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Comment by chrisfosterelli | Hacker News Reader

KDE 3 was already old when I got into tech well over a decade ago. It was snappy and efficient though. KDE 4 was beautiful and had fancy widgets but was resource hungry. Glad to see KDE 3 still has love.

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KDE 4 looked like a cheap Vista knockoff gone wrong and the widgets were worse than useless, I stopped using KDE altogether because I felt the developers completely lost the plot.

One of the most arrogant moves was to not have files on the desktop, instead they put together a poorly made widget called folder view, I believe they completely U-turned on that one, not sure how many years it took them though.

To be fair, last night I tried putting a shortcut to a picture onto the home screen on my iPad that has better hardware than my MacBook Air and I couldn't figure out a way to do it and iOS has well-paid armies of people working on it.

> To be fair, last night I tried putting a shortcut to a picture onto the home screen on my iPad that has better hardware than my MacBook Air and I couldn't figure out a way to do it and iOS has well-paid armies of people working on it.

That’s by design. Those well-paid armies are working against you.

"there's an app for that"

KDE 4 was a disaster for pretty much everyone. I _loved_ KDE 3. It was consistent, accessible enough for newbies, infinitely configurable for power users. The desktop of freedom in all that meant.

Then KDE 4 happened.

I never used KDE again as my daily driver until Plasma 6. 16 long years mourning what I lost. Sure XFCE and Gnome were totally ok but they lacked something.

What is sad, I think, is that during those times, KDE lost a lot of its artistic community who back in the days were releasing hundreds of themes every months. Most were awful but some were gems and anyway the configuration options always allowed you to transform KDE into your thing.

It’s slowly coming back but it’s not there yet and it’s not as easy as yesterday.

I remember working on a KDE 4 desktop. I had like 3-4 applications with icons in the status bar. Every couple of seconds they got redrawn... i believe they recalculated the spacing between them when each icon was updated, because they simply ... moved around a few pixels on every update.

I couldn't help but notice the movement which did wonders for my concentration on work.

I already had an Apple laptop, so when I got a new desktop I built it to be a hassle free hackintosh. As much as a hackintosh could be hassle free.

In the mean time I've switched my desktops to Apple as well so now I'm complaining when Cook doesn't take his dried frog pills in time.

Same. I remember they made a big song and dance about KDE 4, then when all the complaints started rolling in they pretended it was not meant for end-users and blamed the people complaining for expecting too much. They literally published a press release telling people how great the new major version was and then acted like it was unreasonable to treat it as anything other than an early alpha. I kept checking back in with the point releases, but even years later it still wasn’t as good as KDE 3.5. They had zero humility and zero accountability for the debacle, it was always somebody else’s fault.

I loved the folder view! It really highlighted the shift to a modular design in Plasma and solved the problem of desktop eventually ending up as a garbage dump of stuff that at some point was relevant but now impossible to find by providing configurable views to files that exist elsewhere and can be adjusted to fit current needs.

The 4.0 release was otherwise painful though as it was a slow, constantly crashing mess of bugs. At around 4.3 it became stable enough to serve as the primary desktop but IIRC that took years and I saw a lot of friends adopting Gnome or XFCE.

KDE 4 was completely unusable for the first ... 4 releases I think?

4.4 rings a bell as the ones I actually installed due to not wanting to fight PPAs; 4.6 was the first release I would actually call stable.

But even today I miss essential KDE3 features like a proper editable start menu.

The folder view thing genuinely seemed useful, because you could lay out several folders onto your desktop. Alas, when I stopped using desktop Linux (because I realized I valued my time), the feature constantly broke and reset the positions of my carefully constructed array of folder views.

> KDE 4 was beautiful

There's a first for everything, and this is the first time I ever heard anyone say anything approving about KDE 4.

> and had fancy widgets

Hang on... You're saying this is a good thing? You liked the widgets? You wanted them?

I can see how you'd feel that way. This was a time when I was very experimental in my approach to my PC. I would put up with a lot of inconvenience for new or interesting ideas I suppose. I ran Gentoo about the same time and remember several times I wanted to watch a movie I had to instead wait several hours to recompile the entire video player.

Later on I became a fair bit more partial to reliable tool choices in order to actually get work done.

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