Why I Dumped KDE

I had been a KDE fanboy for about 10 years. I remember compiling version 1.0 from source myself. But now I had to put an end to it. Let this be a lesson to us all. If you produce software that is

1. unstable
2. unintuitive and weird
   
3. lacking important functionality

then your users will be upset.

As a user of free software and Debian testing as my primary desktop operating system, I have a degree of tolerance for unstable software. In fact, two of the biggest culprits in the past, KMail and Konqueror, have become much more stable in KDE 4 compared to KDE 3. But Plasma kept crashing or running nuts with resources, and there were frequent rendering problems that caused windows and icons to disappear, causing me to restart my sessions every so often. I don't need that. And I didn't even dare to stress the enhanced desktop effects (compositing features) beyond a few trials. In the meantime, me and lots of other users who dared to adopt KDE 4.0 or 4.1 had to spend hours reporting interface bugs and regressions that were all probably reported once before but got reintroduced accidentally during the big rewrite.

The second problem was that KDE had set out to reinvent the desktop, and ended up giving users a desktop environment that they did not understand and that they could no longer use in the way they were accustomed to. The new theme and widget style were hard to read and fairly hard to use without the enhanced desktop effects also on. The panels wouldn't stay where I wanted them, and the things on the panels wouldn't either. And why after we have finally gotten to the point that all major free desktop environments can share the system tray, everything in KDE is now a plasma widget that is incompatible with everything else. The widgets, the menus, everything just didn't feel right. The interface of Kopete, the instant messaging client, had me constantly guessing who I was talking to and why. KMail had some good new ideas, but I had to spend hours disabling most new features so I could continue reading my mail. And the network manager applet, still in Debian experimental admittedly, was so weird to use that I'm amazed it ever connected to anything at all.

Which brings me to the third point, the one that finally did it for me. They wrote a new desktop environment, but forgot the include the functionality that people actually need to use. No stable network management. No printer setup. No bluetooth support. No Debian update manager support. The entire groupware suite still cannot synchronize with hardly anything. Not my phone, not Google, not MS Exchange. Instead, there is now a MySQL server running on my desktop with the promise that it will be able to store all my contacts at some point. Or something. And Konqueror, now demoted to merely a web browser, has as far as I can tell, not been developed at all since KDE 3.5. It has serious rendering problems with many currently popular web sites and has none of the extensions that Firefox offers. You can probably synchronize the bookmarks with Akonadi someday. Or something. So, in practical terms, if you subtract all that, you are basically left with nothing, and might as well not use KDE at all.

So what now? I had good experiences with LXDE before, so I went with that. It has worked out well so far: visually appealing, lightweight, yet functional, and you can smoothly mix in KDE and GNOME applications. Well, that's LXDE plus OpenBox, to spread the credit fairly. I got Iceweasel configured to do most of the things that I once appreciated Konqueror for, and with the right extensions it's much better. Evolution isn't as configurable as KMail, but at least it can connect my calendar and addressbook to the external sources that I need. Pidgin gives me more protocol options and a saner interface for instant messaging. I hung on to the KDE konsole application, which has nice enhancements in KDE 4. Also, Amarok, possibly another one of those rewrites/reinventions gone wrong, seems to be without usable alternative at the moment. (Kaffeine has not been ported to KDE 4, and all the Gtk/GNOME-type applications I tried didn't do what I needed them to do.)

The Linux desktop, for lack of a better word, is becoming irrelevant. If you are a hacker, all you really need is a browser and a terminal. And maybe Emacs. If you are a normal user, all you need is a browser and an office suite. And maybe Skype. There is not much room for differentiation left there.

Praise to LXDE

I've been know to rant at times about crappy Linux desktop software. So here's a praise for a change: a praise to LXDE.

You know when the name of a piece of technology starts with "Simple" or "Lightweight", it's really not? SMTP, SNMP, LDAP? Well, LXDE proves that wrong.

I first heard about LXDE from Klaus Knopper's presentation at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2009, where he described why he chose LXDE as the new default desktop for his well-known Knoppix live CD/DVD/environment.

I have never really been interested in the debate of late about how short we can possibly get the boot time of a Linux machine/desktop, since I've been using suspend-to-disk for years everywhere. I only reboot for kernel upgrades, and possibly when the wakeup gets botched, which happens about once a month, I guess. But that's a different matter. What I was interested in was a lightweight desktop environment to run inside a VirtualBox.

So LXDE. apt-get install lxde gives you the whole thing. Well, the only thing that's missing is a web browser, which you will have to select and install yourself. I had reported previously on the amusing quest to find a "lightweight" web browser.

Unlike some geek-enabled minimal desktop environments, LXDE doesn't surprise the average user with an unusual layout. You have a taskbar at the bottom (can be moved to the top, for those used to GNOME), with a menu button, buttons for file manager, terminal, browser, minimize all windows; on the right, there is a CPU meter, a clock, a screen lock and a logout button. At least on Debian, the terminal and browser buttons call x-terminal-emulator and x-www-browser, respectively, so whatever browser you choose to install, it will work. There is also an image viewer and a handful of minor tools and settings available through the menu. And you can start random commands with Alt+F2. But that's more or less it.

Another thing that is interesting about LXDE is that it makes "ps" useful again. Under KDE, a "ps x" on relatively idle desktop produces what feels like 50 processes. Under LXDE it shows 15, which includes the terminal, bash, and ps processes to produce the listing. And it looks like with a bit of effort that number could be reduced even further.

Even though it's quite small, LXDE supports freedesktop standards. It uses desktop files, dbus, openbox as window manager, and supports compiz if you want. You can easily run GNOME or KDE applications, and they will behave reasonably. Once you do, however, they will of course load their lot of libraries and daemons, and the lightweightness will be gone. So on a workstation desktop, where you might want to run a graphical mail program, a calendar application, network manager, update notifier, and so on, LXDE will probably not buy you much. But on netbooks and virtual boxes, where all you need is a browser and a shell, this is a great alternative that is usable by everyone, and one that is true to its lightweight attribute. So far.