kde3 to be masked

Whose brilliant idea is it to mask kde3?

I've tried KDE4 at every minor release since 4.1 and it is still
garbage. Too many idiotic decisions have been made that reduce its
useablity to nil and in my opinion it is simply not ready. Some of the
nastier aspects I discovered in less than 8 hours of use:

konsole: no stable window size. Resize a konsole window and all
future windows take that size. Simply hatefull. If I resize a window,
I don't want all future instances modified. What it means is that
half the time I open a konsole, I have to resize it.

Missing settings. I can't have the window manager perform actions
depending on the application. Can't have a particular application
show up on all desktops, or be sized a certain way. Konsole has
settings for colors but little else.

No bluetooth manager.

No desktop. Insanity! Everything is shoved inside a window. I can
drag icons outside the window, but they remain in the window and
there's no obvious way to get rid of the window. Reminds me of
windows 3.1, or perhaps a very old version of CDE.

No way have a large and small menu bar on the same edge of the screen.
I use a large one at the bottom for a few important items like the
desktop switcher, task list, kmenu, etc. I use a small one
immediately above it for application launchers and I have about 25 of
them up there. Can't do this in kde4.

I guess I'll just unmask kde3. Hopefully gentoo won't make too many
other poor decisions regarding kde3 and make it unuseable.

Maybe it's tine to switch to gnome, or to another distribution.

On Tuesday 03 November 2009 04:48 in alt.os.linux.gentoo, somebody
identifying as AZ Nomad wrote...

> Whose brilliant idea is it to mask kde3?

Thanks for the heads-up. My missing hardware is being supplied today
and if all goes well, then I may (re)start on the Gentoo installation
today.

(Hmm... Just got a call as I'm typing this: the hardware will be
supplied tomorrow due to time constraints today.)

> I've tried KDE4 at every minor release since 4.1 and it is still
> garbage. Too many idiotic decisions have been made that reduce its
> useablity to nil and in my opinion it is simply not ready. Some of the
> nastier aspects I discovered in less than 8 hours of use:
>
> [...]
> No desktop. Insanity! Everything is shoved inside a window. I can
> drag icons outside the window, but they remain in the window and
> there's no obvious way to get rid of the window. Reminds me of
> windows 3.1, or perhaps a very old version of CDE.

This is something that I've read about in another group. It's still
possible to have icons on the desktop but the mechanism is different.
You have to add a plasma applet with "folder view" or something, which
will then have some sort of translucent appearance. (Note: I hate the
word "folder", because people only started calling directories folders
because of MICROS~1.)

> [...]
> I guess I'll just unmask kde3.

That is also what I plan to do.

> Hopefully gentoo won't make too many other poor decisions regarding
> kde3 and make it unuseable.

That will of course remain to be seen... :-/

> Maybe it's tine to switch to gnome, [...

I'm not really a fan of Gnome. I really do like KDE 3.5.10 though.

> ...] or to another distribution.

Sabayon is Gentoo-based, but I haven't really checked their package
list, so it's possible they supply KDE 4 as well, although I /believe/
that their default desktop environment is Gnome.

I myself have recently also been looking into NexentaOS, which is the
GNU userland with the OpenSolaris kernel and C library. The package
management and set-up is based upon Ubuntu, but what I find interesting
about it are the Solaris Zones, ZFS, and the fact that it also supports
running in a Xen dom0/domU, but then again, they're all binary packages
and of course, then it won't be "Linux" anymore.

They use the GNU userland (minus glibc) but OpenSolaris is CDDL, not
GPL, and that sort of goes against my FOSS activism and my loyalty to
Linux, the kernel. I will agree that RMS is sometimes a little too
pedantic about things, but he needs to be, because if he isn't, then
people will be walking all over the GPL - and some are trying to find
loopholes or perverting things anyway, which is why GPLv3 was drawn
up - and my ethical alignment with regard to Free & Open Source
Software leans over closest to the GPL(v3) and the Free Software
Foundation - more than, say, the BSD or MIT licenses - so it doesn't
feel "right" to suddenly exchange the trusted and powerful Linux kernel
for an open source project from a big corporate vendor.

And well, the fact that NexentaOS uses binary packages bugs me too.
That was the main reason why I had my mind set on Gentoo. Now, I need
a system with "zones" (or "containers") anyway for one of my Xen domUs,
so perhaps I will install Nexenta in that domU but keep the rest
GNU/Linux. I don't know yet. I'll check out how well Gentoo handles
an OpenVZ setup first before I'll try Nexenta.

--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)