A week of KDE4 usage

[Alex Schuster]

Kevin Krammer writes:

> On Saturday, 2011-07-02, Alex Schuster wrote:
> > BTW, ordinary users here means people who often do not speak English.
> > The German localization misses a lot, so KDE 4 is not right for them.
> > Is KDE 4 meant to be for these people? I'm not sure.
> 
> Hmm, using KDE localized for German myself I can't really agree with this.
> Do you have an example of something not being translated properly?

Sorry, no. Since 4.6.3, nearly all my KDE applications suddenly are in 
English. An exception is systemsettings, although the applications in it are 
English again. The K menu also has German entries, and the KDE Help Center 
has most stuff in German. Must be some bug because kde-l10n is installed, 
and German is set as application language in the help menu. I don't care 
much, let's wait and see if 4.7 will correct this.

Before 4.6.3, most things were German, but sometimes dialogs were not. But 
no, I can't remember any specific ones.

> Do by any chance run something Ubuntu based and using their language
> packages?

No, Gentoo.

> > BTW, who actually does the coding for KDE 4? How many of those people
> > are being payed for this, how many just do this for fun in their free
> > time?
> 
> I don't think there is any significant number of developers currently
> being paid to work on KDE.
> IIRC Aaron Seigo is, David Faure is 50%, some of the people working on
> Calligra Office are.
> The Kontact Touch project was done as a contract work for a German
> covernmental entity, but that has been delivered and there are currently
> no follow-up contracts as far as I know.
> 
> Canonical might have somebody working on KDE stuff as well.

Thanks. I thought it were some more. So, despite my constant ranting about 
the bad quality of KDE4, it's astonishing what a group of mostly unpaid 
volunteers can accomplish. This is a huge project, and it is quite cool. If 
only the stability were better.

> > Gnome works fine, but I did not use much of it. Networkmanager is a
> > pain, and I had a hard time setting up WLAN. This was not very user
> > friendly.
> 
> Interesting, I always found NetworkManager to be quite easy, at least when
> the WLAN is broadcasting its ESSID (which most of them do).
> Mostly using WPA though, had to experiment a bit when doing WPA-PSK, but
> work also from UI (i.e. no file editing required).

I have never used WLAN with Linux before, and I hoped that it would 
automagically work. The interfaces came up, but when I tried to connect, I 
was asked for the WEP password. Some notice that my WLAN drivers were not 
capable of WPA would have been nice, I did not know what was the problem. Or 
a list of the interfaces capabilities.
I still do not understand why a PCMCIA card did not work, that worked out of 
the box with an earlier Ubuntu Version. After I flashed the internal card, 
WPA suddenly worked.

But the interface often does not come up after resuming from suspend to RAM 
or disk. Sometimes the connection also drops during normal usage. I get a 
notification that the interface is down, but NetworkManager still shows it 
as up. I have to manually disconnect and then connect again. Should be no 
big deal, but this is my Mom's notebook, she's 61 years old and has no 
experience with computers. She does not understand why she has to disconnect 
something that just told her in a notice that is has been disconnected.

But maybe I exaggerated a little, it's not _that_ bad. I have heard many bad 
things about it, maybe this biased my opinion. I also did not find a quick 
way to turn it off altogether, I would prefer the interface to be up all the 
time, even if no one is logged in. maybe this is a nice feature for moving 
laptops, but this one always connects to the same access point. I also did 
not like that I had to enter the password for, um, I guess it's the 
equivalent of KDE's wallet, but I was able to solve this by adding a PAM 
rule. The password still has to be entered after waking up from suspend, I 
didn't find a solution for this, but she can live with that.

	Wonko
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