KDE 4: the good, the bad and the broken

[Draciron Smith]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:43 AM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks.

Your welcome if your working on it and a big thank you for your
contributions. Hurry up LOL. There are several features that are
described as under construction which look like they are going to be
awesome.

> I will add Kedit to the list.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you. It is the perfect light text editor.



>> For starters
>> picking up non-KDE apps in the menu. It took 2 updates before Firefox
>> finally showed up in my menu and 3 updates before the add application
[Snip]
>>
>
> I have not had this problem. Are you saving the menu after editing it?
> It needs to be saved before the changes take place, and I myself have
> been guilty of closing the menu editor without saving.

Yes though I have done that also, not thought to hit save and lost
changes. The first KDE 4 version wouldn't even allow me to browse for
for a file. I had to paste in the command line. This last try today
allowed me to add the gimp. Though the save function apparently only
works on adding to the systray if I restart KDE as none of hte apps I
clicked on the add to systray have showed up yet. Not going to restart
KDE until I have too. So not sure if they'll show up even then though
the button to add them to the systray is a whole lot easier than the
drag and drop method.


> Do you meant shortcuts to applications on the desktop? I will mention
> that, it is a common use case. Thanks!

Applications and places. I don't use them myself but barely a week
goes by when somebody doesn't ask me how to do it in KDE and I have to
tell them you can't.


> That is a Ubuntu issue, not a KDE issue, sorry. But I will tell you
> that Kubuntu works fine, in fact most of my installs are Kubuntu.

Aye but it's bad PR for KDE is my point. I understand that it's the
fault of the maintainer with Ubuntu and probably fixed by now as I ran
into that a couple months ago.

> Please file bugs with your distros. Feel free to email to me the bug
> numbers in private mail (in a new thread, not a reply here) so that I
> can triage them.

Can't :( The bug reporting tool is broken LOL.  Generally if I just
put up with it for a few weeks and update fixes it but breaks other
stuff.  I've got a Fedora Bugzilla account, should I report it there
manually or is there a different bugzilla acount, I think I had or
still have a KDE bugzilla account.

> Which distro? Which apps? I have not had this issue with KDE, though
> Firefox has a huge memory leak.

Fedora 12  KDE 4.4.1  Downloading an update right now that moves me to 4.4.2
Firefox is probably the top culprit since I have MANY Firefox windows
open for weeks at a time.  Sadly they had the mem leak mostly fixed in
3.5.x but 3.6.x is almost as bad as 2.x was with the mem leaks :(  I'm
not certain which apps but Kwrite I am very suspcious of having a Mem
leak., The various Kwrite windows I have open are using a combined 15
megs of ram over 6 windows most of which contain maybe a paragraph or
two. When I get about 20 open it does evil things to my memory. One of
the reasons I miss Kedit so much. Pulse audio appears to have one also
as it takes way more mem than a sound server should after it's been
running for a few weeks. Right now a few days after launching it's
already up to .3 megs. The Plasma desktop seems to be another. Right
now it's using up 13 megs of ram which seems high to me. I'll watch
and see if it grows any over the next day or two. Kwin is another I'm
suspicious of. It's right now one of my top 10 in mem usage at 4.6
megs but I havn't closed anything or opened any new windows in last
hour or so.

There are a couple non-KDE apps I'm also suspicious of, Evolution is
one of them. Keep meaning to change my default mail client to Kmail as
I hate Evolution and the army of child processes it spawns.


> Again, this is a distro issue. Does PA or Jack work better under
> Gnome? I honestly don't know too much about the sound systems, but I
> did not realize they were so dependant on the desktop environment.

Jack except on Fedora seems to work decently or at least works mostly
with Gnome. On Fedora it's a real chore to get it to work under any
desktop. No idea why Jack hates Fedora or vice versa. On Ubuntu Jack
usually works in Gnome but rarely works or if it actually works will
work for long under KDE. At least 3.x still need to upgrade my laptop
to see. I might get 20 mins into an editing session and suddenly the
sound goes out. At least Jack does. If a system bell or anything else
makes a peep I can count on Jack going bye bye until I restart KDE. I
can try installing Jack on this machine but it's Fedora so it'll
probably not work.

> I think that's back in KDE 4.5.

That would be awesome!  I really miss it. I've made some pretty big
mistakes thinking I was on one desktop when I wasn't.

> Yes, that sounds like a distro issue. It works decently, but not 100%,
> under Kubuntu.

Ah but wouldn't making it more distro independent encourage adoption
by distros and get better faster bug reports in?

> Keep me posted. I'd actually like to help you solve the issues
> mentioned earlier if you are interested. Thanks.

Thanks !
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