So, my first day of KDE4 and my patience is already being tested, there's some good things about it, but mostly bad things. My primary issue for today is the bloody window list, along with the thing they dare to call a web browser, Konqueror.
10 minutes into my week of KDE4 and I've already found something that annoys the hell out of me, and it's probably one of the most important parts about any desktop enviornment: the window list (or task manager, as KDE4 calls it). KDE4 in it's obsession with shiny, has sacrificed usability here, big suprise! Instead of properly highlighting the active window, it puts a slight "glow" beneath the lower 1/2 of it's entry in the window list, which is hardly noticable at a glance when the other entries also have shiny white lines beneath them to indicate where their click targets are. This is even worse when you have more than a few windows on the screen, what the hell were they thinking?!
Now, onto my favorite KDE abomination, Konqueror! KHTML, the little rendering engine that couldn't, was taken in by Apple a while ago, given some good baby food, and grew up into the mighty WebKit. WebKit has now been ported to Qt4, but guess what KDE4 browser still refuses to get with the times and grow up with WebKit? Konqueror, certainly you jest?! But no, unfortunately Konqueror, while having better (though still buggy) CSS2 support, still handles Javascript like a retarded infant, in fact, here editing this story where I manually wanted to put in the summary break I had to use the old fashioned <!--break--> tag instead of clicking the handy "Seperate summary at cursor" button that has served be so well in Drupal 6. To top it off, the bloody browser won't load gmail either, so I can't access my Google Apps mail, congrats Konqueror developers, you just gave me an excuse to try Kmail or Kontact!
On a lighter node, it hasn't been all bad, Dolphin has proven to be an excellent file manager (sadly no spatial mode...) and has even implemented miller columns, a long sought after feature for me. Here's to hoping the nautilus developers finally get to work on adding it themselves!
Also, KWM4's compositing is pure awesome, it preforms well even with the proprietary ATI driver, which I normally don't use since the open source one supports my card well, but I really wanted decent OpenGL support for once. Now, if only there was the equivalent to the scale plugin for compiz, I might be much happier.
So, all things considered, so far KDE4 could be better, much, much better; but at the same time it could be a lot worse, here's hoping I find a few more decent things about it.
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