The KDE Rant

I guess KDE will be my new desktop now that GNOME has gone fucked. For some reason both gnome-shell and Unity works slow as hell with my 3d drivers. KDE works decently though, so it can't all be fglxr's fault. Plus, I was kind of content with classical GNOME without any of the bling bling and semantic desktop junk.

KDE 4.8.3 does impress - animations are smooth and there are lots of shadows in all the right places. It has lots of features and lots of places where you can customize things. I guess that that is both its greatest advantage and drawback:

• There is no such thing as a desktop theme. Oh, no that would have been to simple. There is a setting controlling the audio events theme, one more theme for window decorations, one for mouse pointers, desktop theme (for the panel), start screen theme, widget engine (controlling how Qt renders widgets), color theme, icon theme, GTK+ theme and finally smiley theme. I don't have the patience to tweak that stuff. Just give me some graphics that works please.
  
• Which the default graphics theme Oxygene does not. It appears to have been designed by someone with a fetish for shades of gray. Window frames have gray gradients, panels are gray, menues, buttons etc. It is really hard to read dark gray text on a brighter gray background, especially when that background is semi-transparent.
• Oh what wouldn't I give to remove that stupid transparency from the bottom panel. KDE has settings all over the place but not one for making the panels opaque. The idea is that you should have to download a panel theme with a non-transparent panel. Which is a great idea until you realize that every damn theme author in the whole world loves semi-transparent panels because they are more concerned with shiny happy graphics than being usable.
  
• The KDE people could just rip Clearlooks from GNOME and be done with it. Then they'd have both an awesome desktop with great looking desktop with BILLIONS of smooth animations and shadows and ALSO readable text! It saddens me that KDE gets so close to perfect, then has so many EASILY fixable design issues that it significantly degrades the whole experience. Like a marathon runner 100 meters ahead of the pack who trips over himself and falls a few meters from the finish line.
  

Everyone got to rant, this was my turn.