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

[Alex Schuster]

Duncan writes:

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

> > 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?

I'm using the open source radeon drivers. Had troubles getting them to run 
for a long time, so I used the closed-source ati-drivers (fglrx). But they 
have some sort of memeory leak, after a day of KDE4 usage I had to log out 
and in again in order to free memory.

So now Im using Xorg 1.7.7-r1. Works, with graphics distortions. Quake3 is 
unplayable due to stroboscopic flickering...  but now that I try again it 
actually works. The flickering happens, but only with compositing enabled, 
and I always disable it before playing Quake3 (I sometimes had problems when 
not, all plasmoids were misplaced because of the changed resolution). But 
maybe I just forgot to.

> 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.

Xorg 1.10.0 crashes after less than a minute. Similar experiences for 1.9.5. 
I have the gallium compiled in, but deactivated, maybe activating this will 
help, but the last time I tried performance was really really bad.

Oh my. Currently there is Xorg 1.7.7-r1, 1.9.5 and 1.10.0.902 which I can 
try with ati-drivers and radeon-drivers (with and without gallium), that is 
9 combinations. Oh, and I can upgrade my kernel, too (running 2.6.37-ck 
right now). But I will try this soon, working with my desktop is no fun at 
the moment.


> > 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...

I thought also had it in another aplication, but I don't remember. And, 
being very stupid, I just reproduced it - and had to kill kontact. 
Fortunately, the draft was saved (somewhere around 4.4 I think this did not 
work, so at least some things get better).

> > 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?

I didn't look into that yet. The 'problem' happened a couple of times, but I 
don't care much about it.
Now that I do, I can add 7): konqueror hangs when I try to open the settings 
dialog.
Oh, and there is 8): Since KDE 4.6.1, I sometimes have some knotify 
processes sucking all CPU power, until I kill them. Did not yet happen with 
4.6.2, though.

> > 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.

I had this with 4.6.1, too. But cannot reproduce it now... I'm not even sure 
what the exact problem is. It happened when I downloaded some video links 
(which I do regularly), and my routine did not work as it used to, I had to 
paste with the middle mouse button. And now I remember I had it in NEdit, 
but after a re-login it worked again. Probably not KDE's fault.

> > 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.

Yeah.

What did not hapen for a while now is a corrupted plasma session. Whenever I 
manually save the session, I make a backup of my .kde4 before, because it 
often messed up everathing. Mostly plasmoids (I know by now which file I 
have to restore from the backup), but sometimes also other applications. 
like, all konsoles open on the first desktop and such.

KDE4 is usable now, but it took quite a while. I should have waited one year 
longer instead of starting with KDE 4.2. Soo many problems... and still, 
when I do 'unusual' things, strange things happen. Like, when dragging 
plasmoids from the panel to the desktop. Plasma used to crash, but that also 
seems to be fixed now. When writing large mails, I regularly copied the text 
into a file, because of the risk of a crash
Another thing that I would expect to just work: FTP transfers with dolphin. 
it fails if I have german umlauts in the file name. Also no big problem for 
me. But at my institute, people are using KDE4 now. And what sense is there 
in teaching them how to do FTP transfers with dolphin, when they 
occasionally have to use another client because of an umlaut in a file name? 
It's easier then to teach them only the other client. It may look less 
fancy, but it does the job, and it's easier to remember how to use one app, 
instead of learning how to use one, and also be able to work with another 
one in case the first one fails.

8) Sometimes, Dolphin does not update when new files appear. This used to 
work well, now I have to issue manual updates, at least sometimes. If a file 
grows, I see it growing after I hit the update button.
It also does not show any content in most of the windows opened when 
restoring the saved sessions. This also started with 4.6.1.


> > 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?

No idea. Well, maybe it's a little easier to code if one does not have to 
deal with multiple processes, but I think this just calls for trouble. I 
already had some.

	Wonko