Still using KDE, because it's the least bad desktop environment, but these v4.x era additions annoy me to no end. v5 does nothing to improve this.
Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker was ripping the devs a new one over that attitude not listening to users; apparently that went into one ear and out of the other.
but [prediction of the future coming]: you won't care anyway. Which is ok, dear bmn_1! You get to be ... I guess "upset" about something that happened 6 years ago! You get to post about how horrible it is that no one listens to you (you, a professional programmer and all!)! It's fine, it really is.
You know what I can't afford? This shit. Now I don't mind (really you're SO right there its really into one ear and out the other) because I'm a big boy and been doing this for years and years. I don't know about the programmers but for designers and especially designers in open source and ESPECIALLY-especially young designers testing the waters in open source, honing their skills and learning how to work in a team - my advice will always be "Do the opposite of what that guy wants".
You're probably a lovely person. I bet you nurture little animals back to health and is a ton of fun socially going out for pints - in another world we could have been friends. But here - in this setting - with all your wounded pride leaking out of every sentence and word, with your "I big professional! You listen!" chest thumping and your make-belief truth you spun out of overhearing a keynote... you're one of the many things wrong with open source today.
Though, the desktop search incarnations were a hype topic back in the early KDE 4 era and strigi, nepomuk and its later re-implementations and the related services like dbus were sadly sub-par/sluggish compared to Windows search and Mac Spotlight. The biggest let down was the rewrite of KDE 4 itself. KDE 3 had so many features that were never re-implemented in KDE 4.x. I had the impression that the developers lost touch with the user base back then.
In the days before Novell bought SuSE KDE 2 and 3 were very popular.
Akonadi is indeed a resource hog and useless (a dozen processes and 100+MB memory usage). If you don't use any KDE PIM application (Kmail, Korganizer) or any calendar event integration they don't appear. Nepomuk is no more, replaced by baloo, which is actually pretty fast and light on resource usage, so I keep it running. But it can be easily turned off in the system settings under the desktop search item. I don't use activities, the only trace of it is a kactivitymangered process running, if it bothers you that much you can set up a startup script to kill it.
The tray icons and cashew you may have a point. Although I like monochrome status icons but the cashew is an eyesore, so I drag it underneath the panel and it stays out of the way.
The article says "it drives tweakers nuts because it’s the one unchanging thing on the desktop. There have been heavy debates on how to hide it, but for the interim it’s here to stay." Really? You get the same thing by right-clicking (or long press on a touchscreen, I imagine) on the desktop. Having an omnipresent widget is redundant and annoys people who don't need it.
Except many inexperienced users (and some experienced yet lazy users who never take the time to learn their computer, I've noticed) don't know or often forget about right-clicking. So when you throw a bunch of random people who have never seen KDE before and test their proficiency with the desktop, of course they're going to overlook right-click menu and whine about needing a special widget for customization. But that's how UI design is these days: conceding to the lowest common denominator. Designers are striving for a utopian interface that can be used without any training or adjustment period. Yet it's a myth. It's impossible to make a computer that can be used without instruction. Maybe if half as much time was spent writing documentation as is spent twiddling with icon colors users would have a resource where they could learn how to use KDE. Then you could build a desktop that doesn't feel like it's in novice mode all the time.
Except documentation isn't as sexy as screenshots and Google-ripoff icons.
Addendum: "Authors note: My testing machine had an issue with activities, so I was unable to fully test activities: this section may have minor inaccuracies."
How much better off would KDE be if they just stopped foolishly hanging on to the idea of Activities? No one uses it. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Also, I told my non-techie brother that the three-line menu was called a "hamburger". He looked at me like I had a carrot growing out of my nose. Please someone come up with a better name for that thing.
I usually use right click, but you know that you can customize your mouse actions on the desktops and set right click to other stuff, like showing a running applications menu ?
That said the only reason I was able to accomplish this (and it was convoluted) is because Gentoo (Linux distro) allows me to customise & compile software with specific settings.