Why? Just take KDE4's widget bar for instance.

Now KDE is an X11 Window manager. X11 was designed to allow for remote 
logins, using XDMCP. By the very nature of such remote use, display 
sizes /will/ vary.

One of the first things I noticed when I first managed to log in to KDE4 
via XDMCP was that the widget bar had shrunk, and failed to occupy the 
whole width of the screen.

Okay, so there is a button to click that will allow you to enter a mode 
where you can resize the widget bar, and do other cool stuff like 
dragging the individual widgets around.

Or accidently change the widget bar's height (because the interface is 
new to you, and you decide to toy around), with no "back to defaults" 
button to undo your changes.

As for moving the widgets around, they'll give you some kind of 
crosshair to click-and-drag. Sometimes. You need to do /something/ right 
to make the widgets move - if you don't (and it's not that it would be 
in any way obvious /what/ it is you must do right), then the widget may 
feel the urge to consider itself clicked on, and pop up. Great. You've 
just been dropped out of "move-the-stuff-around"-mode.

But back to the widget bar's width. Oh yes, the "move-stuff-around"-mode 
does give you some sliders to move the left and right ends of the widget 
bar, so you can adjust it to your screen size. But that'll just last 
till next time you log in with that old screen resolution.

Ha, but wait! There's an option to "Maximize Panel" - and indeed that 
does cause the widget bar to go flush to both sides. Nice. But if the 
developers had thought a tiny bit further, they might have provided this 
as a /locking/ option, to have the widget bar auto-adjust to whatever 
screen resolution you're logging in at. Well, they did not.


Another thing bothering me about KDE4 is its standard of single-clicking 
a highlighted item to activate it, but they can't be blamed for me being 
so accustomed to the Windows Way, and I concede that the KDE4 Way is 
indeed more consistent with web browser standard behavior.


The scroll-wheel-switches-desktops thingie Warp is so fond of I find 
actually quite annoying, can't think of how anyone might like it - as it 
has the scroll wheel change functionality dramatically depending on what 
the mouse cursor is currently hovering over. It might be less irritating 
if KDE4 would have totally given up the concept of an application being 
"in focus", or auto-focus whatever application the cursor is currently 
hovering over, but that's not the case: The concept of focus is still 
there, it's just being limited to the keyboard. Which I find a dubious 
idea, given that mice by now have grown additional keys with 
functionality that often transcends the concept of a point-and-click 
device, while at the same time keyboards occasionally grow pointing 
devices, and it becomes hard to tell the "mouse keys" from the "keyboard 
keys".

(To be honest, Windows to some degree does the same thing, routing 
scroll wheel events to whatever the mouse cursor is hovering over; 
however, this is at least limited to the application in general that has 
the focus. Plus, it's not usually used for such a dramatically different 
functionality.)

But there are practical issues with this, too: So there you are 
scrolling with the mouse wheel through your desktops. Whoops - now 
you're scrolling through some list of a window on this desktop that 
happens to be where the other desktop had desktop background.

Say what you will, but the scroll wheel is good for scrolling, and 
shouldn't be abused for desktop switching. Now if a mouse has a 2D 
scroll wheel, using the left/right scrolling for that (and exclusively 
that) seems fair to me, but the up/down... no way. I hope I find out how 
to turn this off soon.


Ah well, and did I mention that KDE4 uses a totally different font size 
in a XDMCP login than it does when logged in locally?

Or that the Dolphin file manager gives you a nice "open with file 
manager in super user mode" option, but in that mode refuses to launch 
KWrite to open a config file for edit? Which to me defies the main 
purpose of having a super user mode in the first place.


It's also nice that the "Personal Settings" window does pop up a pretty 
list of items when you hover over a category icon, but although it 
appears pretty much like a popup menu, no way you can click on an icon 
in the popup...


Gee, if openSUSE 11.2 didn't come with a brand new version of boost, I'd 
throw it off my hard drive again any moment...


... well, maybe that's enough of ranting for now. I do find some good in 
KDE4, too. Enabling users to configure standard keyboard shortcuts 
globally for all applications, for instance. I hope it works as 
advertised. The standard editor, KWrite, seems superior to the Gnome 
counterpart, too. Not to mention Notepad...

And my, this one-click-to-activate thing is more addictive than I 
thought... I guess I'll turn it back on again...

Well, maybe modern Linux desktops don't suck /that/ much after all...

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