On Monday 04 August 2008 01:43:38 am Martin Schlander wrote:

I've been using KDE 4.1 (factory:desktop) on my "production" machine since Tuesday. After a rough few days I'm now starting to have it set up pretty nicely and figuring out how to work around problems, so I can now use it without troubleshooting or banging my head against the desk in frustration most of the time.

I'm too lazy to file bugreports for all the problems at this point, but I thought I'd mention some of the problems I've been having here quick, some are small and some are big, maybe it can be of some use to someone. If nothing else it might give an impression of why so many people hate KDE4.

* "Zombie" processes: I'm having a lot of problems with processes that keep running in the background when I quit the apps. Especially Konq - I had to periodically go to ksysguard and kill several konq processes - and dozens of kio_http processes, until I finally made Opera the default browser.

I also have similar problems with KMail and Kopete.

If I quit Kate with Alt+F4 an ever increasing number of kate processes will keep running - but if I quit with Ctrl+Q the processes will die as they should.

* Rsibreak-issues It wouldn't autostart for me - not by session management and not by adding it as a desktop-file in the Autostart systemsettings module - manually creating a desktop-file in ~/.kde4/Autostart worked though.

The rsibreak config dialog (right click systray icon -> configure rsibreak) is completely messed up. .. well.. I guess it's still beta.

* Launchfeedback I tried to disable taskbar launchfeedback in systemsettings -> desktop -> launchfeedback. No matter how many times I uncheck the checkbox, it's checked again when I go back.

* Krunner + kcontrol strangeness I disable a lot of the runners hoping it would make krunner a little less slow and laggy when typing. I found that for some reason the application runner doesn't think kcontrol exists, I need to enable the bash runner to be able to start kcontrol from krunner. Other kde3 apps don't have this problem.

* Plasmoid get hot new stuff thingy doesn't work I selected a few plasmoids from online, they seemed to be downloaded and it says they're installed, but I can't figure out how to add them to the desktop.

* Multimedia keys don't work I have a Logitech Office Comfort keyboard, the multiemedia keys worked out of the box in 11.0/KDE3.5, they don't work with KDE4.1

* Camera problems I have a Canon Ixus 70. In KDE3 I would get a popup asking me what to do when it's connected - in KDE4 I got nothing - nothing in recently plugged devices nor in Dolphin sidebar. The systemsettings digital camera module seems to identify the camera correctly, but I get error messages no matter what I click in that module.

Still haven't figured out how to access my camera, other than using kde3 konq.

* KSnapshot doesn't suggest default filename/filetype KDE3 KSnapshot would suggest something like "snapshot.png", in KDE4 you have to do everything manually. Very minor issue, but it's symptomatic of how everything is just crude and unpolished in KDE4.1.

* Konq profile applet doesn't like Danish characters (æ, ø, å). At least I think so. When I launch konq profiles with Danish characters in the name I get an empty session, while I can load these profiles fine from within konq. Changing their names makes them launchable from the applet.

* Kopete issues At one point I got a Jabber account called EMPTY@. I have no idea where that came from and no matter how many times I deleted it in the gui it would keep reappearing, I had to remove it manually from the config file to get rid of it. (this might be related to kopete proces keeping running in the background when I thought I had quit the app though).

The history plugin doesn't work well with metacontacts. For example, if I open a jabber chat with some guy, I won't see the history of msn chat I had with the guy the day before, even though the different accounts are grouped together as one "metacontact".

* There's no kde4 super user file manager (at least not according to kickoff) .. well.. kde3 konq is probably the best filemanager on the system anyway ;-)

* I couldn't extract tar.bz2 with Ark Maybe I'm too stupid, or maybe it just doesn't work.

This is just a small selection of the problems I've had, I've left out all the problems that seemed to be caused by re-using kde3 settings and the issues that are so weird, that it's too difficult to describe or that you wouldn't believe me if I told you.

I think I'll stick with KDE4.x from now on, but only cuz I'm a fanboy. My general impression is that too many things either don't work or are just painful to use. I'll have to keep recommending KDE3 to non-fanboyz for some time I'm afraid. But I do think there's hope that 4.1 can become enjoyable in time for 11.1 - but there sure is still a lot of work to be done. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

Martin, you are more patient than many others, congrats! I just hope the kde4 developers and kde4 marketeers do not misinterpret your positive attidude and push some of your bugs to kde4.5 or something like it. How to find the balance between keeping the feet to the fire and acknowledging effort is a very tricky thing. In the older days only microsoft was an active marketeer, always promising perfection just with the very next release, now almost everyone thinks that they can fool all of the people between releases... d. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org