Re: [gentoo-desktop] Re: KDE Sunset Amarok

[Alex Schuster]

Duncan writes:

> Alex Schuster posted on Sun, 22 Jul 2012 20:18:12 +0200 as excerpted:
>
> > Not me, I really like Amarok 2. For me, it is the KDE4 software I am
> > most happy with.
>
> LOL!  ... And you DO have your problems with kde4!

Yes, I still do. It gets better, partially because it REALLY GET BETTER,
and partially because I avoid to do things that I learnt are giving
troubles. Or because I know what to do in case of a problem, like which
file I have to replace with a backup when plasma AGAIN messed up all my
plasmoids, or does not start up, or whatever.

> (FWIW, those who don't understand what I'm referring to, apparently
> aren't regulars on the kde-linux and kde-general lists.
>
> Both AS/Wonko and I have had our problems, tho mine at least are
> reasonable solved, now, by switching to non-kde solutions for a lot of
> stuff, mpd and front-ends as a music player, tho it's MUCH different
> than amarok but better fits my usage tho I miss the visualizations but
> kde4- amarok killed that anyway tho for all I know it's back now,
> claws-mail for mail and as a feed-reader, killing with fire anything
> akonadi related including kmail and akregator, my own scripts in a
> konsole popup replacing kde3's multikey hotkey functionality, as it's
> apparently entirely broken and unfixable in qt4 (qt5 is supposed to
> have the feature again, tho, but that doesn't help with qt4/kde4), the
> qt4-based smplayer and qt4-front-ended vlc replacing kaffeine, firefox
> replacing konqueror, since it became very apparent with the treatment
> of various bugs and https certificate handling that the kde devs don't
> consider konqueror any more than a "toy" browser, or they'd not have
> called kde4 including konqueror ready for ordinary users, when it was
> seriously bugged, including security issues... and it's still kde4 but
> I switched to the yasp- scripted and then superkaramba to replace the
> missing ksysguard plasmoid/ kicker applet.  Meanwhile, with akonadi
> killed with fire, I was able to set USE=-semantic-desktop, regardless
> of the semantic-desktop lead-weight being a major bullet-point feature
> of kde4, and get back the performance kde4 otherwise robs compared to
> kde3.

Some similar experiences here. I do no longer use KMail since it killed
some thousand mails, simply by moving an IMAP sub-folder to another
folder. I just tried to reproduce this, and hey, the mails are not
deleted, but KMail crashes, this is reproducable. Maybe I should file a
bug... but my report about the deleted mails got no attention, and I
expect the developers to try things like moving folders around for
themselves. It seems whenever I do such things, I run into bugs sooner or
later. Usually sooner. Oh, and I do not need to mention that all the time
while I tried this I get Akonadi notifications about missing folders and
such.

I do no longer use Akregator, altough Liferea also has its issues
(so far I reported 4 bugs and 5 wishes).

I still use Konqueror... not really sure why. I like it, yes, it looks
more KDEish than Firefox, and it opens in a new window instead as a new
tab in an existing Firefox window, which probably could be changed
anyway... but a problem are the bookmarks, moving multiple top-level
bookmarks to a folder makes keditbookmarks crash, sometimes losing some
of those bookmarks, and sometimes it will additionally delete the very
first folder. Happened at least three times for me, and guess what, the
first bookmark folder is named 'Accounts' and is the most important one
for me. Then I will have to get an old version of bookmarks.xml from a
backup and merge it with the current file.

This is really annoying. From the beginning of KDE4 I had trouble with
the bookmark editor. And the bug I just mentiones is nearly two years old
now. Will this ever be fixed? Will KDE ever have a working bookmark
editor? Maybe using Rekonq instead will help, I did not play around with
this browser yet.

Amarok is an outstanding exception. It's not perfect yet, and has some
stability issues, although this has become much better. I like how it
looks. I like how I can configure it. Being able to fuse context and
media view together in two tabs, so I save some space [*]. I like the
information the context view presents, such as Wikipedia entry or lyrics.
I like the look and feel, for me it is just beautiful.

Another fine piece of software is Digikam. I don't use it much, but I
like it.

> But I still like kde's general configurability, and plasma as a
> desktop's actually quite good, once you add a few plasmoids from
> kdelook and configure everything to your liking.

Yes, but I back up my .kde4/share/config directory (or at least
plasma-desktop-appletsrc) before that, as many of those plasmoids caused
trouble here.

> kwin's also quite
> configurable, and I like the available effects and kde integration.
> And with a decent mid- range graphics card (radeon hd4650 on the old
> system, radeon hd6770 on the new, freedomware drivers of course) it's
> fast and stable.

Yes, kwin is really great. Window rules are such a cool feature, I use
them often. Sometimes to work around problems, like some application's
windows always opening minimized, I do not know why. Okay, this also only
happens in KDE4, so the window rules are a solution for a problem I would
not have, but still. And I like mplayer to open without any window
decoration, visible on all desktops, and always on top. And I like to
group windows together, like on the top left of my screenshot [*]. It's a
Konsole and a Dolphin, minimized to title bar size unless I need one of
them. The Dolphin has two tabs, each with two panels, I use it to manage
files in my music and video folders. I also have Claws and Liferea as a
window group, this feels similar to having Kontact with its KMail and
Akregator sub-modules.

	Wonko

[*] http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2012-04-01/desktop2-1.png