Is KDE 4 Stable? (was Re:Linus on Gnome 3.2)

[Ted]

As a original Kde user, then on gnome for last 3-4 years, wanting to go 
back to kde,
i find one question with your report below,
i was under the understanding, and this has been how i operated in the past,
that as long as the libraries are installed, you can run any kde app, 
i.e. i run kb3 (or whatever burn program is called), on gnome desktop,
and when i was using kde, i was running apps from gnome project on kde.
I am confused that when you talk about the different desktops, that you 
can't effectively run apps from the other desktops collection of apps.???
If I go back to KDE, and run KDE4, i would expect to be able to run 
banshee, Thunderbird, etc, but your experience seems to cast darkness
on that. Guess i will have to experience for myself.
Now i understand if you use a gnome app in kde DT, or a kde app in gnome 
DT, you lose some of the features inherent to the DT, i.e. some drag drop,
and replacement of windows on next load, but most functionality should 
work irregardless of the gnome app on KDE, or kde app on gnome?
At least that has been my experience.

-tl

On 12/04/2011 01:56 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> On 12/02/2011 03:00 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 01:18:49PM -0500, Ted wrote:
>>> people not seeing this stability yet with kde 4.x ?
>>
>> No kde 4.x is fine now.
>
> I'm a long-time KDE user and fan. KDE 4 was hard to like for a few 
> years because it seemed that a lot of time and effort was put into 
> things I didn't care about, like eye candy at the expense of features 
> that I valued from KDE 3, like stability, apps that mostly worked, 
> etc. Recently, I upgraded to Fedora 16 from the long since deprecated 
> Fedora 13. For a few days, I really couldn't use KDE because any GTK 
> app would be very unresponsive. I read similar reports on-line and 
> figured that it would eventually get fixed so in the meantime, I 
> attempted to live a GTK-free existence, which meant no Thunderbird and 
> back to KMail, which I had abandoned when it became unusable 
> coincident with the switch to KDE 4. KMail is much better now but I 
> still don't "get" the grab bag of "funny" names, Nepomuk, Akonadi, 
> etc. I'll have to read up what they're trying to accomplish with that.
>
> There were a few irritants that were large enough with KMail to have 
> me considering other mail clients until I thought, "Wait a minute. I 
> use Thunderbird on three different operating systems. It's *the* 
> mission-critical application for me. Why should I have to switch from 
> it just because the desktop manager is broken, even if temporarily?" 
> so I decided to try a few different desktop/window managers. I had 
> read enough about Gnome 3 that I wasn't enthusiastic about trying it, 
> and I'd never really warmed up to previous versions of Gnome anyway, 
> so I installed LXDE, ICEWM, WindowMaker, and BlackBox. I attempted to 
> install XFce but for whatever reason, I never managed to see it in the 
> available choices on the login screen.
>
> The GTK issue disappeared with the other window managers but I found 
> myself missing things that I took for granted, like the ability to 
> hover my mouse over the clock in the bottom right corner of my KDE 
> panel and see the local time in time zones of interest to me. Silly? 
> Perhaps but that's an essential productivity tool for me. I also tend 
> to have many open windows so I've become dependent on Alt-Tab, point 
> and click on the list of open windows to bring a window to the 
> foreground. Right-mouse click on the background to bring up a list of 
> open windows as I'd have to do with some of the desktop/window 
> managers I tried just wasn't the same because with many windows open, 
> I usually can't see much desktop. I don't want to have to remember to 
> leave a bit of desktop exposed and have to mouse all the way to that 
> little bit just to see my list of open windows. Virtually all of the 
> desktop/window managers support some sort of Alt-Tab cycling through 
> windows but when you have many windows open, it's not especially 
> useful to have to cycle through every window to get to the last one on 
> the stack.
>
> When I analyzed the memory consumption between the "lightweight" 
> window/desktop managers and KDE, with the amount of RAM I have in my 
> system (8GB), it was really negligible. I was "wasting" at most 100M 
> of RAM to run KDE compared to the other ones so "lightweight" really 
> depends on ones perspective. ICEWM wasn't usable out-of-the-box 
> without reading docs and figuring out why there weren't any 
> applications in the menu. Once I figured that out, it was pretty easy 
> to configure the application menu as I wanted but that exposed yet 
> another difference between KDE and all of the "lightweight" 
> window/desktop managers.
>
> In KDE, I have the option of seeing my menus by function of the 
> program and then the program name underneath it in a smaller font. 
> Certain programs, like XChat, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Konsole, 
