Now this is one of the things that you wouldn’t expect — Years after I left KDE behind me, today I’m back using it.. and honestly I feel again at home. I guess the whole backend changes that got through KDE4 were a bit too harsh for me at the time, and I could feel the rough edges. But after staying with GNOME2, XFCE, then Cinnamon.. this seems to be the best fit for me at this point.
Why did I decide to try this again? Well, even if it doesn’t happen that often, Cinnamon tends to crash from time to time, and that’s obnoxious when you’re working on something. Then there is another matter, which is that I’m using a second external monitor together with my laptop, as I’m doing network diagrams and other things on my dayjob, and for whatever reason the lockscreen provided by gnome-screensaver no longer works reliably: sometimes the second display is kept running, other times it doesn’t resume at all and I have to type blindly (with the risk that I’m actually typing my password on a different application), and so on so forth.
Then since I wanted to have a decent photo application, and Shotwell didn’t show itself as valid enough for what I want to do (digiKam is much better), I decided to give it another try…
So first of all I owe lots of congratulations to all the people working on KDE, you did a tremendously good job. There are though a few things that I’d like to point out. The first is that I won’t be using the term “KDE SC” anytime soon; that still sounds dumb to me, sorry. The second is that I wonder if some guys made it a point to exaggerate on the graphical department, and then having to roll back. I remember how much hype was created around Oxygen and now it feels, that just like Keramik at KDE 3 time, they had to drop it back.
Another sore spot is the Italian translation — it’s not just awkward but in some places it’s definitely wrong! They translated “Plastique” (the theme name) and “Plastik” (the reference to the KDE 3 theme) as if they were “Plastic” — this is not the case! Keep the names the same as the original please. There are also a few more problems, including the fact that they did translate terms like “Serif”, “Sans Serif” and “Monospace” which … well they don’t really sound that good in Italian. At the end I simply changed the system language back to English.
There are still quite a few things that I have to take care of to set this up properly; right now it’s just a messy first set up and there are a few bugs that I have to report (including the fact that to upload originally-sized files on Flickr, KIPI is actually copying the original file to /tmp which makes it very unpleasant especially when you have that directory in tmpfs.
At any rate, you’ll probably read some more comments on KDE4 from me in the next few weeks, so be ready for them.