KDE4 = KDE Vista
10:39am EDT, 11 Jun 2009

After upgrading to Jaunty on my laptop, I noticed that kmail and akregator were a little slower than usual and thought it might help their performance by logging into KDE instead of GNOME. Besides, maybe KDE4 just sucked because I was trying it out under Mandriva.

Um, nope.

After a startup process that took literally about a minute and made my Intel-driven screen flicker a lot, I finally got the extremely glassy-looking KDE4 desktop with its startup noise that's sort of like Brian Eno's Windows 95 startup noise crossed with Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

Some of the bigger irritations disappeared when I used the apps under KDE, like the visual artifacts they both had when I switched to them from another app such as Firefox. I attribute this to their developers not testing them under any window manager other than kwin or whatever it's called this week. Their scrollbars both also stopped scrolling when I let go of the mousebutton, something making them hard enough to use under GNOME that I'm seeking non-KDE alternatives.

Those behaviors are fixed when I run them under KDE. Unfortunately, what's not fixed is that when I click the scrollbar, it takes about 500ms for the click to register and almost another second before the article or email list is updated to reflect the new position.

Also not fixed is that I can type at my normal speed (probably about as fast as a novice secretary, but no more than 60-70wpm) in kmail and after about a sentence, I have to stop for about 4 seconds to let it catch up. It makes me want to use leafpad as an external editor, but then I sacrifice on-the-fly spellchecking. "Well, that's what takes all the extra time," you might think. But under KDE3, it worked without any noticeable delay at all.

Oh yeah, loved the application title bar racing stripes that look like MacOS circa 1992. Not.

Applications aside, how's the KDE4 desktop? Well, the stuff on my GNOME desktop appears in a little window about the quarter the size of the screen. It has no widgets except when I move my mouse away from that window down to the KDE task bar, at which point what appears to be a grab bar appears, but goes away again when I go to click it. The K menu itself, which used to be even quicker and better organized than GNOME's, is now this huge behemoth like an application unto itself. You click on it, and instead of having submenus you have tabs with different categories on them. You can't just click the K button, hold the mouse down, move to the app you want to start and let go. You have to actually navigate it like a retarded little web site.

About that point, 2-3 minutes into my KDE4 session, my laptop's fan came on for the first time in weeks. I suddenly noticed that my laptop was getting really hot. And that's when I logged out.

I wonder if anyone is actually still using this. For now, I'm back in GNOME. Maybe KDE 7 will come out someday and be lighter. For now, though, KDE4 serves no purpose except to remind me that GNOME isn't so bad. KDE fans accuse GNOME developers of parroting Microsoft when they embrace Mono and things like that, but with KDE4 their own developers have gone all the way and created an experience as annoying and frustrating as Windows Vista.

Update: Going back into GNOME, I started kmail and akregator again and found their style had been changed. I went into KDE systemsettings and changed the style back to Gtk" and restarted the programs, only to discover that now they're not displaying the artifacts or doing the sticky scroll bar thing reliably anymore (but the scroll bar still sticks occasionally.) So something about logging into KDE and back out again has killed some bugs, though it hasn't helped the apps' performance.

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