Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?

[Chad Perrin]

On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 08:49:09AM -0700, mdh wrote:
> 
> I rather like KDE4.  I don't find that it's like Windows at all, given that Windows is an operating system and KDE4 is a development framework, application suite, and window manager.  There're hefty differences there, not the least of which being that KDE4 isn't an operating system kernel.  In general, I've found it to be well-maintained (some of the window managers I've used in the past went defunct when the 1-2 developers actively working on them got bored or whatever), nicely designed, attractive appearance-wise, and easy to configure.  Let's face it, spending a whole bunch of hours over the course of a few weeks writing a perfect afterstep config was really cool when I was a young'un and didn't have a life to worry about, but nowadays I just want to get on with what needs doing.  KDE allows me to accomplish just that, efficiently, and without leaving me unable to toggle/modify/configure certain things as GNOME does.  
> 

My preference is to simply find a window manager that acts as much like
my ideal as possible in its default, unconfigured form -- and make a few
minor tweaks as necessary.  What I don't want is something that has a
whole bunch of stuff heaped on it to cover every possible eventuality the
developers envision, leaving me still wanting more, with an "easy"
configuration interface to try to make up for the lacks.  That, I'm
afraid, is how KDE feels to me.

Worse yet, KDE4 strikes me as significantly counter-intuitive.  I'm aware
that "intuitive" in interfaces is a matter of familiarity -- but I think
it's relevant in this case, in that KDE and GNOME seem to a fair degree
to have a need to cater to the familiarity of people who also use OSes
like MS Windows and Apple MacOS X.  While my primary sense of familiarity
(and thus the "intuitive") isn't with MS and Apple OSes, they do kinda
fill in the secondary and tertiary spots for me; KDE4 falls into line
somewhere back around 20th for me.  It seems to me like it has several
configuration options lacking in something like MS Windows, and lacks
several that something like MS Windows has -- but has made poor
trade-offs, adding less important configuration options and removing more
important options, based on what I've seen so far.

This view of KDE4 is based my recent experience (a few days ago) of
installing and configuring PC-BSD on a laptop for a friend.  PC-BSD's
default version of KDE4 is a newer iteration than what's in FreeBSD
ports, so it certainly isn't a matter of the default install having a
slightly older minor version number and needing to be upgraded.  The
somewhat broken functionality is a bit of a problem, too -- such as the
Plasma Desktop Folder View's inability to just show the damned icons
properly, the tendency of KDE to crash and restart when I try to make
certain changes with widgets "unlocked", panels that might vanish from
view when I try to move them but are apparently still running
*somewhere*, and so on.

I've never been much of a fan of KDE, ever since I discovered the joys of
window managers that aren't derivative of the MS/Apple WIMP style, but
KDE4 strikes me as a case of some visionary project manager stepping on
his own virtual genitals.  I don't know -- maybe I just don't "get" the
new direction for KDE4.  Maybe it's awesome for someone's purposes.  It's
terrible for mine.

. . . not that I think GNOME 2.24 is any better.  I'll stick with AHWM
for now, long since abandoned by its developer, but so elegant in
operation and configuration that it really doesn't even need any further
development.  It does what it needs to do, and doesn't screw around with
a bunch of singing and dancing and backflips to distract me from the fact
it doesn't do anything fundamentally new.

Just one man's opinion.  Yours is surely different.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
Quoth Larry Wall: "Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized
version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'."
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