Frederik Himpe

This week-end, I installed KDE 4.0.83 also known as 4.1 beta 2. Here’s a quick round-up of issues I reported:

• More accessible help for “Download the MSN picture” configuration: the option “Always” says to look in the help for more information. However there is no Help button, and I failed to find it by hand. In the ideal case, this whole option should not even be necessary and Kopete should automatigically get the display picture right in all cases, which is certainly not the case now, whatever the setting. Pidgin handles this just fine.
• Plasma picture frame: No way to select multiple directories at once for slideshow
• Plasme picture frame: does not execute EXIF rotation
• Plasma picture frame: No way to open shown picture
• Plasma folder view: crash at log-out (fixed in svn)
• Dolphin: does not execute EXIF rotation
• Gwenview: very low quality upsampling
• Use sane default size for desktop icons
• Desktop settings completely messed up when restarting KDE
• Kopete: message notification in contact list only disappears when the contact is (re-)selected

Looking at the bugs of previous weeks, those are fixed now:

• Plasma: Moving application launcher from kickoff menu to desktop creates duplicate entry of which one icon is broken
• http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164658: Yes, desktop effects are finally activated correctly now at log on now!
• Kopete: popup notifications do not disappear automatically

So in total, this means 4 out of 31 bugs reported during the last two weeks are fixed now. Unfortunately, most other bugs did not see much progress at all: either they are considered as feature request for KDE 4.2 or later, either they are completely ignored, either the only progres is that the developer says it is working for him, even if I can easily reproduce these bugs. I could not find the feature “folder view widget used as desktop”, which is really needed in my opinion, so it seems indeed that this is only a KDE 4.2 feature, as was suggested in an earlier comment on this blog. Together with all other bugs/feature requests for Plasma I reported, I am still convinced that Plasma is not mature enough today to be used in a production environment by non-geeks.

This week-end I upgraded my KDE 4 test installation to KDE 4.0.82, which is now included in Mandriva Cooker. Time to follow up on the bugs I reported last week and to take a deeper look at Plasma, the new desktop concept introduced in KDE 4.

Plasma

The good news is that the Folder View widget, which is used to display desktop icons, has been fixed so that right clicking on a file now gives a meaningful menu. So finally you can easily trash or rename icons in the folder view widget or execute other common actions for normal files.

However, the more I use KDE 4, the more problems I see with this whole Plasma thing. Especially the Folder View widget is problematic, not only because of bugs, but especially because the whole thing works rather counterintuitively.

In other desktops (including KDE 3.5, GNOME and XFCE), icons can be placed on the whole desktop surface and those files and application launchers are saved in the ~/Desktop directory. KDE 4 takes a radically different approach. All items on the desktop are Plasma widgets. Plasma widgets can be small applications (like an RSS readers or a clock) but also file and application launchers and they do not correspond with a file in ~/Desktop. To circumvent this limitation, the folder view widget was created. It’s actually a widget which shows all the files in a certain directory. By default, a folder view widget showing the contents of the directory ~/Desktop is added to the desktop. This creates a highly confusing situation:

• Because the contents of ~/Desktop is not shown over the whole desktop but only in a widget, files in ~/Desktop can only be shown on a limited area on the desktop.
• All widgets get some sort of transparent overlay over the desktop wallpaper. In my opinion, this looks ugly. It creates unnecessary complication, while it is not aesthetically pleasing to my eyes, because it ruins the background too much.
• There are now two different ways of creating items on the desktop: either by creating a separate plasma widget which represents a file or application launcher, either by putting the file or application launcher in the the ~/Desktop directory.

Because of this fundamental change and some bugs which worsen the situation, very strange things can happen:

• Moving files or applications to or from the visible desktop folder view widget does not work at all,
• Move a file from KDE’s program menu to the desktop, outside of the folder widget. A Plasma widget representing the program is created at the location where you dropped it, however it only shows the “broken” icon. The application name is ellipsized to three letters. At the same time the icon is also added to the folder view widget, so there are now two desktop icons…
• I could drag and drop a Kopete avatar image file to the desktop, so that a Plasma widget was created. There was no way to copy or move this file to another location any more, so I could access it somewhere with my file browser…
• When moving a file to the desktop, in the past this moved the file to ~/Desktop, so you could easily find the file there in all applications. Now the file is not moved anymore, but a Plasma widget linking to that file is created. That means that in applications, you can’t find the file anymore in ~/Desktop, although the file is shown on your visible desktop.

Even with the impossibility of dropping files on the folder view widget and the double icons when dropping outside the folder view widget fixed, the two different type of icons on the desktop, will be very confusing for users. At work there are users who are constantly using the desktop for saving files. If there does not come a complete rethinking of the way the desktop is implemented in KDE 4, I am planning on migrating these users to GNOME instead of KDE 4, because this Plasma thing will cause too much support interventions because ueser won’t find their documents anymore.

Half of the Plasma widgets are still not working for me. The most widgets, only show a grey area when I drop them on my desktop and I still could not add the Show Desktop widget to the panel.

Changing the size of a Plasma widget neither is very intuitive. You have to click on the resize icon which appears normally at the left upper side of the widget (but this can be the right side too, if your widget is near the left side of the screen!), and then the widget will be expanded or reduced around the centre of the widget. This is of course very annoying if your widget is already near the side of the screen, as this means you’ll probably have to move the widget too. I don’t understand why the same idiom of resizing and moving application windows was not reused.

