Bug 147096

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.2)
Installed from:    Unspecified Other
OS:                Linux

Konquerer has many, many problems, both in the way it is designed and in the way it actually works. 

It is about as unfriendly a program as I have ever used (and I've been working with computers for over 20 years).

Konquerer is a much, much more convoluted system than Windows Explorer, and not at all intuitive in that it does not keep the metaphor of a physical office. 

Konquerer is specifically supposed to be easy to learn and helpful by allowing regular final-application users avoid having to deal with "housekeeping" items, letting them bypass all of that in the directory trees they must look at, but then defies its own logic of having by filling the "home folder" -- one with a really confusing and meaningless name like "home/arklinux" -- with gibberish subfolders like "bin" and usr that only relate to housekeeping and advanced features, and are only for IT people anyway. It then does not come equipped with ready made folders that people really use like "my documents" "my pictures" or "my music." These have to be created by the user.

The accompanying mandated segregation of folder views by dividing them into substantive purposes -- one can not look at everything on all his drives all at once, "services" or "bookmarks" or some such -- is just horrendous. Windows gives the feel of being in a specific place because you can see the whole world at one time; Konquerer leaves you just lost, not having some idea of physicality or order because the folders seem to be grabbed from here and there randomly. 

Besides that, the "services" icon covers both utilities and final applications, so it's misleading and doubly confusing because users who go click there get to the exact point Konquerer was supposed to let them avoid, namely housekeeping functions.

That set of icons on the extreme left of the Konquerer explorer screen is just awful. They are bland and generic, and thus meaningless. They are way too small, and the size can't be adusted, so that's a problem for users who have poor eyesight.

Worse yet, when entering Konquerer through the House icon on the desktop, you end up facing a directory list on the right that does not match the topmost entry on the navigation pane to the left -- the place Windows Explorer leaves you -- which is awful because none of the folders to the left are highlighted to tell you you are not really where you think you are. You think you are looking at the directory tree from "root" when you are actually looking at the tree from the /hdc/arklinux subfolder, and little to wise you up about that. Just awful if you are putting that in front of a clerical worker with limited computer skills or motivation to learn new ones.

For some unknown reason, you have to "mount" a disc to get it to show up at all, and "unmount" it to get a data DVD to eject. Go figure that out. Floppies would not mount and were completely invisible.

To make life easier and more intuitive, I tried changing mnt/hdc to simply E:, as it has been in computing since Day 1, and to change the mnt/hda to C: as it has been since hard drives came into use. This caused utter havoc. The only thing that changed was the name of the icon that still represented it, mnt/hdc and mnt/hda remained in the address bar. At this point I was forbidden to change E: back, could not unmount E:, could not delete it from the desktop or from the directory icon list, and, of course, could not read from it, each effort to do so resulted in that broken glass sound. An audio compact disc would not be identified at all. So an disc icon with the name E: remains on my desktop, broken, unusable, unfixable.

Konquerer refused to default to a details view, opening every time in a icon view, which is less than meaningless to me. It refused to open maximized. The start menu does not identify any program as providing file management services; instead one is lucky if he guesses that it is the "services" link that opens it. One would never dream that a house icon on the desktop, universally recognized as a launcher taking you to your Internet home page, is actually the entry to the main file management program, one where most secretaries or others with work in progress really live. God help you if you change the setting, you may never find Konquerer again.

The idea of simplicity of use by allowing application users to avoid housekeeping stuff is wholly undermined by having even the frontend directories for such users filled with useless, gibberish file and folder names like mnt and apt-get. The effort to allow searching by using functionality dividers -- "remote places", "storage media" is poorly conceived because most people know where they put stuff down, and don't necessarily keep track of exactly what it does.

The use of gibberish names for executable files that are supposed to provide some utilities is also ridiculous. Name a program for what it does please, don't use random letters that would make for good passwords.

The idea that Konquerer gives users more freedom than Windows is silly. Konquerer only allows creation of new folders somewhere within the home folder, and doesn't allow created folders to be moved outside the home folder; Windows lets you put it anywhere, for any reason. Konquerer is much more constraining and its design is more for control freaks than Windows ever was. If I want to share files, for example, I can't have a C:\shared files folder. no, it goes into something like \mnt\hda\usr\home\arklinux\shared files; good luck finding that even if you are looking for it. With Windows, one click.

There is no way to print file directories. Nor in Windows, but you can get a program for it that does.

I like the idea of deleting programs instead of uninstalling them; but doing so is not enough to get now unused icons off the desktop or unused links off the start menu, a job and a half itself.

Searching directories for a file name or file contents took just as long, if not longer than in Windows, and could not be stopped once it got going. I had to shut down.

I liked the idea of stripes to help identify individual directory entries -- but that is the only thing Konquerer of significance does that Windows does not. I disliked the absence of file extensions appearing in the directory.

I tried installing a Windows game called "Candyland" using Wine, and got 50 Konquerers popping up, faster than I could shut them off, until I maxed out the system resoruces. My computer hung for 7 minutes with even the clock frozen until I could shut down with Ctl-Alt-Del.

In sum, Konquerer is a poor product, unacceptable really. It's hard to use when it functions, which is not all that often or that well. It has not been thought out; it doesn't meet its own objectives; all it seems to be different. That's not enough.