KDE 4.2 Plasma Techno-Rant

Hey there,


I promise, my next post will be centered on the Mermaids, but I have been attempting to use KDE 4.2 on my SuSE boxes at home for the last 3 months and have come to a painful conclusion; Plasma and KDE 4.2 are more trouble than they are worth.

To start with, plasma is heavy and slow. When I log in to one of my systems it takes a couple of minutes before plasma can manage to get around to launching the network manager and get my connected to the world. By this time all my networked applications have already fired off and timed out.

So, I thought, save a session without any of these applications running and log into that saved session. Ooops, if there is a way to save a session in KDE 4.2, I can not find it.

Next try. I closed all the networked applications, logged out, and logged back in. It still took over a minute before my network connection managed to crawl out of Plasma.

On to the desktop itself I have tried using Plasma widgets. And tried. And tried. And thought, wow, this is just my desktop! Why am I spending all this time mucking with it?

What goes wrong?

Here are a few of the issues I have had:

• Placement: the widgets do not remain where I place them.


• Settings: using the directory widgets , they frequently revert back to my home directory.


• Session Loss: some times when I log in, all the desktop settings and widgets are just plane gone.

There may be fixes, work-arounds, and alternate use cases that I could use, but why? This is supposed to be a background for my work. The concepts may be aimed at making it a more useful and supportive background, but the implementation makes makes the desktop environment a black hole for time.

I have used KDE on SuSE for the better part of the last decade. I will keep using KDE 4.2 on SuSE, but in a minimalist form. Doing my best to ignore it and pretend it does not exist. Because, so far, all the time spent on it has not added one jot to my productivity.

I am using the 'Factory' repositories and will keep updating the KDE subsystem, but I think some very basic things must be fixed in the plasma environment before I would recommend it to anyone.

If you think I am using the environment incorrectly, or missing the point, please comment.

thanks,

LandShark