KDE: What a monster!

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Monday 26 January 2009 17:02:05 n j wrote:
> Linus Torvalds on KDE4...
>
> [quote]
>
> A: I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I
> switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do
> what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is
> painful for users and they can choose to use something else.
>
> I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it
> badly. They did so many changes it was a half-baked release. It may
> turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE,
> but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.

I've seen it suggested that KDE4 is faster than KDE3.

I'm running FreeBSD 7.0 - granted, my machine is not brand-new: it's a P4 
1.8GHz with 512MB of RAM and an NVidia GeForce MX4000 (I mention the graphics 
card because the latest NVidia binary driver doesn't support it). KDE3.5 does 
what I want my window manager to do - keeps out of my way and works snappily 
enough that I don't notice it.

I recently installed PCBSD7.02, which uses KDE4.1. It's unusable. For example, 
with only two applications running - the KBreakout game and the Psi 
Jabber/XMPP client - the game was unplayable because each time Psi received 
an incoming chat or event, the game froze for a second or two while KDE 
struggled to open the chat window.

The claim that KDE4 is faster than KDE3 is frankly incredible to me.

Jonathan