Yesterday when I was trying to watch some shows on my desktop I hit a really bad obstacle in my KDE experience. I really had to struggle to get even simple things to work.
I usually watch things in XBMC, even on my desktop and laptop. It keeps track of new shows and what I have watched and so forth. Plus it's sort of a bonus that it's full screen all the time. Less distractions.
Well I have had some real problems with choosing the sound output on Fedora/KDE. I have two sound cards, one for the speakers and one for the headset. For some reason this worked really well in Ubuntu/Unity, but not in KDE. KDE technically has more control over it, but it doesn't really work consistently.
So I wanted to watch some shows with my headset, because it was pretty late in the evening and I can't get XBMC to switch output. So I try Dragon player. My media is on my server in another room and I usually use SSH to connect to it. However, Dragon player doesn't play media over ssh, so I try SMB, same as I use in XBMC, Dragon player doesn't play over SMB either.
So then I install VLC, which plays over SMB but not over SSH for some reason. This works pretty well, but I had some trouble with the video (turns out the DVI was loose) so I tried restarting it a few times and always forgot to select "open with". I should probably make VLC the default player, but I actually like the interface on Dragon player better.
Anyway, I will try to figure this out, but I hope that I don't have to mess around with autofs, sshfs and such ugly hacks that I used a few years ago in Gnome, before proper support for network shares. For a moment there I really wanted to go back and leave KDE in the rear view mirror. I will however persist and try to resolve these things or change my methods of doing things. After all it's the result that counts, not the way you get there.