Quote Originally Posted by PattiMichell View Post
Thanks - every time I try to do something KDE4 can suddenly turn frustrating - and they seem to have an "always decentralize" sort of rule. It used to be that there were just two places to go to change configuration(s) of just about everything, and what you wanted was *somewhere* in that menu tree - now you have to search everywhere through different top-level menu trees for settings, and you keep going down blind alleys menu-wise. VERY frustrating!! Then it's off to some forum or other to ask questions and wait a day or three for an answer...

I just cannot for the life of me imagine the logic behind an os upon which I can't just click something to change it's settings!! But that's KDE4 for you!

Then there's the new "no-walking-on-the-grass" rules, for instance - you can't put anything on your desktop - only on the new folder they call the desktop, not the desktop itself. I remember early windows (3.0) and macs were that way - you could not configure the desktop much beyond default - I remember when just getting a picture on the desktop was such a BIG deal... So KDE4 is a step backward in many ways. It seems like it's aimed at a generation of mac users, actually, though I haven't spent much time on macs. I finally just gave up trying to configure my desktop the way I wanted in KDE4 - frankly it seems they can't be made to be the same. What's up with that? It's almost as if current programmers never saw Windows 3.1, OS2, and the first macs, so they don't know the early problems and have to rediscover desktop what's desirable by trial and error. (do I sound old?)

Well, too bad KDE3 isn't available for Knoppix. As a stone-cold Knoppix noob I was able to do wonderful things in Knoppix/KDE3: I never had to go to a forum and say "where is this?" - I just right-clicked on a desktop drive icon, clicked "mount it" then fixed what was wrong - and in minutes had repaired a friend's computer. So there's real power in KDE3, which is prolly why it evolved along the lines it did. I guess you can argue that it's simply a case of already knowing KDE3 rather than KDE4 - but you can't argue against the way KDE4 has "decentralized" all the configuration settings. There's still many easily used in KDE3 that I haven't found. I've repeatedly gone through sessions of clicking around for hours trying to find what I want - not finding it - then finding later it's buried somewhere counterintuitive (except, maybe, for the coders?).

Sorry for the diatribe... just disappointed.
Patti
No apology needed! I know what it's like to be frustrated by an OS.

So, I take it that the default LXDE desktop (window manager) is not appealing, and you're using KDE4 by specifying that on bootup? Or is LXDE what you're using? Once we've got that nailed down, we can try to address the specific concerns you refer to indirectly. Or, you can install KDE-3 if you like, assuming that you have Knoppix on a flash drive or hard drive; Linux is all about freedom of choice!

Cheers!
Krishna