Lost behavior between KDE 4.1.3.1 and 5.5.5

[Draciron Smith]

I don't upgrade till a version is out of support since upgrades never work
and I have to do a wipe and load and that's an insane amount of work for
me. I've been using Kbuntu LTS 14.04 and loving it with KDE 4.1.3.1 for
years now. I am in the process of taking several older computers that were
given to me and putting Linux on them as well as installing Linux for a
couple relatives and friends. I grabbed Kbuntu LTS 16.04 and slapped it on
the first machine. Ugg what a mess.

The install went quite smoothly on an old Emachine. It has 2 gigs of RAM
but KInfo only showing 1.5. dual AMD E-350 CPUs. Radeon graphics.

After the install initially I thought I'd botched something as the screen
would freeze. Luckily the VERY first thing I did was install Synaptic or
I'd been totally screwed. Explorer refused to show me the pop up to allow
me to authenticate. I suspect it was out of memory. The machine would
freeze constantly and ran so slow I began to wonder if it was just too old.
Then I did a top and saw why. It WAS constantly out of memory. Alkondi
alone brings the machine to it's knees. On top of that so much garbage that
is a pain to turn off or I haven't found a way short of killing the process
to kill. SAMBA for example used to be easy to stop from auto starting. I
don't have any windoze machines in my network and the Mac can just SSH in
if I need to talk. Samba is just useless overhead. So every time I reboot
I'm pulling up Htop and killing half the processes. Thing is Alkondi keeps
coming back to life on me. Most of it is useless. I use webmail so the mail
agent does absolutely nothing for me. I don't use the calendar or PIMs. I
IM on FB or Skype nowadays. I haven't logged into Yahoo IM since they made
changes that made Pigeon incompatible. a couple years back so the IM stuff
isn't doing me any good. In fact I can't think of anything akondi does that
I actually use. I might use some of it like the address book if it didn't
wipe out every byte of memory by starting anything that invokes akondi.
Can't find a way to turn akondi off and keep it off.

When I get thru killing Akondi in particular but the other garbage it works
quite well and 2 gigs is actually decent memory for a machine not too
heavily taxed. I couldn't use it for my primary machine, but if you only
have 4-10 tasks open and none of these involve large numbers of FF or
Chrome windows it rolls along quite nicely.

There has GOT to be a way to change the taskbar action to where hover does
not preview. I'm getting migraines from the flashing of the apps. I don't
even have to hover, just run my mouse along the taskbar and the apps are
flashing me like a Polaroid gone insane. If I had my druthers I'd have no
preview at all.  If I can't turn preview off completely how can I adjust
the hover time to something like 5 seconds?  In KDE 4 the hover is
something like 3 or 4 seconds and instead of wiping the entire screen out I
get a tiny preview. So I can run my mouse along the task bar and not get
sunburned.

It'd be really nice to add or bring back the Samba configuration utility to
KDE. I don't remember having any difficulty removing Samba from my KDE4
system then again it was a long time ago. I am not understanding the
reasoning in running Samba by default but not allowing folks to easily
configure it from the System admin GUI. That's just begging for a
vulnerability as Linux users are no longer necessarily techies. Systemcntl
however fails, so I'm going to have to track down the script and edit it by
hand or remove it so I don't have to kill Samba every time I reboot.

Going from Fedora to Ubuntu I really miss checkconfig, any hopes of a GUI
equiv?  Systemctl is definitely not an equiv or even all that useful. A KDE
equiv would sure make life easier.

On KDE 4.1.3.1 I can plug my LG phone (Stylus 3) and download the pics on
it without effort using Gwenview or any other app capable of importing. On
the 5.5.5 system I  had to resort to Digikam to get at the pics.
Apparently Gwenview has lost the ability to import images from devices.
Opening digikam which I often removed from KDE 4 and earlier versions,  is
like getting in a tank to go down to a store a block down the street.

On machines that I'm setting up for other people. They are not technically
literate in Linux. I want to set auto updates, but cannot find any such
option short of writing my own chron script but that would require a sudo
and they are unlikely to even notice a konsole window much less know what
to do with it. Otherwise I have to configure their routers so I can log in
and make sure they are staying updated, that's a pretty major pain. I'd
rather not even run the SSH daemon on their machines at all. So how can I
set up auto updates where it just pops up and asks them for their password
to install updates or something along those lines or better yet just
installs the things without bothering them?
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