[arch-general] We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 10/26/2009 06:57 AM, RedShift wrote:
> 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.

I'm with you about hating KDE4.  I was dragged kicking and screaming 
into using KDE4, since no one supports KDE3 anymore.  (Even the kdemod3 
packages are in limbo - although you can install the last built 
packages, the packages can no longer be built without error.)

After finally, grudgingly upgrading to KDE4(.3) and kicking it around 
for about a month I came to the conclusion that I was extremely 
disappointed:

* Performance, as you noted, sucks.
* Loads of cool little features that I either relied upon heavily or 
liked a lot are gone.  And although I've filed bug reports asking to 
bring them back, no KDE dev has even responded to them.
* And of all the "cool new" features they've added, I don't use a single 
one of them.

Finally this past Friday I gave up.  After an intense 5 year love affair 
with KDE, I switched over my desktop to XFCE.  It's lightweight, it's 
fast, it looks slick, things work, and all the little nice features I 
loved in KDE3 are there.

As I said in an earlier email, I've come to the conclusion that KDE has 
"jumped the shark".

Maybe try giving XFCE a go?

HTH,

DR