> Kate, I know what they do without having to be told "IRC", "Email", 
> "Web Browser", "Terminal", "Text Editor" but others, like Karbon14, 
> which I use infrequently, I can't remember the name without being told 
> that it's a "Scalable Graphics" program. The whole point of these 
> systems is supposed to be to make us more productive. If I have to 
> spend time Googling or launching applications that I think might be 
> the one I'm looking for instead of just launching an application 
> that's labelled "Scalable Graphics", I would be penny-wise and 
> pound-foolish. For the sake of "saving" some negligible amount of RAM 
> compared to the total pool of RAM I have, I would essentially pay for 
> that RAM the first time I had to spend a few minutes trying to 
> remember what the name of that obscure application that did XYZ was.
>
> Getting back to GTK apps slowing down to a crawl on KDE 4.7x on Fedora 
> 16, I kept an eye updates to see if there were any KDE, nVidia driver 
> (I use the proprietary binary), or kernel updates and I would test 
> with KDE to see if the problem was fixed. It took less than a week for 
> the problem to be fixed and I was back in business with KDE again. 
> When I run out of system resources, damned Flash is implicated every 
> single time. I need Flash in my work so being a "purist" and running 
> without Flash isn't an option. I noticed the same issue using ICEWM so 
> I know it has nothing to do with the desktop/window manager.
>
> There are a few things that I don't have in KDE 4 that I had in KDE 3 
> that I miss.
>
> * I used to be able to sort Konsole sessions, as they used to be 
> called in KDE 3, but sorting profiles, as they're called in KDE 4, is 
> no longer possible. There used to be buttons in the "Manage Profiles" 
> window for "Move Up" and "Move Down" in earlier versions of KDE 4 but 
> they were always greyed out. Those buttons have since disappeared so 
> now there isn't even a pretense that my dozens of profiles can be 
> sorted. Sometimes, it's just faster for me to type "ssh foo-+RB1Aph5k6s at public.gmane.org" 
> than to hunt through the unordered list of dozens of profiles for 
> same. I'd like to be able to not only sort the profiles but arrange 
> them in logical groupings in folders. For instance, I have access to 
> multiple virtual machines running on multiple physical machines. One 
> grouping could be physical machine -> virtual machine.
>
> * I use Kate like an "IDE", though it's not really an all-singing, 
> all-singing IDE like Eclipse, et al. It was ultra-stable until 
> whatever version is in Fedora 16. Now, it crashes occasionally.
>
> * KMail is still only barely usable for me. It seems to be quite slow 
> with IMAP folders, which it also was back in the KDE 3 days. It 
> doesn't report how many unread messages are in a given folders as it 
> used to in KDE 3. It doesn't report new messages in my IMAP folders 
> unless I click on the folders, which when you have hundreds of folders 
> is a bit of a problem. Thunderbird started behaving the same way after 
> I started using server-side filtering with Sieve. Other people have 
> reported the same problem but none of the guesses have been helpful. 
> The one that seemed credible was that the IMAP server, Dovecot in this 
> case, didn't support the IMAP IDLE command. That wasn't the case so 
> I'm patrolling important message folders manually. Sigh...
>
> * I used to use kdissert, a mind-mapping tool in KDE 3. It has since 
> been superseded by Semantik. Semantik seems nice, except when you 
> attempt to print the pretty diagram you just created to a PDF. It 
> *only* prints what is visible in the window's view port, not the whole 
> document and there seems to be no obvious way to do otherwise. That 
> means I wasted a bunch of time doing a mind map of a project I'm 
> working on only to discover after I'd done that there was no easy way 
> to share what I'd done with other project participants, all of whom 
> use OS X. I had to fiddle with the diagram to get it to fit within the 
> view port but that's fragile because the next object I added, it 
> rearranged the diagram automatically. This pushes me some on-line 
> hosted application that I don't really trust, bubble.us, so I'm 
> looking for better alternatives. I've seen some Java-based 
> cross-platform app but it has the handicap of being Java-based, which 
> I'm reluctant to install because every time I install anything 
> Java-based, it seems to be a pig and it always seems to disappoint. 
> (Case in point: Eclipse. I have a rant about it that I'll have to save 
> for another day.) Yet another, "Sigh..."
>
> One general irritant in KDE 4:
>
> * The mouse is "twitchy". I gave up on using a PS/2 mouse and keyboard 
> long ago with Fedora 13 because I'd lose control of the keyboard and 
> mouse after some random interval ranging from minutes to hours. I've 
> been using a USB keyboard and an optical mouse since then. The problem 
> has been that the mouse would often jump to almost any old place on 
> the screen when given just the slightest nudge. (I haven't tried 
> another mouse yet.) This made what seemed like a useful feature, 
