Linux drove me to get a Mac

[Tyler Aviss]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:41 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Tyler Aviss wrote:
>> In 8.10 the ability to stick with KDE3 disappeared as well, so anyone
>> upgrading and wanting the other good things about Intrepid also have
>> to eat the not-so-good things that happen when moving to KDE4.
>
> What are these "good things" that one would miss?
>
>> Of course KDE isn't Linux, but it is one of the two bigger contenders
>> in terms of WM/DM. Certainly I could have continued to update my own
>> kernels etc (usually do anyhow) to keep my drivers up-to-date while
>> sticking with Hardy, but really the whole thing seems to be something
>> of a debacle.
>
> If the kernel in Hardy is working, what is the point of "updating" to a
> newer kernel? It seems to me your reasons for complaining about KDE 4
> are pretty flimsy, just like they are for the majority of people whining
> about KDE 4.
>

There were a few apps which weren't available in hardy (or at least
not in a version I needed), as well as bugfixes, etc. For users who
can't roll their own kernels, sometimes there's a need to go with the
newer distro version as well (I know that my laptop had major issues
with hardy and the default available kernels due to an ACPI bug which
forced a thermal shutdown). The latter wasn't an issue for me as I
know how to disable ACPI on-boot and roll my own kernel, but I saw a
*lot* of others who had issues dealing with this.


>> Of course I could also have switched distros entirely, but I've been
>> through that before and it's generally not worth the headache.
>> Hopefully KDE4/Ubuntu will grow post these little hiccups sometime
>> soon, but it would have been nice if the change hadn't been quite so
>> *forced*.
>

> Sigh... no one "forced" you to "upgrade" to Intrepid. Did Hardy stop
> working? No. Can you still get support for Hardy? Yes. Are there other
> distros that give you the choice of running KDE 3? Yes, though KDE 3 is
> really only on maintenance now and will not be upgraded.

As mentioned. No, Hardy worked, but there were some things I
needed/wanted from Intrepid, and unfortunately that meant having to
use KDE4.



As for the email addressing it as a "Kubuntu" issue and not a KDE
issue, that's hard for me to say because as of yet I haven't run any
other distros with KDE4. I have, however, seen plenty of people
complaining about similar issues online, and many were Suse/FC users.

A few of the annoyances currently include:
  - Multi-depth start-menu folders don't seem to work properly, or
kmenuedit is broken in terms of saving the menus (seems to be a KDE4
thing)
  - Issues with the accelerated functions and FMV, which do vary by
card, but I didn't have such issues with other 3d-GUI related projects
such as "Beryl" or "Compiz". Either a KDE4 thing or possibly an issue
with the newer Xorg/driver versions that also updated at the same time
  - The network-manager-kde applet no longer seems to work properly
with VPN's (OpenVPN), and puts weird duplicate entries of my wireless
interfaces
  - Various KIO-slaves not working quite right just yet (may be Kubuntu)
  - Missing Quick-Launcher applet (may be a Kubuntu thing, I've been
trying to find this applet online to install manual)
  - Substantial changes to the overall control-panel etc. Some things
appear to be missing, but they might just have moved somewhere I can't
find them
  - Major issues with icons from various apps, especially the tray
icons which get gibbled even with the stuff coming with KDE
  - User-enabled tray docking seems not to work properly

One of the nice things about FOSS projects like this is that they do
tend to "evolve" fairly quickly with user feedback, so I'd imagine
that a lot of the little annoyances will be tidied up over time. One
must take the new with the old, but that doesn't mean we must give up
our right to grumble about it :-)


- TJA
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