Missing Features – Feeling Brian Proffitt’s Pain

Missing Features – Feeling Brian Proffitt’s Pain

Brian Proffitt has written a story about how he laments missing features in a recent version of openSuSE.  This is an article in sympathy, as my own experiences have been similar, although I’ve been reluctant to blog about them in case they’re not really missing and I just don’t know where to look.

My first, and greatest, lament is the absence of kprinter.  Kprinter is (was) one of my favourite ‘office’ applications.  I knew I could simply send everything off to kprinter and it would print things the way I liked them and, on occasion, allow me to make one off changes to how things print.  Now, with kprinter gone every time I print something I need to navigate the interface of the particular program and set my requirements.  Unlike kprinter, most programs don’t store them, so every time I print I have an extra 5 or 10 mouse clicks/navigations to do just to get something to print.  Some of the applications don’t even have all of the options I want in the print dialog  (eg 2-up printing (hello OOo)).   To overcome these I need to either print twice as much paper or route it via a pdf and print from Okular.  Moreover, I need to remember the idiosyncracies of each program – eg application x continually defaults to letter when it should be A4.   From what I can tell kprinter may return someday, but as it is I can’t find it :(

My second lament is the KDE 3.5 weather applet for the panel.  It used to give me everything I wanted to know and could be configured to show weather from multiple sites.  There are two available in KDE4 – the LCD Weather station and Weather Forecast, both of which are front ends to the same code – and which apparently only allows weather reports for the UK, Canada and the USA. Useful not.

[oops: this got dropped somehow:]

My third lament is Kcharselect – which I used to use often.  It allowed me to select some often used characters and display them in the panel.  To paste them into a document all I needed to do was double click it to put it in the clipboard, then paste away.  Now it’s not directly clickable from the panel,  I need to actively start the app, and open it in order to access characters.  It only remembers the last character selected rather than a chosen list of frequently used ones.