Konqueror/Dolphin file managers very unstable

[Duncan]

Jerome Yuzyk posted on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:59:14 -0700 as excerpted:

> I've always liked Konqueror's file manager, but it's been completely
> unstable ever since I moved to KDE4. Many operations seem to hang doing
> nothing and then suddenly wake up. Crashes are routine. I switched to
> Dolphin, thinking Konq had been abandoned, but it's not a lot better.
> File previews are 50/50 whether they'll show or just spin.
> 
> Right now I'm on KDE 4.5.3, Fedora 13. Nothing else misbehaves like
> these two apps, so maybe there's some kind of cache corruption I should
> clear out or setting(s) I should avoid?

FWIW, it's not a big surprise that dolphin exhibits the same issues, as 
the konqueror file-manager mode now uses the dolphin kpart, which is 
apparently what's unstable for you, so switching from konqueror to dolphin 
didn't remove the unstable component from your test.

What about gwenview?  It can act as a file manager, especially for media 
files, and I /believe/ it uses a different component, tho I'm not sure of 
that.  You can also consider installing krusader (which I've read about 
but don't use personally), tho I'm not sure if it uses the same dolphin 
file-management kpart or not -- it's likely it does.

FWIW (2), I've not experienced any such unstability here on Gentoo, since 
quite earlier in the kde4 cycle (4.2 or 4.3 era, maybe).  I AM seeing 
issues with thumbnail generation on video files, which seems hit or miss, 
but not on still jpeg or other image formats, or on text/pdf/html/fonts/
etc.

But FWIW (3), my file management usage tends to split between two types of 
tasks, "admin-type" tasks, editing config files, moving files/directories 
around, backup, etc, and "user-type" tasks, managing/viewing videos, 
photos, etc.

For admin-type tasks the thumbnails don't matter to me a lot and I prefer 
the traditional semi-gui commander-type interface of mc (midnight 
commander), running either at a VT (virtual terminal) outside of X/KDE 
entirely, or in a konsole window.  This works best for admin-type tasks 
since the app and its UI are the same whether I'm in X/KDE or not, I 
/don't/ need the thumbnails, etc, and loading them only takes extra time, 
and it's quite conceivable that one such admin-type task would be editing 
xorg or kde config files themselves, to get them working again when 
they're broken and I can't even start X/KDE, so using a tool that doesn't 
depend on X/KDE in the first place to do admin tasks like editing their 
files is a good idea.

It's only for user-type tasks that the thumbnails are actually useful, as 
they let me see the contents of the media files I'm working with.  As 
such, it's these user-type tasks that I tend to use KDE's tools to work 
with, and in fact, gwenview is very useful here -- more useful than 
dolphin, etc.

As a result, I don't actually tend to use dolphin, etc, that much, tho it 
does remain the configured kde file-management tool and thus pops up when 
I click on a directory in a folderview on the desktop, or the like, and 
I'll use it for "trivial" tasks.  But never-the-less, it's quite stable, 
here.

You might try running dolphin from a konsole window.  It'll then output a 
*LOT* of debugging info to the konsole as it does its thing.  Do 
understand that even on "normal" installations, it's going to spit out a 
lot of very scary looking warnings, etc, that are normal.  (Actually, it's 
possible I'm getting even more than normal ATM, since I'm in the middle of 
the 4.5.3 -> 4.5.4 upgrade and that may be causing some additional 
warnings since it's half-and-half, but the point stands, dolphin remains 
functional even with all of them.)  If/when it crashes, you'll want to 
note the last warnings, perhaps comparing them with earlier ones and 
eliminating the "normal" ones, and can maybe then use that for debugging.

Similarly, I know I was getting some sort of library mis-match error on 
the thumbnailer recently, apparently because I'd upgraded one component 
and not the rest and hadn't run the revdep-rebuilder that would normally 
correct the issue.  This is a somewhat routine issue on Gentoo if you 
don't complete the necessary library dependency rebuilds after an upgrade, 
so no big deal.  I suspect that had a lot to do with the problems I was 
having with video-thumbnail generation, but I'm hoping/expecting the 
current upgrade to 4.5.4, and subsequent run of the revdep-rebuilder, will 
fix that issue.  While the binary distributions try to avoid this issue by 
building everything against a common reference and then not upgrading it 
incompatibly, or upgrading everything else built against it when they do 
(the reason you need to get packages for your specific binary distribution 
version, a package for a different version or a different distribution 
might break), sometimes an ABI dependency gets overlooked and stuff 
breaks.  It's possible that's what both you and I are seeing, with the 
broken thumbnailing, me because I didn't properly complete the revdep-
rebuilds, you because of an overlooked ABI dependency issue.

-- 
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

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