> hotspots on screen corners to do certain things like expose the widget 
> dashboard, show all windows on all desktops, show just the desktop, 
> and show only windows for the current application, a la OS X, utterly 
> useless. On OS X, this works marvellously well. On KDE 4, it's 
> unusable because the mouse seemed to find its way to the hotspots when 
> I didn't mean to have it there. I'll have to try this with a new mouse 
> to see if it makes any difference.
>
> Kudos in KDE 4:
>
> * Speed, speed, speed - The "lightweight" desktop/window managers are 
> supposed to be so much faster. It only takes a few seconds more by the 
> time my KDE desktop is ready for use compared to the "lightweight" 
> desktops but once it's ready for use, there is no appreciable 
> difference in any operation that I've noticed, even with eye candy 
> like fancy effects and transparency enabled.
>
> * Configurability - I like being able to configure my environment as I 
> like. I don't want to have to use the default out of fear of the 
> distro clobbering my changes as I upgrade. I upgraded to Fedora 16 
> from 13 by doing a fresh install. Just to be on the safe side, I 
> physically disconnected the drive(s) that has /home on it during the 
> installation, which meant a bit more work after installation but I 
> could then be certain that an installer bug couldn't screw up my 
> /home. After I rebooted after reconnecting the drive(s) containing 
> /home and enabling them in fstab, my old configuration was completely 
> preserved. All told, the upgrade/fresh install took me about 1.5 hours 
> from start to finish. It was pretty much painless but I knew about 
> things like volume UUIDs, etc. so I had done some prep work in advance 
> that made things go smoothly. After I restored /home to the one I had 
> before the upgrade, the only thing that had changed in the look and 
> feel of KDE for me was the wallpaper. That was a pretty smooth upgrade 
> compared to the upgrade from KDE 3 to KDE 4.
>
> By the way, I don't expect "ordinary" users to be able to disconnect 
> the drive(s) containing /home, fiddling with volume IDs and correcting 
> fstab after installation, etc. so I have no idea what the experience 
> would be like for the average Windows or OS X user. Actually, I do 
> know. They'd be completely lost. For Windows users, the upgrade path 
> is buying a new machine. For OS X users, it's a bit smoother. I'm not 
> sure I care since I doubt Linux will ever be viable as a mainstream 
> desktop OS. Even in countries where the cost of a Windows license 
> represents a monthly, or in some cases, an annual income, people use 
> Windows because it just so happens that those countries have a vibrant 
> counterfeiting market so licensing is a non-issue for them.
>
> * UI - I think the KDE team have done a great job of creating a modern 
> interface that is competitive in terms of look and feel with the other 
> two mainstream operating systems. To anyone who is familiar with 
> Windows, it doesn't seem like an alien environment. For instance, my 
> 11 year old daughter can (and does) sit in front of KDE 4 and with no 
> training whatsoever figures out what she needs to do in order to use 
> the applications she needs, which are word processor, spreadsheet, and 
> web browser. Things work as I would expect them to work.
>
> By the way, I use multiple desktops only because I want to isolate 
> certain applications, like GIMP, on their own desktop. GIMP opens a 
> mess of windows and bringing one window to the foreground doesn't 
> bring all windows associated with GIMP to the foreground as it should 
> to be usable so rather than grumble about it, I just open it in its 
> own virtual desktop and switch to that desktop by clicking on the 
> pager I have in my panel when I need to access GIMP. There might be a 
> keyboard equivalent for switching desktops but I haven't found it to 
> be important enough to me to find out.
>
> What it boils down to is that KDE 4 is really stable and fast and it 
> has features I value. I can't say the same about all KDE 4 
> applications though but the only KDE applications upon which I have 
> dependencies are Konsole and Kate. I used to develop pyKDE 
> applications but I don't do that any more so I no longer have a 
> dependency on KDE as a developer. I use XChat, though I would probably 
> be fine with using Konversation. I use Thunderbird and I might be able 
> to live with KMail if I had to. I use LibreOffice but I haven't tried 
> any of the KOffice stuff. The last time I'd tried, which was a couple 
> of years ago, KOffice apps were not even half-baked.
>
> As I think about how I work, I could probably live happily on OS X if 
> it were not for the stupid keyboards on Macs and the fact that without 
> a coherent way of managing packages, it tends to be more of a pain 
> than it's worth to use MacPorts and such to install software I care 
> about. I might even be happy enough on Windows 7 for my desktop 
> environment but I haven't used Windows 7 very much.

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