On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:57 AM, RedShift <redshift@pandora.be> wrote:
This thread will probably erupt in a massive flamewar, yet I decided to post my story anyway. I am talking about the desktop experience in general, not the technical details behind it. Keep that in mind.
I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels very sluggish and incomplete. I can't enable the desktop effects because that makes things even slower. I'm doing this on a fairly decent setup, an AMD Sempron 2 Ghz with an nVidia FX5500. My laptop suffers from this sluggishness as well. On top of that, lots of things annoy me in KDE 4.3, see the end of this post for my top annoyances. Yesterday I had to reboot to my Windows XP installation on this computer and I was shocked when I arrived in XP's userland. Everything was ridiculously fast. When returning to my linux desktop everything felt even more sluggish. That's when I decided to go back to KDE 3.5. I restored my old KDE 3.5 profile, installed the necessary packages and logged back in. WOOOOOF, everything is fast again. Opening new windows is instantaneous, hell even bringing up context menus is faster. If Linux is that much better, why does the current Linux desktop (KDE 4.3) still suck compared to an operating system that's 8 years old?
The way that last sentence is phrased reveals a lot. If you think "Linux Desktop" == "KDE" then you're already deep into a method of thinking that makes MS automatically win. If I used one of the big DEs I'd hate the Linux Desktop too. Not to mention, if you evaluate any "X" by comparing it to "Y" then "X" will look bad by any difference it has from "Y". Sure, performance problems are lame. But rather than complain about KDE, just go run something else that isn't a huge hog. I use awesome with a bunch of hand-picked apps and I'm very happy with my "Linux Desktop".