Other problems

There has not been much progress in my bug reports of last week. Most remain unanswered or only have got a “I can’t reproduce” answer. Most promising for the moment is the KMail text encoding bug, where I was able to find some more information about the circumstances which trigger this problem. Let’s hope this helps in fixing the problem soon now. The slowliness of KMail’s message list is getting more and more annoying too. Actually already in folders with only a few hundreds message, the slowliness is noticeable. Speaking about slowliness, Konqueror’s KHTML web browsers also feels very sluggish today, compared to Firefox 2 and 3. Scrolling with the mouse scroll wheel often feels sluggish, as does the loading and rendering of complex pages. Konqueror’s KHTML on my Athlon 64 3500+ feels much slower than Epiphany/Webkit on my old PowerPC G4 laptop. It’s unfortunate that GTK+ and QT/KDE Webkit are still not really ready for production use.

List of today’s new KDE bugs:

• Moving application launcher from kickoff menu to desktop creates duplicate entry of which one icon is broken
• KDE should automatically mount all removable media at logon or when plugging in
• Kopete: Adds user to “Not in contact list” for MSN account without any chat being initiated
• Kopete: Crash when authorizing XMPP/Jabber contact
• Kickoff menu: impossible to change order in Favourites tab
• KMail: Accept certificate forever does not work

Update 15 June 2008: two new bugs related to the Plasma desktop problems:

• Plasma: No way to move or copy files saved as a Plasma widget
• Gwenview: Save As disabled for a Plasma file

During the past few days, I have been testing KDE 4.1 beta on Mandriva Cooker. Actually the version I tested is even a bit more recent than KDE 4.1 beta: Cooker currently includes the KDE 4.0.81 snapshot.

Overall, the desktop is basically in a usable state. I experienced a few crashes, but generally it was not too bad. Unfortunately I could not report them all, because I don’t have the -debug packages installed (thanks to our infamous download limits in Belgium, it’s a bit difficult to keep these big packages up to date). Most problems are related to things not working correctly or not very intuitively. In my opinion this has always been the weak spot of KDE.

Here’s a list of bugs which I reported during the last few days:

• KWin/System Settings: XRender smooth scaling setting not saved
• KMail: check mail at startup should be enabled by default
• Kopete: raw HTML shown in tooltip pop-up for MSN contact
• KMail: disabling message structure viewer when the message structure viewer is enabled, causes a crash
• Kopete: no invisible status possible by default
• Gwenview: should save the visibility settings for the sidebar and the thumbnail bar for the next session
• Kopete: message in pop-up notification is empty when receiving a single emoticon message
• KWin: desktop effects only enabled if I change the compositing type setting
• Dolphin: no visible button in sidebar to empty wastebin
• KMail: provide close button to disable Favourite folder view
• KMail wrong encoding for sender name which is not selected in message list
• Kopete: truncation of contact names not done for status change messages
• Kopete: message pop-up notifications are not disappearing automatically

A lot of this problems are not too bad, but they make the desktop loop a bit unfinished and less professional. The finishing touch is still lacking.

So apart from that, I experienced some more random crashes for which I did not find a reproducible test case yet. Sometimes a combo box in Konqueror’s web browser shows completely black when opened for the first time. Also in Konqueror, there are some refreshing issues, where you get part of the page overlapping with other parts, until you scroll the problematic part of the page out of the window and back in. Sometimes sound notifications in all KDE applications stop working completely. Some dialogs are not heigh enough by default (for example in Kopete’s new account wizard), a bug which was already reported on KDE’s bugzilla.

Plasma is still a mixed bag in KDE 4.1. The folder view, which is used for showing the normal icons on the desktop we are used to, does not have a correct right click menu for the menu icons, which makes it difficult/impossible to rename or remove icons on the desktop for example. I failed to add a “show desktop” button on the panel (nothing seems to happen when I do this). It’s deceiving that such basic features are still not working correctly now. All in all, I also have the impression that this whole Plasma thing also makes the desktop much more complex. It also adds little gain (only a few interesting gadgets mostly used by more advanced users and geeks) while it has still many drawbacks in basic features which are used by many less experienced people.

What’s also very problematic, is that there is a huge speed regression in KMail. in KMail 4.1, it is simply mail folders containing ten thousands of messages are barely usable, something which worked fine in KMail 3.5 and also works fine in Evolution. I reported this problem and apparently this is a known problem in QT 4.4’s Q3ListView class. Trolltech does not want to fix this bug anymore and so the only possible solution is to port KMail to use QTreeView, which will not happen for KDE 4.1. Unfortunately this is yet another example of things which won’t be complete for KDE 4.1.

KDE 4.1 generally feels very fast. Dolphin is a very nice addition to the desktop and while I was not really a fan of the KickOff menu earlier, it’s actually very usable. KDE finally can access file systems on encrypted LUKS devices (although it’s currently not working for me, probably because of a bug which is also affecting GNOME). and Gwenview is a very nice default picture viewer. Amarok 2 however does not seem very usable yet at this moment. I also like the new default setting of showing the text under the toolbar icons (however I don’t understand why this is not the case in Konqueror) and the integrated desktop effects in KDE are nice, while being a bit less bloated and bombastic than Compiz.

While KDE 4.1 has some very nice improvements, I think I will never install it on systems I manage for others (normal, non-technical computer users) which are now using KDE 3.5. For those kind of users, I want a (near) perfect desktop where everything is polished and things are working perfectly as intended and as would be reasonably expected by normal users. I’m afraid it will take until somewhere in the the KDE 4.2 series until this will become reality. If you are a more experienced user and don’t mind basic Plasma things not being finished and other unpolished things all over the desktop and don’t have any huge mail folders, then even already KDE 4.1 beta could be right what you need. Personally, I will continue to use GNOME 2.22.2. For now, I consider this as the most professional desktop which is capable of offering the kind of stability and smoothness most new Linux expect.