KDE3? KDE4?
Jon posted an interesting entry concerning KDE3 vs KDE4, and I was all geared up to post a comment to it, but I figured I would go ahead and share my thoughts here, since I had been pondering writing about this topic to begin with. He mentioned a couple of points that I’d like to weigh in on myself. I’ve summarized the points since I haven’t had a chance to ask if I could repost portions of his blog here.
I disagree with the thought that KDE3 is only for power users. I’ve sat quite a few people in front of a KDE3 setup who were totally used to Windows and they didn’t have any issues getting things done. In one case, one person actually liked the fact that settings were at his fingertips and not buried behind various shields. The fact that KDE4 is trying to simplify things doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to appeal to everyone. In fact, some may view this as going along the lines of the Gnome project. My biggest beef with Gnome is the whole GConf setup, and the fact that I have to dig through a special editor to customize some settings. I shouldn’t need to go into a registry-like setup to tweak things. KDE3 exposes these things in via the system settings and various configuration settings, where they should be.
KDE3 was, and still is, a perfectly good desktop for home users. For most people, they may not get into all of the settings, only accessing what they need to. The settings themselves are organized well enough that most wouldn’t need that much hand-holding (if any) to get around things. For some reason, the thought that KDE3 was for power users only just kinda bugs me a bit, especially after seeing quite a few new users take to it nicely.
With that said, let’s turn to KDE4. I’ve tried it, and wasn’t too keen on it at the time. I may give it another shot when 4.1 final is released, but I’m still not sold on it yet. To me, it seems like they focused on the “ooo, pretty” aspect of the desktop and went from there. I wouldn’t call KDE3 vs. KDE4 over just yet. It’s going to take some time before people completely migrate over, myself included.