KDE 4: A beautiful piece of non working software

Greetings pals! long time no blog!

I humbly speak in this corner of the ever growing internet to discuss something that bothers me most…

KDE 4.

Now, why would I talk about KDE4 now?, well my friends, because recently SuSE 11.1 was released and I was utterly dissapointed with it, it looked nice thanks to… KDE4 but printer would not print, cd drives would not be recognized, startup, shutdown and workflow would be slow, bluetooth was a no-no… anyway, haven’t had much luck with SuSE since the 9.3 days…

I said “its SuSE, let us go to the good old kubuntu instead” but no, it was bad old kubuntu instead.

I have never liked the attitude at canonical where ubuntu is all they care for, yet promotion kubuntu like if they really supported it, but I am just a voice… if you need any kind of opinion then go to ubuntuforums and ask in there.

Well, instead of a long long rant I will just make a list of things that made me go back to ubuntu – gnome:

1. Kwin crashed. When KDE session was loading, that is unless I clicked when the loading splash was present, it would make the splash dissappear and I would not see many funny colors and no desktop at all.
2. Bluetooth is completely broken. Thanks to the lord I have no bluetooth hardware other than my cellphone, yet I wanted my cellphone to use anyremote, sync my music with my phone via bluetooth, etc. Por Takmadeus won’t do so because they forgot to fix bluetooth out of pure lazyness (more on that later).
3. Adept sucks. Enough said, it is sluggish, and even if I add the whole repositories somehow adept is smart enough as to not to show what it considers I don’t need, problem is that computers are not very intelligent these days and this joke of a program blocks many software I need as well.
4. Openoffice.org crashes. Just because openoffice.org-kde has some kind of pallette conflict when drawing the windows. The solution is to uninstal it and do your office work like back in the glorious era of windows ’95!
5. Plasmoids do not work. yep, just as you heard it, plasmoids do not work, if you add a plasmoid, it will just look like a small transparent box, it is easy to fix if you look around and find out that there is a repository with all the packages fixed, which sucks because this should be the job of the official staff to keep all these things running smoothly.
6. Multimedia keys support. Finally, they tried to do something, but unfortunately it was not enough, They need an better way to assign the way buttons work, whenever I assigned the calculator button for Tremulous to launch, it would not save the preference no matter what I did, plus the “back” and the” media player” buttons both were treated like the same button, gnome knows they are different, fortunately.
7. Whenever I searched for info on how to fix most of these issues, I found those who asked were treated harshly, told to RTFM, and yelled at because “that debug report doesn’t do sheet!” mostly in the kde bug tracker; I mean, please, keep it civilized people, this attitude leaves a bad impression. In launchpad things were simply not put enough attention, meaning there were many complainers and no package mantainer says a word, not even a “we’re working on that issue”, which left me the impression there is no KDE/Kubuntu real work in progress.

These complaints, among any others made kubuntu look like some kind of beta release; regarding the broken bluetooth, after some looking around I found out is due because “he does not have the
time to put towards porting to 4.x”, excuse me? then why not assign someone else?, bluetooth is a very important component of the system, some people even have all their peripherals working via bluetooth, so they don’t matter? I mean, they guy has all its rights to not to have enough time, but then it is responsability of KDE as an organization to ensure that this issues will be dealt with, and they have plenty of paid developers to do this. This again leaves a bad impression.

Canonical, I know your flag product is Ubuntu, ad that’s fine, but trust me, it is of no use to do releases that actually look and work and pre betas, if you are going to do so, it would be better if you did nothing at all and just not release kubuntu, but this kind of releases are a disrespect for users and community alike. Following that train of thought, I ask of you that you get bluetooth fixed in Ubuntu intrepid as well, I cannot connect foo!

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