A week of KDE4 usage

[Billie Walsh]

On 05/09/2011 06:49 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> [Oh, this has become rather lengthy. It's a description of my various
> problems with KDE4, the details are not so important, no need to read it
> all. My question is: Are your experiences similar to mine?]
>
> I'm somewhat diesappointed with KDE4. I'm using it since 4.2, and it's
> become much much better - but still, there are just so many bugs. Is it
> just me, or it this normal? Would you suggest other people (being
> unskilled uses, not hackers) to use KDE4? What OS and desktop
> environment does your Mom's PC run?

I've never hesitated to suggest Kubuntu to someone unfamiliar with 
Linux. I usually tell them that there is a bit of a learning curve to 
make the changeover. I suggest that they dual boot with whatever they 
are using and play around with Kubuntu when they have some spare time 
until they get used to it. That's pretty much how I made the switch from 
Windows to Linux. After a while I realized that I hadn't booted into 
Windows for weeks. I never looked back after that.

>
> One week ago, a friend wrote me an e-mail that he gives up on using
> KDE4. He spent half a day to configure some KDE menus, quick starters
> and such stuff on his uncle's PC. Works, but it took him a while. Then
> he spent some hours to figure out how to create a distribution list, and
> did not succeed. And he wonders why such basic things do not work - were
> they not tested, did someone of the developers actuall try it out? Were
> they working, and is this a new bug? Meanwhile, systemsettings had
> crashed about 20 times on that day.
> He compares KDE4 with a new car that has a great new injector
> technology, but even in the fourth revision the windscreen wipers just
> do not work. So he gave up. And he is sad, because his uncle, who does
> not know much about Linux, got the impression is that this linux is
> something for weirdos only.
> I never used a distribution list with kontact, so I tried this for
> myself. I created a new contact group 'Testgroup' in kaddressbook and
> added some people with their e-mail addresses. Kmail then knows about
> this Testgroup (it auto-completes it) - great, I think before KDE 4.6
> addressbook and kmail did not exchange their data, Kmail did not know
> about the people in the address book. But when I send a test mail,
> nothing happens. It turned out that the mail is being sent to
> Testgroup at myhost.my.domain, and not to the members. This seems to be a
> known bug that was already fixed, but it's happening again. [1]

I tried Kmail once years ago and absolutely hated it. Haven't tried it 
since, and with all the issues I read about on the help lists I wont 
ever try it again.

I used Thunderbird in Windows when it was first released. When I 
switched over to Linux I continued to use Thunderbird. It just simply 
works. No fuss, no muss. Creating a distribution list is very simple.

>
> Now here's a list of other weird stuff happening during the last week:
>
> Monday, my boss phoned me and wanted me to download a PowerPoint file
> from our FTP server. This happens often, so I have a folder view with
> some starters to access various sites via FTP, VNC and such. But when I
> double-clicked on the current version of the .ppt document, dolphin
> crashed. Seems to happen all the time I click a .ppt document. And when
> one dolphin crashes,_all_  instances crash. It's annoying to re-create
> them as I like them to be - for example, there is a dolphin grouped with
> a konsole window, the dolphin has two tabs, each tab is a split view,
> and they show specific locations. Takes a while to re-create this setup.
> I can also just log out and in again, but then I have to save my work
> first. And I lose stuff like all the tabs in akregator. Those seem to be
> saved when I manually save the session, but this often messes up the
> session, so I never do this without doing a backup of my .kde4 directory.
> Back to the download. I clicked my program starter in order to open a
> dolphin with the FTP target directory, but nothing happened. No idea
> why, just another weird problem. I started dolphin manually and entered
> the URL, but it did not connect. So I went to the text terminal and used
> command line ftp. The problem is that I did not know the password,
> that's what I have the wallet for. But how to access the wallet? I only
> found out about the --show option to kwalletmanager after this, before I
> used to open it by using the system tray. But I had the tray disabled
> because of another nasty bug that made plasma crash dozends of times per
> day [2]. So I had to first add the system tray plasmoid, then I could
> get the password and downlaod the file. BTW, I wouldn't have been able
> to download it with dolphin anyway [3], because it has German umlauts in
> the file name.
>

I use Gftp. OK, I know it's not a "K" program, but it's much easier to 
use that any of the "K" programs. Sorry. Save everything to the 
bookmarks. One click and I'm ready to upload and download. Well, two 
actually. One for the bookmark menu and one for the actual site. I keep 
everything set up so that when I click on a site it changes the local 
directory to where it's supposed to be as well as the remote directory. 
It's simple.

One thing you mention, about the warning box's. I find that sometimes 
they wind up behind anything else on the desktop. they should pop on top 
of whatever, but............

-- 
"A good moral character is the first essential in a man." George Washington

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