[kde-linux] Re: Panel widgets alwais to the left

[Duncan]

Alex Schuster posted on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 03:56:57 +0200 as excerpted:

> Duncan writes:
> 
>> FWIW I finally upgraded to 4.6.2 (from 4.6.1, which was from 4.6.0) a
>> day or so ago, and am /not/ impressed.  I still believe 4.5.5 to be the
>> best, most stable kde4 yet.  4.6... honestly seems to be going
>> backward.
> 
> I was happy with 4.6.0. From 4.6.1 on, things became much worse.

I didn't personally see anything regress for 4.6.1, but the gentoo/kde 
folks said it did for a LOT of folks.  4.6.2 is the bad one, here.

> 1) I experience nasty graphics distortions, mostly when scrolling in a
> browser or something. This makes lines disappear, images miss parts, and
> I have to refresh often, or scroll a whole page down and up again to get
> the correct view.
> I had this before, but it had been fixed. Without compositing it is much
> better, but still happens to some extent. I really have to file a bug
> about this.
> May be related to my old X.org 1.7, but with newer versions I get
> crashes after few minutes of KDE usage, or X does not start at all. I'm
> thinking of buying a graphics card (probably nvidia) that can optionally
> replace my on-board radeon hd 3200.

So on-board radeon hd3200.  Which drivers?  FWIW, I've been quite happy 
with my upgrade from an old radeon 9250 (r2xx chip) to the hd4650 I have 
now (rv730 chip).  When I first upgraded, the native kernel/x radeon r6xx/
r7xx driver was behind, especially with 3D/OpenGL, and I had to run live-
git built drivers (I tend to run kernel pre-releases anyway), which while 
they produced "interesting" color effects at times, didn't crash.

But now I'm running the latest xorg-server-1.10.1-rc (1.10.90x) available 
in the gentoo/x11 testing overlay, kernel 2.6.38 (I tested 2.6.39-rc3, but 
it has login, possibly pam-related, issues, that delay or hang logins/
logouts at the CLI), etc, with no complaints, using the latest native
xf86-video-ati native driver of course, naturally with kms, as I don't 
consider the proprietary drivers a viable option, here.

If you're running the proprietary drivers, that could be the problem for 
nearly all the above.  I'd suggest trying the native freedomware drivers, 
preferably with at LEAST xorg-server-1.8 if not 1.10, and kernel 2.6.37 or 
2.6.38.  I only use kms mode so really can't say how ums works these days, 
so I'd recommend kms, as well.

> 2) Plasma crashes all the time (around 5-25 times per day), mostly
> because of a known bug related to the system tray.

Luckily that hasn't hit me.

> 3) Save file dialog sometimes hangs, and has to be killed, along with
> the parent aplication. Kontact mostly.

I've not seen that, but I don't run kontact, only kmail, so...

> 4) No big deal, but anyway: konqueror no longer asks for confirmation
> when being closed with more than one open tab.

Interesting.  I've not noticed.  Let me check...

I still get the confirmation.  There's a checkbox for don't show it 
again.  Perhaps that got checked, accidentally?  I wonder how to turn it 
back on or check it without the confirmation box appearing? (Checking...)  
Looks like there's a checkbox in konqueror config, general, tabbed 
browsing section: "Confirm when closing windows with multiple tabs".

Perhaps you need to check that option?

> 5) There is some clipboard problem, Ctrl-V does not work in some
> applications.

I've not seen it yet.  But I've only been running 4.6.2 for a day, so I 
might.  Hope not.

> 6) The shutdown command was broken. That's fixed already, but how can
> such errors make it into a release?

Interesting question.

But at least it was a simple config option to fix.  I'd thus rank it at 
about the same level as my proxy issue... bad for those who don't know 
their config options very well, but reasonably easy to fix for those who 
do, and thus, for anyone who has access to lists such as this, where the 
answer came in relatively short order.

It's the crashers or stupid things like not obeying the config they 
previously obeyed for multiple versions, despite reconfiguring, thus 
forcing one to repeat it at every run, that are the bad ones.

>> Meanwhile, it's worth observing that the whole plasma thing has been a
>> very huge problem for kde4 from the beginning [and] its problems
>> continue to drag kde4's reputation mud-ward.
> 
> I like the plasma stuff, but it gives a lot of trouble, too. Like my
> problem 2). I had some more problems, sometimes related to specific
> plasmoids, resulting in plasma crashes, or stalls for several seconds.
> Too bad there is only a single plasma process.

I wonder about the single-threaded bad-plugin-stalls-or-crashes-the-entire-
thing design myself, especially for something as big and complex as 
plasma, designed to run plugins contributed by the community that may be 
created by inexperienced users making newbie programming mistakes... while 
the trend everywhere ELSE (see chrome/chromium's leading efforts in that 
regard, and those of firefox as well, tho not to the scale of chrome/
chromium) seems to be toward confining such extensions to their own little 
sandbox where they have only limited effects on the larger application and 
system as a whole.

It just seems like such an odd choice to make, for such a new project with 
such lofty and leading edge goals.  Why would one choose such a fragile 
and easily hung/crashed design in /this/ day and age, especially when 
one's target is definitely NOT the old/slow/low-mem machines where it 
might actually make sense for memory conservation reasons?

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman