Comment 91 for bug 905147

Hi all,

Just my two cents, with disclaimer of heavy off-topic derailments.

I've been loving KDE since its inception, when hovering the mouse pointer over the 'K' start button used to pop up a tooltip saying "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"... 'tomorrow', I guess it meant 'progress' wrt to M$ Windoze.

Now, sadly, I don't see any more that desire to really improve things, at least not for my not-so-powerful laptop: it's mostly about eye candy, rather than functionality. I know there's plenty of good stuff under the hood, but, jeez, where is it? In order to have a functional DE capable of booting in less than an... age, I had to:
- disable all desktop effects -- and that's annoying 'cause I need the zooming feature as my sight, like my laptop, is a bit defective;
- split all the KDE virtual gentoo ebuild, to get rid of that plethora of useless/misbehaving apps and bits -- above all, akonadi and nepomuk... actually, those are not useless, though so buggy that the frontier is fuzzy.
- spend hours at no avail trying to synchronize all my mail/contacts/calendar with gmail + my nokia smartphone. Then, defeated, I decided to remove akonadi & Co...
And still every now and then I must tidy up my ~/.kde folder where config junks accumulates like dust over scaffolds.

Where are we heading to? I don't believe in stupid OS/DE wars. I do believe in progress, cooperation and good management, even geeky and nerdy if you want, but *real*, i.e. one that makes things move forward.
I think that if we can just make it functional, without comparing it to anything else (who really cares when it's free?), that will be progress. What others do should be source of inspiration rather than term of comparison. F***ing hell, libre/open-source SW is not about *competition*, it's about FREEDOM and COOPERATION. Personally, I wouldn't want a MacOS clone; I couldn't care the less because I already decided that my life must be, as much as possible, proprietary-SW-free, so I don't need the illusion of owning what I cannot afford to buy (my salary, fortunately, would allow much more than that). The problem is convincing those who consider eye-candy stuff a paragon that they don't need it: priority is having good tools.

But this policy of just "good looking stuff" is making much of these efforts vane. Even though the recent Qt/Nokia debacle had a part in all this, I say, hey, now that's back and free to the community, let's take a chance to start think differently.

IMHO, KDE folks should look a bit closer at the development process of, as for my viewpoint, more stable projects, like Mozilla products. We users, keep on posting, prodding and proposing! As for this bug, I think that the priority is OK: as far as I can understand, there's a workaround... annoying, yes, but that's it.

Sorry for venting my frustration... I hope nobody got offended.

Cheers,

  ^s