HOWTO: Use KDE 3 from F8 on F10

[Kevin Kofler]

Michael Eager wrote:
>     Windows appear and disappear, sometimes apparently on their
>     own, other times in ways which I didn't expect.

I haven't seen that happen.

>     (Clicking on one of the buttons at the bottom of the screen makes
>     everything disappear, replaced by a heading saying Plasma Dashboard.) 

You mean this happens when you click any button, even a menu button? I
haven't seen that happen either.

Have you tried the KDE in Fedora 10 yet?

>     I no longer can put application icons on the desktop

1. Add a "Folder view" widget to the desktop.
2. Add your icons to the folderview.
Enjoy! :-)

>     or add an application to the panel at the bottom of the screen

If you use Kickoff: right-click on the app, Add to panel.
If you use the classic menu: drag&drop the app to the panel.

>     but have to step through a multi-tab application menu to search
>     for the button to open a terminal window or open Firefox.

Right-click on the menu button, "Switch to Classic menu style". Tabs
gone. :-)

> Perhaps there are ways to configure KDE 4.1 to allow me to work
> as efficiently as I'm used to with KDE 3.5.  If that's the case,
> then perhaps that should be the the default.  Or perhaps there
> should be a KDE 3.5 compatibility mode.

4.2 provides something like that for the desktop icons (you'll be able to
switch if you want the widget-based Plasma desktop or if you want a
folderview as the desktop - you can put even Plasma widgets on top of the
folderview if you choose that option, not really what it is designed for,
but they decided to be flexible and allow that).

> The suggestion that "you'll have to get used to KDE 4 sooner
> or later. Better sooner (how about NOW)?" is reminiscent of a
> certain Redmond-based software provider.  In the open source
> world, "take it or leave it" usually results in the latter.  In
> the ultimate version of "leave it", the result is a fork in the
> development project.

KDE is huge. I doubt a fork of KDE 3.5 will be successful. And I think
there'll also be splits in the community over questions like "Do we fork Qt
3 as well or do we port to Qt 4?" (which are both hard, Qt is also huge and
nontrivial to maintain, porting to Qt 4 is a huge effort, which is one of
the reasons KDE 4 took that long, and porting without rewriting anything
will also be fun for some of the stuff, Qt3Support only goes so far).

        Kevin Kofler