[CS-FSLUG] Theory Exercise: Stable Desktop

[Ed Hurst]

Eduardo Sánchez wrote:

> KDE 3.5.10 is one answer. It's been over 2 years since its release and 
> it got lots of bugfixes. It seems that it will still get a little more 
> maintenance. It has a huge amount of localization, and plenty of apps as 
> well.

Sometime around 3.5.2, on several distros and on three different 
machines, KDE across the board has maintained one particular bug: the 
screensaver and DPMS controls do not work. Period. I get no interaction 
between the running process and the hardware. The screensaver never 
comes on. Instead, the hardware does its default and blanks the screen 
after a short period of inactivity. 3.5.9 on openSUSE 11.0 (and 3.5.10 
on 11.1) still does this. It's also broken in Etch and Lenny, and it 
doesn't matter whether I run 32-bit or 64-bit.

There are other annoyances I could list, but the point is KDE has gotten 
progressively more broken in my experience. I am particularly 
disappointed in Konsole with it's spastic changes and regressions each 
release, Kscd, Koffice never fixing the kerning on TTFs, etc. Of all the 
projects, this one has recently become far worse with the attitude of, 
"We aren't fixing older releases. Upgrade of buzz off." I got enough of 
that from the earlier days of GNOME.

Qt and Gtk both are just dandy, but the two major desktops symbolize all 
that's wrong with Open Source: too much, too soon, and too many 
ill-considered innovations.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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