As someone who first used KDE back before 1.0…

This sort of thing seems to be a ‘history’ with them…

First there was the big tiff over single-click-to-open as a default… ‘Double Clicking is bad’, etc… Fortunately, they left that one easily ‘fixable’ in Settings…

Now, we take the desktop icons thing….

Remove all support for a traditional desktop (you know, the style that’s been around from MacOS classic, through the various versions of Windows, and the early KDE)….

And replace it with the desktop verision of a ‘Junk Box’…

The Containment thing is – as near as I can tell – NOT a ‘traditional’ desktop icon system…

Any icons you ‘want’ have to be in the ‘folderview’ box… Which by default sits up in the top corner of your screen, is *not* transparent, and does *NOT* organize icons like you’d expect a ‘normal’ system to do…

Nor does it have the standard ’special’ icons that have been with most graphical systems since the early days of MacOS…

It reminds me of Windows 3.1, with a taskbar instead of Program Manager… And a box on the screen to chuck stuff into….

What SHOULD have been in KDE 4.0 but isn’t, is the ability to
right-click the desktop and create an application-shortcut
JUST LIKE IN KDE-3.x! (Even if that wasn’t gonna be the
‘final implementation’!) I recently read, how it WAS SUPPOSED to
work is: ‘click add-widget, choose the ‘generic-icon’ widget,
drag it to the desktop, and tailor it as you did in 3.x.

But, that is totally broken in two ways: (1)The permissions are
WRONG (2) There is no ‘application tab’, so you can’t define
the launch-command.

Meanwhile, with their heads mostly up their arses, the openSUSE
community mistakenly decided to make KDE-4.0 the default for
their new 11.0 release. From their KDE-LiveCD install kit,
you get 4.0 and must ADD KDE-3.x support if you want that.

Luckily, saner heads prevailed over at Debian, where for their
upcoming ‘Lenny’ release, they’ve decided on 3.5.9 for the default.

Meanwhile, all the power-users [who have TEST partitions]
are all scrambling around and being told to go try out
‘KDE 4.1-beta’ to “see how great KDE4 is gonna be!’

[In my view, someone from KDE 4.2 development should be
physically dragged back by the short-hairs to retrofit a patch
for KDE 4.0.4 to make basic application-shortcuts (the GENERIC-ICON) work.
It should only take 5-minutes to fix (well, ok, maybe all
morning to test and do the paperwork).]

http://www.mepislovers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=15837&page=5
http://www.mepislovers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=15963

Just my 2-cents…

yes, it is. when you use the folderview as your containment, you get a fullscreen icon view showing a given folder (e.g. the Desktop folder) that floats “under” the widgets.

it is *identical*.

this isn’t by accident either.

“With the current revision to 4.x, is it possible to place an icon on the desktop as a stand-alone entity (i.e. *not* within a containment)?”

yes, that’s exactly the idea. it *is* a containment. containments are also applets (though not all applets are containments). isn’t that a cool system?

here’s a screenshot of it in action:

http://img214.imageshack.us/my.php?image=filenw9.png

that’s a zoomed out plasma with 5 different containments, 4 of them the default desktop one (one in the default configuration with the folderview on it) and one folder containment.

“If the answer is “yes” then I have misread.”

so .. where do we go from here? you’ve ranted about this and unjustly called me “disingenuous”. you’ve added to the FUD out on the internet about my work.

personally, i’d hope for a retraction on your blog to make up for this piece of butchery.

if you’d like to discuss this in private, my email is aseigo at kde dot org.

“Such a statement would not have inflamed or insulted your readers”

just keep blaming me, and not the people who couldn’t keep their angst in check for two moments to ask questions and accept answers instead? hm.