Switching to Kubuntu; problems?

[theo.schmidt at wilhelmtux.ch]

Am 24.10.2011 13:59, schrieb Robert Curriden:
> Panels, visual effects, plug-ins, forcing the use of Gnome shell...
>
> This move by Canonical is not unlike Microsoft's changing in their own
> UI, and is just as arrogant.

It's not just Canonical, it's everybody! There is a serious conflict 
between developers with early adopters versus "users". In my role as a 
user I started with KDE 1 and faithfully followed through KDE 2, 3, and 
3.5, which did almost everything I wanted and could be configured to be 
similar to Gnome, or vice versa. It also worked perfectly with Edubuntu 
simply by installing the meta package kubuntu-desktop.

Then came the totally new KDE 4, which is cool, but still doesn't work 
well enough for old "users" like me, who also miss some of the features 
of KDE 3. I tried it for a while and still have (to have) it installed 
for KDE-4-only programs like Marble, but have gone back to KDE 3.5, 
which is much faster and less buggy. I also have the classic Gnome 
installed of course, but it seems a dead end apparently to be replaced 
by something completely different soon. Canonical just preemted this 
with Unity, which seems OK for new users and for mobile devices with 
small screens, who just want a program starter, but is not something I 
want to use myself on a large screen.

I also tried Xubuntu and Lubuntu desktops and will probably use one of 
these when KDE 3.5 becomes untenable (it is already deteriorating and 
switching between KDE 3 and 4 programs is possible but a bit unnerving 
because the look and feel is so different.

In short, this excessive high-speed forking has seriously impaired the 
Linux desktop. I wouldn't know what to recommend a business user or 
indeed a school. Many organisations are moving from Windows XP to 
Windows 7. A switch to KDE 4 would be of the same order of difficulty 
and some distributions like Mepis soften the switch remarkably well (I 
use Mepis at work). The reason I can't recommend Kubuntu for Edubuntu is 
because in my opinion the Kubuntu implementation of KDE 4 has "lost" the 
classic desktop users somewhere. I'm sure it could be tweaked by 
experts, but it isn't something I can do without losing patience.

BTW, my problems were often a combination of low performance and 
usabilty, i.e. a warning appears, in the wrong colours, and disappears 
before I can deciffer it, or a button action appears not to work, so you 
try a few times and give up, and then after a while you get ten windows 
at once.

Best, Theo Schmidt