This is only a rant with a highly provocative title, which reflects onto the contents of the post, but not in the way you have expected when you first read it.

So stop yelling your comrades to start to “sharpen the forks”.

So, what is this all about?

Well, for a long time now, I keep my system mostly clean of Gnome/GTK programs. Only a few remain (and probably will for both foreseeable and unforeseeable future), and those are GVim, Gimp (big kudos for the last version goes to the developers), Inkscape and Synaptic. Apart from those, whenever I need a program for something, I first search for KDE or Qt based applications, and only if those are non-existent, I consider installing something else.

So, what the hell is this title all about?

It’s about the fact that I have realized that now I’m avoiding KDE/Qt 3 programs as well. For example, I have lived without Digikam and K3B until the KDE 4 ports started to become usable. I still use Akregator from the “three” series, but that is due to the fact that new Akregator crashes a lot for me and I am too busy to investigate why.

So, that’s it.

If you are asking why I’m not writing something useful, that is mostly because I have had no time lately to do anything useful to write about. You can see that Lancelot commits were silent for the past 10 days, but I plan to change that very soon… See you later!

I have seen the proposals to replace the default Kickoff menu with Lancelot on a quite a few places now (the latest, which triggered me to write my stance on the subject, was a proposal on the (K)ubuntu brainstorm site).

In a nutshell, I’m against the idea. I was since the start (see for yourself in earlier blog posts and comments on commit-digest), and I don’t see I’ll change my mind in the foreseeable future.

There are a couple of reasons for this, some of them technical, and some personal.

The main personal reason is the fact that if Lancelot became the default menu, I would have to give up the absolute control that I have over it at the moment. It would have to fit the rest of the desktop in ways I don’t want it to (for example, the current resize-by-dragging-any-border-or-corner would have to be changed to resize-by-dragging-the-one-corner like the Plasma applets and the present Kickoff menu).

The second is that the development would be significantly slowed down because everything would have to pass a discussion whether it should be changed, and then whether the change is correctly implemented…

And the last, but not the least, I don’t consider L to be mature enough, and I don’t think it will be until KDE 4.3 (or maybe even later).

So, the point is that I’m very glad most of you like Lancelot, I’m more than glad that many of you are using it, but making it a default has absolutely no benefits at the moment. I would rather have it used by a smaller percentage of users whose choice was to use it, than to have it imposed onto the whole KDE user base.