Hacker News Reader

Comment by badminton1 | Hacker News Reader

I really liked KDE up to version 3. KDE 4 seemed like a big departure from version 3 and focused too much on the shell and libraries and not a lot on the applications themselves.

I think the legacy of KDE is the open sourcing of Qt and the creation of the KHTML that then was forked to create WebKit.

View on HN

In its prime, Konqueror (khtml) was excellent.

True. I still miss that I could search via toolbar, and then search through the resulting pages with the buttons for each word I entered... Pure genius.

I also preferred Konqueror to Dolphin as the file manager.

God how I miss konqueror from kde3.

Dolphin is... Utter crap.

KDE3 had this crazy thing, Kioslaves. You open a remote host via SSH using konqueror, open a remote file as if it was locally available, and KDE would somehow juggle sync-on-save. It was super awesome when editing files on remote ftp servers (you know, phone and stuff).

KDE still has Kioslaves.

For each their own, I suppose. I love Dolphin, and think it's one of the better graphical apps in the whole Linux landscape, so your "utter crap" comment comes across just as sad and bitter.

Didn't dolphin work with kio slaves too?

It goes great length towards not having address bar or anything to type them in.

Konqueror can do everything! The only all-in-one application I actually like (maybe excepts Emacs).

I miss the text of the tabs turning blue, letting you know the page is completely loaded, although this was probably more important on dial up. These day chrome does even render until you switch to the tab, causing a noticeable delay.

It's still the best browser going. Things like integrated wikipedia lookup - so simple but no other browser has ever added it.

Have a look at this project: https://www.trinitydesktop.org .

I'm trying to build it on my Slackware just for nostalgia.

I like the persistence at Trinity project. They are doing the project despite the initial backlash from upstream (like: it's nice that you're doing it but why would you???).

have you try KDE 4 recently? There is a lot of hate around KDE 4 thanks to the initial versions, but actually is the best DE for GNU/Linux

At some point (after years!) it became OK and I went back to it, but it was never as good as KDE 3.5 was for me. I realized it was not just nostalgia, when a friend showed me a laptop with KDE 3.5 and used it for some minutes.

While the whole DE got worse, there's two pieces that got better and better, Kate and KWin.

And desktop applets. KDE 4 is the only environment I ever used where these were stable and reliable.

> stable and reliable

They were not, for a few years.

They were for me, even on 4.0. Nothing else worked, but the plasma widgets did.

KDE 4 is not updated any more, is it? I switched to KDE 5 well over a year ago, and found it better already back then. It's very solid these days I think.

In fact KDE (Plasma) 5.8 will be an LTR. https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.7.95.php

KDE 4 was pretty decent by the time they abandoned it in favour of the still-immature KDE 5 (or Plasma 5 or whatever they're calling it now). The CADT approach to software development is really annoying.

"Best" in everything? or best in specific aspects? Have you tried Pantheon? (elementary OS)

That can be customized a lot (instead of the Gnome mindset of "Do on my way or fuck your self"), and run fast even without 2d/3d acceleration (aka the old good X11 SVGA driver ) ?

PD: Add that anything based on Qt can handle faulty graphics drivers far better that Gtk3.

And KDE 4 wasn't realized exactly with the mindset you describe with so much candor? Now Plasma 5 can be more flexible, sure. But when you don't give users a usable alternative for years people tend to look for alternatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com