A week of KDE4 usage

[Duncan]

Alex Schuster posted on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 14:21:45 +0200 as excerpted:

> Me too. KDE is so customizable, and I like things to be integrated. To
> have the same file dialog for all applications. I also like the idea of
> a semantic desktop, although I do not make use of it yet. Or activities,
> which are probably nothing for me, but quite interesting.

[splitting this into single-point replies as I find the urge]

The more I see about semantic desktop, and the more experience I get with 
it, the more I conclude that while it might be fine for the "computers 
for dummies" crowd (who should be far more comfortable with gnome or 
unity than kde anyway, but...), it's very little more than a huge waste 
of resources, here.

FWIW, I don't run *locate or even have the service installed, for much 
the same reason.  Evidently, I'm intuitively directory tree oriented, and 
seldom have the problems others (even the types who'd normally know to 
run locate) seem to have finding stuff.  Even if I can't go to the 
specific file or dir, I *CAN* narrow down the search space far enough 
that a (perhaps a couple level recursive, hardly ever more) real-time ls 
or grep (or often for me, the filesearch function in mc) works reasonably 
well, well enough that the inconvenience of the location indexing and the 
chance the index is outdated for the info I'm looking for, is more hassle 
than it's worth.

In that context, "semantic desktop" features are nice to have in theory 
or were there no associated costs, but in practice, VERY unlikely to be 
worth the hassle and resources required to maintain the database.

So here, I continue to turn as much of that stuff off as possible.  
Fortunately, kde and gentoo both tend to make that somewhat possible, 
altho it hasn't really been practical to turn it off entirely for some kde 
versions, now.  But while I have to build with USE=semantic-desktop, that 
does *NOT* mean I have to have strigi running, with an index I repeatedly 
had to delete (before I simply turned off the feature as entirely unworth 
the trouble) after it took up 4-gigs plus on a /home partition that 
there's (otherwise) no reason in the world why it can't properly fit in 
the 16-ish gigs it's allotted, thus running me out of space when I SHOULD 
have several gigs to spare.

Plus, that saves me from various krunner crashing issues, etc, 
specifically known bugs that I simply don't have to deal with as I've 
often already disabled, and where not, can disable as soon as I'm made 
aware of them, the sometimes bug-triggering semantic desktop features...  
(In particular here, I'm thinking about the contacts and desktop search 
krunner modules, specifically warned on the user-/tech-base articles 
about akonadi, etc, to turn off if krunner was crashing.  When I read 
that, I had one of the two turned off already, the other one I didn't 
know about but was happy to turn off as soon as I realized it was there, 
clued in by the techbase mention to look.  And looking back, indeed, my 
krunner crashes disappeared about same time I turned off the one, well 
before I read that note in *base.  But the principle applies in general.  
I seem to have had far less trouble with "weird occurrances" since I made 
it my policy to disable all semantic desktop stuff I could possibly get 
away with disabling, not just with krunner, but that one's widely known 
and accepted to be the case.)

-- 
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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