Did battle with KDE 4.1 again today. And lost.
There have been some concessions to the people who want it to look and feel more like KDE 3 -- the title bar of the active window is still gray, f'rinstance, but now it has colored stripes -- but the goddamn launcher still sorts programs by their description instead of their name, and doesn't seem to have any way to change that (other than wiping the "description" field for every single program). There IS a simple way to swap it out for an oldschool-style launch menu, but while that can let you view programs by name, it still SORTS them by description. (Also, switching launchers hilariously removes the Alt-F1 keyboard shortcut. Which is now no longer located in KDE settings, and requires hacking a config file to set. Also, hacking the config file doesn't actually seem to work very well.)
There's also no "show desktop" shortcut anymore. You can get a widget to do this, and (hypothetically) set it to a keystroke by hacking a config file, but the widget is a hack: all it does is minimize all programs. So it's a one-way deal; you can't, say, hit Start-D to show the desktop, do whatever the hell it was you wanted to do on the desktop, and then hit Start-D again to go back to what you were doing.
Also, I couldn't find a way to alt-tab to programs on other desktops. But it might be there; it's just that I said "fuck this" and quit looking after wrestling with the goddamn launcher for about three hours.
All in all, I think I now understand how my grandparents feel when using their computers. I spent the afternoon incredibly frustrated with a desktop that wouldn't do what I wanted it to do even though there should be an obvious, simple, straightforward way of getting it to do it.
In a nutshell: KDE 4.1's getting there, and there are FEWER deal-breakers to its basic interface than there were in the beta, let alone 4.0, but by definition one deal-breaker is too many. Maybe they'll get it right in 4.2. And if they don't, people should start seriously considering a fork.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I'm almost certain that the
review I read that convinced me 4.1 might be ready for prime time is from the same site that convinced me back in '04 that ATI's Linux drivers were in good working order. So at least this time I only wasted my afternoon, not $230.
