Zugschlusbeobachtungen

I have been using current KDE since most of my Linux time (having converted over from WindowMaker to KDE 2 back in 2002). But currently, I am seriously pondering to ditch KDE since KDE upstream seems to be wildly decided to kill KDE.

I have accidentally upgraded my desktop box to KDE4 because I missed putting KDE on hold before doing a major sid update after a couple of months. KDE4's first regression immediately showed itself - the right display doesn't get any attention from KDE. It just shows up in a grey checkerboard background, it doesn't have a panel, it doesn't have a menu, right click doesn't work. It looks like the only thing one can do with it is dragging windows onto it.

With help of #debian-kde, I quickly found out about this bug in Upstream Bugzilla, which is referred from #529487 and which was marked as Duplicate of this bug in upstream bugzilla, which is one and a half years old and was marked as "severity wishlist".

Despite the splendid job that the Debian KDE team has done to sort out the KDE4 mess, it looks like KDE upstream has managed to break Dual Head Setups for one and a half years and doesn't seem to be too interested in providing KDE4 in a way that it can be compared with past versions. This is very sad and will have me shopping for a new desktop environment soon, I am afraid.

Maybe it was not a so good idea to take away KDE 3 so soon and it might have been better to keep KDE 3 in Debian. Maybe it's time to re-introduce KDE 3 as co-installable packages? I would be willing to participate in this effort as a team member.

Which other Desktop Environments and/or Window Managers should I be shopping for? I'd like to have:

• Dual-Head support (preferably with the possibility to switch desktops only on one display, but that's something that even KDE 3 cannot do yet)
• Shortcuts like "gg:search words" or "wp:search words" to immediately open google, wikipedia, the BTS or the PTS
• Overlapping windows that are not automatically resized
• A terminal like konsole which allows me to have different session in tabs and to send my input to all tabs
• A clipboard handler that will automatically pop up a window asking me whether I want to open the URL that I just marked in a browser
• Integration with the Debian menu system
I will try adding to this list over the next days when I notice a feature that I have accustomed to so badly that I don't even notice any more when I'm using it.

I recently had to install Openfiler on a HP server with ten 750 GB hard disks on a cciss RAID controller, which proved to be a major nuisance. Since the customer wanted the box in service fast, I finally settled on wasting two of the disks as a 750 GB RAID 1 for the actual system (with like 10 GB actually used) while RAIDing the remaining disks together to a RAID 6 with spare disk for productive data.

During this task, I noticed a severe lack of current knowledge about modern PC architecture and how to boot from a big hard disk and decided to do some research into this direction. This article shows the first "results" that I have achived in the last few days.