[CS-FSLUG] Pardon me while I grouch

[Ed Hurst]

(unreasonable rant mode on)

After a week or so fooling around with SUSE 9.3's KDE desktop, I ditched
it for IceWM. That's what I usually do. Much as I love the tools and the
way it works, it's just too darned buggy. It always has been, and I
suspect always will be. Since I have sufficient RAM to use it, I may try
to download the 100MB or so of update packages (on somebody else's
connection) from 3.4.0 to 3.4.2, but I don't expect it will be much better.

One member of this list said he felt KDE spent too much time debugging,
and not getting the next release out the door. Ha! I wish it were so.
I've yet to see any release that worked as it was supposed to work. They
keep adding new features, and inevitably some are broken. Just once, I'd
love to see a polished and stable release, where just the few things I
use weren't broken. For example, use Kwrite long enough to produce a
page of text -- any text -- and it will start slamming the CPU. The
little indicator I put in the Kicker Panel shows the CPU graph leaping
up and down every time I hit the keystrokes after a couple of
paragraphs. There's just no excuse for that in a simple text editor.

Then get out of X and look at the console. There you will see 50 feet of
error messages from a day or so of use in KDE. Again, that is just lousy
development. I realize I don't know squat about code, but I know I don't
get that pile of background error spew from much of anything else on
Linux. Both KDE and GNOME do it, though KDE is more verbose these days.
If it's inconsequential, why even turn the messages on? Why, after some
50 releases and sub-releases do we still see something so clearly
unfinished? Yep, we are really going to win over those Windows users.
Novell-SUSE's Konqueror browser chokes on Novell's own SUSE webpages
because it can't handle some JavaScript.

Yes, I've had these same gripes for over two years now. It's like the
pastor that gave the exact same sermon two Sundays in a row. When the
deacons asked why, he said, "You didn't listen the first time." The
church was doing things the same way as before. You don't get anywhere
if there aren't at least some incremental improvements here and there.
I'm still waiting.

(rant mode off)

Whew! I feel better now.

-- 
Ed Hurst
-----------
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