The Kubuntu Wishlist
So, what happened to the resident from our Tale of Two Houses? Well, as it happens, after seeing one dispute too many in the first house (including memorable incidents when the orange-shirted designers shifted all flowerpots on windowsills from the right side to the left, and convinced the local post office to glue bright orange stamps to envelopes), while any significant changes just kept getting postponed, she shrugged and moved back to house two—and liked it. For it was newly furbished, and looked much livelier and better decorated than it had been when freshly rebuilt from the ground up. And so she stayed there, and (hopefully) lived happily ever after.
Now, all this allegory-speak aside, Harald Sitter’s recent post really clicked with me. I already switched to Kubuntu a week before it was posted, so I found myself agreeing with many points raised in it. While I switched for social reasons, I stayed for technical ones; I really believe that at this particular point in time, KDE has more to offer to the end user, and I cannot honestly recommend GNOME, torn in corporate feuds and dealing with entropic decay, to my friends whom I introduce to Ubuntu and Linux.
Which is a shame, because I actually like the core underlying platform better in GNOME‘s case. I like GObject, I like GIR, I like Vala, I like the architecture revamp that the GTK developers are doing for 3.0. I like the GNOME HIG and the “less is more” philosophy, and try to apply both to an extent even in non-GNOME software. But Qt (ugh, ancient C++!) has Nokia’s corporate backing, and it really, really shows in everything, including both feature-completeness and the quality of documentation and SDKs. And Qt 4 is a solid, polished foundation on which KDE has built, and built steadily, having evolved surprisingly fast in less than two years since 4.0.
Still, KDE and Kubuntu are not ideal (nothing is), and here is an assorted, broad-strokes wishlist.
- KWin is a resource hog in its default composited configuration. On both machines where I tried KDE 4.5 (one with NVIDIA and the proprietary driver, one with ATI and the default free driver), Compiz worked noticeably faster with about the same quality of effects. I’d like to either see KWin sped up, or see a seamless switch to Compiz in composited mode, like Ubuntu does for Metacity.
- Kubuntu should have more visual identity on its own. The greyish-blue is nice and “techy”, and I’d like it to remain the core of the visual style, but I would also like Kubuntu to have its own, distinct QtCurve configuration. I’d like to see the main menu “K” replaced with something Kubuntu-specific (although since I use a non-default icon theme, I see the Elementary “e” instead); KDE has long passed the time when the developers thought that every appliKation had to Kontain at least one K.
- Plasma, I think, is the most confusing experience for new users. What is a “widget”? What does “block widget changes” mean? (Yes, I know what this means, but, say, my parents would be lost.) The panel editing UI is confusing in comparison to both GNOME and Xfce, with seemingly meaningless whitespace and a horizontal row of widgets that makes it hard to quickly scan them by function; a vertical list where descriptions are displayed all the time, and not just on tooltips, would be better.
- I’m not sure that having widget changes unblocked by default is the best choice. Windows has had its panel changes locked by default since Windows XP, presumably out of the same “Don’t confuse the user” mindset. This mode introduces more right-click menu items that aren’t of interest most of the time, and adds an icon to the right whose sole purpose is to configure widgets. Just keep widgets locked by default and let the users discover the configuration option through right-clicked.
- I find the standard notifications too obtrusive, in the same way as the upstream GNOME notification-daemon. Having a button with a backlog of notifications is nice, but it quickly fills and requires manual clearing; popup window sizes are unpredictable. Often I found myself playing, say, Starcraft II only to have notifications steal focus from its fullscreen window. I have switched to Colibri, which is basically a KDE clone of notify-osd that doesn’t suffer from the Ayatana hardcoding syndrome, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it as the default in Kubuntu.
- Replicate the Ubuntu sound menu.
- Make it more obvious that some widgets (such as the messaging menu, Network Manager and clock) are interactive, for example, by highlighting. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was done for Ayatana application indicators without any specific coding in the application itself.
- Quassel: Best usability of all IRC clients I’ve tried, but it still could use some improvement. My main issues are the unintuitive “Hide Chat(s) Temporarily/Permanently” menu items, and the fact that “temporary” hiding keeps private chats hidden even if you double-click the username in the user list or type /query, and only shows the rows if they write to you.
If some of these issues are considered sound, maybe I’ll take part in working on them for the Natty cycle—who knows!
The perfect designer shoes that can show your charm or provide ample space and a perfect slouch. That you need a pair of
Ive relayed the Quassel comments to Sput (main coder), hopefully we can get them sorted.
Also, if you have time and inclination, we would love to see you in #quassel and contributing. theres a lot of low hanging fruit at the moment, ping me, Sput, Al or Egs or just ask in the channel and we can point out some for you.
Cheers
Jussi