KDE 4: the good, the bad and the broken

[Anne Wilson]

On Thursday 29 April 2010 06:43:57 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 29 April 2010 03:32, Draciron Smith <draciron at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On the bad side.
> > Dropping of some beloved apps like kedit.
> 
> I will add Kedit to the list.
> 
?? KWrite is the re-write of Kedit.

> > An easy replacement for shortcuts is needed. One of the many things
> > which once the Plasma desktop is actually working as described will be
> > nice but right now there's no reasonable method to create one.
> 

This I can't understand.  You can drag shortcuts from the menu to the desktop, 
although I think that works better in Lancelot than Kickoff.  Personally I 
think it's easier to use the right-click on a menu entry and 'Add to Desktop' 
- that's in Kickoff, of course.

> > The Fedora install of KDE
> >
> > worked out of the box but as I mentioned I've had problems with
> > updates adding and removing core functionality.  

If you use the core repos only you should have had no problems, other than 
those caused by major upstream events, such as the recent soprano/virtuoso 
update.  Such things feel major, but they are rare.

> > Memory usage. There is a memory leak and a big one somewhere. Since
> > moving to KDE 4 on this machine I've had to restart KDE multiple
> > times. Something I normally only do a couple times a year. KDE 3 could
> > be counted on to work and work great until I had to reboot for other
> > reasons. While I've not had to reboot I've had the system just crater
> > and run out of memory and electing to stop KDE causing me to have to
> > log back in. Which means 5 minutes or more of waiting for all those
> > apps to reopen. Some of which I have to reopen the specific file I was
> > editing/working on.
> 
> Which distro? Which apps? I have not had this issue with KDE, though
> Firefox has a huge memory leak.
> 
Version numbers are significant to this question.  As you say, FF had a bad 
memory leak at one point.  X had a really bad one recently.  Neither of those 
can be blamed on KDE, although they have a major impact for users.

> > Pulse audio only sort of works under KDE 4. With Audacious I lose the
> > last 30 seconds of every song, with QNMP I suffer serious volume
> > issues, with other sound players I suffer conflicts as they default to
> > non-Pulse audio.  It'd be really nice to have Jack integrated into KDE
> > if possible. I know Jack is a complete pain to work with but so many
> > audio apps require it yet Jack is notoriously fussy under KDE, even
> > more so than under Gnome. I don't even bother installing it on most
> > machines because it conflicts so badly with KDE especially with Fedora
> > based distros. There was an OpenSUSE distro which actually got Jack
> > working great under KDE so it's possible. Unfortunately nobody is
> > maintaining that distro. Tempting to take it apart to figure out how
> > they got Jack to work and play well with KDE.  The importance is
> > simple. If you are a musician or intend to make movies or do any heavy
> > audio editing under Linux you need Jack because so many apps like
> > Audour, Rosegarden and even drum machines require it. I personally
> > don't like it and have complained to the authors of that software but
> > I don't see them switching away from Jack any time soon.
> 
> 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.
> 
There is a great deal of work being done on sound.  I understand that over the 
coming months many of the current problems will be resolved, as improvements 
currently in testing are released for general consumption.

> > The loss of the ability to use a different image for each desktop.
> > Initially I thought this a minor annoyance but I didn't realize how
> > much I depended on this to keep track of what desktop I was actually
> > on.
> 
> I think that's back in KDE 4.5.
> 
If you use Activities tied to desktops it's been back since 4.3, IIRC.

> > The reporting tool is broken. Even when I install the debugging libs
> > it still says they are not installed. If I click the install link on
> > the reporting tool it's broken. Not sure how much of this is Fedora
> > KDE specific or if it's more KDE specific. Don't have any current
> > Ubuntu machines up at the moment.  Still using KDE 3 on my laptop.
> 
> Yes, that sounds like a distro issue. It works decently, but not 100%,
> under Kubuntu.
> 
I've not seen the problem in Fedora.  Again, it might help if versions were 
mentioned.

One thing needs to be remembered.  It's human nature to want our personal 
preferences and problems to be fixed immediately, but if insufficient time is 
taken to test on volunteer systems (which after all is what the kde-fedora 
repos are about) there are screams of anguish because something is not working 
correctly.  The distros are on a lose-lose situation here.

Anne
-- 
KDE Community Working Group
New to KDE Software? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
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