I’d previously tried Suse 11.1 with the kde 4 that comes on the dvd and really didn’t like it, but as kde 4 has moved on a bit since then to 4.2.2 I thought I’d give it another try
Did a fresh Suse 11.1 install and immediately upgraded it to the kde 4.2.2
Pretty much everthing except for klipper and the clock disppeared off the taskbar, and these shifted themselves over to the far left, where we’re used to the Suse/Kde menu with our programs etc being
Yeah … the Suse/Kde menu was one of those that totally disappeared, along with things like the convenient icon for accessing your home folder, the missing menu I just added back as an applet
Things like Home, Kde Help Center, Find Files, Run Command, none of these are on the menu, nor are the usual convenient things like Run Command there when I right-click the desktop
Just a few examples of the simple but handy things I’m used to in kde that just aren’t there
Another anoyance is the inability to right-click a program’s shortcut and then choose to add it to the desktop or main panel, right-clicking opens the program instead. I usually create a little menu using the menu editor containing the programs I use most and then add this to the main panel, can’t find any way of doing that either
There were files I’d moved to my ‘main’ Suse box (still running the excellent Suse 11 on kde 3.5) using samba before installing the 11.1, so I thought I’d copy those back before investigating further
Logged into the samaba shares, browsing them etc, no problem
But when I tried copying any of the files back, no go, keeps telling me that the file I’m trying to copy doesn’t exist, so it can browse the shares but not grab any of them … I know there’s no problem with the samba shares on the main machine, so that’s also something annoying
At this point I decided I was wasting my time with it
As it is right now based on the installation I have, getting the latest Suse and Kde really don’t feel like progress at all, what I’ve actually ended up with appears to be, on the surface at least, a less usable system than when the machine in question was running Suse 11
I know that the kde 4 series will continue to improve but my own experience with it so far is that it certainly needs to
Purely out of curiosity I’m thinking I might try something like the latest fedora on the machine with the latest kde, just to see how the kde 4.2.2 looks and works on another platform
Kde 4 is encroaching more and more on the 3.5 I have on my main machine as things get updated, I can no longer nx into a kde 3.5 desktop on it for example, even though I only have 3.5 installed, remoting in via nx recently started to fire up kde 4
I’ve been extolling the virtues of OpenSuse for several years but I’m beginning to think I might have to look for an alternative … or perhaps even switch to another desktop environment at least until kde 4 gets more mature
I don’t know whether something went wrong with my installation or not, but the whole thing just feels very beta, unfinished even
Are the kind of things I mentioned above ‘normal’ or am I just not having much luck with it?