J Leslie Turriff wrote:
Too true. The worst part of it isn't the
"change merely for the sake of
change," but the lack of recognition that the "non-enthusiast" user wants
or needs certain features (in a desktop environment, at least), like
clearly distinguishable icons, or straightforward configuration tools,
because, while necessary, these are not the primary reason for using the
software, but merely a means for making it user-friendly so that they can
get their work done. We saw when KDE3 was abandoned that the developers
had apparently lost sight of the purpose of KDE as a usability tool and
had moved to providing 'eye-candy' and 'gee-whiz' features while making
configurability more difficult. That wouldn't have been so bad if they
had left some of the old components, like Hicolor-Classic icons, in their
"improved" desktop instead of throwing them away.
I would add here doing this with lack of stability and enforcing it to the
end user.
While I like debugging, supporting the community or communities and
contributing, I need most of all stability - when I turn on the computer I
expect the GUI to behave the same way as it behaved the moment when I
stopped it. This was the biggest draw back - neither Gnome nor KDE > v3
offer such stability as KDE3 (now TDE) does.
Imagine I want to check mails and the mail client suddenly does not work or
some feature of it does not behave the same, because ... whatever in the
background failed to do so. Another example is this indexing that was
starting automatically whenever you log in KDE4 and rendering the desktop
useless. It is just pathethic!
Looking back, I realize that wonderful automatic indexing feature was
probably the thing that drove me away from KDE4; and KDE users are still
complaining about it, and the developers still refuse to provide an Off
switch for it. :-( (I must confess that I subscribe to the KDE4 and Plasma
lists just so I can watch the on-going train wreck.) :-)