Ripping one’s guts out…

Dramatic title?

Perhaps so, but KDE 4 development seems to be following this paradigm to the fullest — enough to make Stephen King proud!

KDE 4 has a laudable goal of revitalizing the internals, making the underlying framework robust and extensible. This is a reworking of function, perfectly acceptably and a valid developmental goal. KDE 4 also went the bling-bling way of oooh– shiny new interface at the same time.

The result?

It’s a dog’s lunch at the moment, stretching developer resources and skewing schedules. Notwithstanding a grand launch of KDE 4.0 which is ready yet not ready for general consumption (go figure!). After all, we’re real software developers and not language lawyers!

This is not a commentary on the state of KDE 4, but rather on the simultaneous reworking of form and function which resulted in neither being complete for a general use… yet.

Of course, the oft-repeated refrain is… KDE 4 will rock with release 4.1!

Yeah. Right!

Replace KDE 4 in the above commentary with Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or any but-it’s-going-to-change-computing-forever software system… the end-result is the same!

Do More to Achieve Less?

The kickoff menu in KDE-four-oh provides the following options to leave a session:

Let’s say we select Logout. This generates the following dialog:

It’s always good to have a choice, a second chance to change one’s mind. But it does seem slightly overkill asking confirmation for the options selected from the kickoff menu earlier.

While there are definitely valid use-cases for the End Session dialog (such as electing to terminate a KDE session from a Logout plasmoid), it’s just another annoyingly extra step in the workflow from the menu option. Perhaps a good configuration may be to provide an option to skip the reconfirmation dialog in the scenario discussed above.