KDE 4 annoyances and how to solve some of them

I recently converted my system to KDE 4, because some software I wanted to run required it. I'm less than impressed: it seems the developers decided to break a bunch of things that were not broken, in the name of progress. That's the sort of thing I expect from commercial operations who need to justify every new version as new and different; I hope for more stability from free software. Here are some notes on making the new system livable.

Start menu

By default, the start button now gives you a multi-page scrolling thing that changes its layout as you use it, so that your applications are never consistently in the same place and you usually need extra clicks to find anything. It also seems to be very slow, giving a noticeable delay every time you switch pages, and at least one page switch is the normal case every time you use it.

The old behaviour can be restored by right-clicking the start button and selecting "Switch to Classic Menu Style" from the pop-up menu.

Useless icon in upper right corner of desktop

I'm told that this has been nicknamed "the cashew," though it more closely resembles a magatama (an item of Japanese religious paraphernalia). It provides access to the same features that you can also access by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop. It cannot be disabled in stock KDE 4. Apparently (I haven't tried to talk to them about it myself) the KDE developers firmly insist that this icon is absolutely necessary on fundamental technical grounds, and that providing an option to remove it is both undesirable and literally impossible.

You can remove the useless icon by installing the I HATE the Cashew "plasmoid." Note that it must be installed on the desktop as such - not in the panel at the bottom of the screen. After compiling and installing the code, right-click on the desktop, choose "Add Widgets..." and add the new widget.

"Hide panel" button now brings up config menu

It is no longer possible to manually hide the panel with the arrow icon at the lower right. There still is an arrow icon at the lower right, but instead of hiding the panel it now brings up a badly-designed configuration menu. You can set the panel to auto-hide in Windows style, but that's really annoying: it is triggered by mouse movement, and when it hides it causes other things to resize - which, in turn, has nontrivial consequences for terminal applications running in konsole sessions. Actions with nontrivial consequences should NEVER EVER be triggered by mouse movement alone. The lack of a manually-controlled panel hide is a known bug categorized as a "wishlist" item, as if "fix what you broke" weren't part of the baseline expectation for developers.

You can at least make the arrow icon go away, so you won't click it by accident. Right-click on it and choose "Lock Widgets." If you need the badly-designed configuration menu later, you'll have to "unlock widgets" at that time.

Lock/Logout buttons missing

You can bring them back by installing the supplied "Lock/Logout" widget.

Huge-ass ugly tooltips on panel

Sorry, I haven't figured out how to disable these. If you do, please let me know.

SQL server errors on startup (Akonadi)

KDE 4 wants to put all your personal information (address book, phone directory, appointment calendar, and so on) on an SQL database server, as part of an initiative called "Akonadi." It attempts to run a tool that moves the information from its previous locations in individual KDE applications, to the new database, the first time you log in after installing KDE 4. If you have no SQL server, it will repeat the attempt, and generate a lengthy error report which it prompts you to deal with, at the start of every login session.

You can disable the migration attempts - useful, for instance, if you weren't using KDE to store your personal information anyway and don't want to start - with this command: kwriteconfig --file kres-migratorrc --group Migration --key Enabled --type bool false . The relevant FAQ entries contain the usual warnings about how it's very naughty to turn off important features like Akonadi and you won't be allowed to do it in the future. Note that "disable automatic migration" is what you want - the instructions they give for "disable Akonadi startup" are only relevant if automatic migration has succeeded at least once in the past.

Kiten annoyances

Kiten is a Japanese-English dictionary. It used to have a "radical search" dialogue box, in which you could specify parts of a character (radicals) and find characters containing those parts. It still does, but there are some issues:

• The radical search feature is now a separate "selector" program instead of part of kiten itself. That has some advantages - it's not a bad thing in itself - but:
• The radical selector works by putting the character you chose onto the clipboard. In order for kiten to automatically search when you choose a character in the radical selector, you must either have the "Automatically Search Clipboard Selections" feature turned on (which is obviously what they expect you to do) or manually paste the selected character into the search box.
• Turning on "Automatically Search Clipboard Selections" is a problem because it applies even within kiten. With it on, you cannot cut and paste from the search results into other applications, nor do any serious editing or other operations in other applications, without doing additional searches automatically and disrupting the kiten search results you were looking at. No program should ever stop working while I'm looking at it just because I was working in another program.
• Turning off "Automatically Search Clipboard Selections" and pasting into the search box is a problem because kiten will randomly switch among "Exact Match," "Match Beginning," and "Match Anywhere" modes. (It might even do this with ASCS turned on - I haven't checked because ASCS is painful.) I think what's going on may be that, like Google, if it has no results in one mode it will automatically switch to a less restrictive mode. Unlike Google, however, the mode change persists on future searches. No program should ever automatically and permanently change its configuration options without telling me.
• Of course, that is if you have a search box at all. By default, you don't, and you cannot use the program at all for its intended purpose of looking things up, without using "Automatically Search Clipboard Selections."

I don't have a full solution for those issues. I added a search box with "Configure Toolbars..." under "Settings." I leave "Automatically Search Clipboard Selections" off, choose my character in the radical selector, paste it in with a middle-click in the search box, and then search. I just keep checking the search mode any time it seems like it may have changed. The result isn't really very good, but on the plus side, improvements in the radical selector itself probably save more time (over the older version) than the changes waste. I particularly like being able to pick characters from the radical selector and paste them into other applications directly with middle-click instead of having to go through the dictionary lookup.