[PLUG] where can I get a sane KDE?

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Mon Feb 12 01:16:55 UTC 2007


Hi all,

Today I found myself wondering how long it will be before we start 
having desktop environment "distributions" with specific mixes of 
stability, defaults, etc -- the way we have linux distributions now 
(e.g. ubuntu is not for everyone.)

I really like the kde window manager, kmail, konqueror, and quite a few 
other parts of the system.

Unfortunately, when I aptitude upgrade, certain parts seem to come with 
new and improved silliness almost daily (it's more like every 6 months 
-- I don't really want to be thinking about my desktop environment 
daily.)

A couple (few?) years ago, there was a problem with the alt+tab box not 
showing all of the windows (I have about 40 running right now, but 
that's just on the laptop), though it would at least pan to allow you 
to alt+tab to any one of them.  This was fixed by replacing it with a 
vertical stack which now makes any minimized windows completely 
inaccessible via alt+shift+tab (it just truncates the stack.)  Yay.  
That must be the developers telling me that I've got too many irons in 
the fire.

Recently, the very-useful feature of being able to spin through a window 
*group* with the mouse wheel turned into the much-less-useful "spin 
through *all* windows with the mouse wheel".

Today, the particular ridiculousity that prompted me to write a rant is 
discovering that Ctrl+Shift+F5 is a hotkey used by kde for the 
oh-so-frequently-needed "switch to desktop 17" action.  WTF?  I really 
doubt that having this enabled could be considered a "reasonable 
default" given that most people won't be running 17 desktops *and* if 
they were, they could not be expected to guess that hotkey without 
going to look in the config (at which point, they could easily enable 
it.)

This is not a new category of annoyances though, since the "increase 
font" hotkey still (IIRC) defaults to Ctrl+"Plus", which literally 
means Ctrl+Shift+= because the plus is the shifted character on that 
key (though, maybe not in every country.)  Similarly, the default 
"Alt+Click to drag a window" can get in the way until you realize that 
it is yet another overly-helpy default to be disabled.

Of course, I'm not switching to gnome.  I could point out about 20 major  
issues there that would make me pull way more hair than the few weird 
nits I have with kde.  I've messed with several of the other wm's, but 
I typically end up being dissappointed with something major (like the 
ability to build hierarchical multi-key shortcut sequences.)

So, am I alone in that I use kde, have 100+ windows open at a time (no, 
I don't like multiple desktops, I prefer layers and the grouped 
taskbar) and don't want perfectly useful and reasonable features to get 
phased-out in favor of increasingly less useful and reasonable ones?

Most of the issues I have are in the window manager, so suggestions of 
how to get or setup a reasonably powerful and configurable replacement 
are welcome.  It just needs to support xinerama, 100+ open windows, 
hierarchical hotkeys, grouped applications, and a decent system tray.  
It helps if I don't need to spend an entire day figuring out how to 
configure it.

Is there a better solution than building from source and maintaining a 
custom set of patches?  Maybe "Joe's KDE sane-ification release" or 
something?  I've tried bug reports, but typically get answers like 
"just use multiple desktops" or "what's wrong with Ctrl++ ?" and it 
seems they generally don't take you seriously unless you compiled trunk 
this morning.  I really do like kde, but the nits seem to be 
accumulating and/or regressing to the point that I think I have to do 
something or else freeze everything at Sarge (!) until I find a better 
answer.

Thanks,
Eric
-- 
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
--George Bernard Shaw
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