KDE 4.5.1 rocks

[BlackStar]

Out of interest, what does GNOME Do do better?

It starts giving results as soon as you type the first letter you type (not the third), the results tend to be more relevant, it learns from your previous searches and you don't have to randomly press enter twice to launch the application (the app launcher ignores the first keypress randomly - don't know if this is a bug or a responsiveness issue).

The app launcher is way prettier, however.

You didn't REALLY install all of it? Nobody does that.

Oh, I should obviously have shifted through ~350 packages by hand in order to find out which exactly I need. No, sorry, I installed what "pacman -S kde" recommended, there's no other sane solution.

Now I can start removing the chaff to reclaim some space but I'd rather not have to do that.

Finally, Kate sucks. As in really, really sucks.

[that guy]

I should obviously have shifted through ~350 packages by hand in order to find out which exactly I need

Cool story, bro.

A long time ago I used to install Gentoo's kde-meta meta-package, which installed tons of stuff I didn't need, until someday I decided to install fewer stuff so I unmerged kde-meta, emerged kdebase-meta, ran emerge -p --depclean to see what packages would be removed then added the 5 or 6 packages I would have missed. Took me a couple of minutes. You've spent ten times more spouting crap in this forum.

[pingufunkybeat]

It starts giving results as soon as you type the first letter you type (not the third), the results tend to be more relevant, it learns from your previous searches and you don't have to randomly press enter twice to launch the application (the app launcher ignores the first keypress randomly - don't know if this is a bug or a responsiveness issue).

the "enter" thing is a responsiveness issue introduced in 4.5 (I didn't have it in 4.4), and I agree that it is annoying.

I haven't had problems with relevance of the recommendations, but I am more of a shell person and I'm used to typing more than a few letters. Different use-cases, I guess.

Oh, I should obviously have shifted through ~350 packages by hand in order to find out which exactly I need. No, sorry, I installed what "pacman -S kde" recommended, there's no other sane solution.

Now I can start removing the chaff to reclaim some space but I'd rather not have to do that.

Actually, you should just install startkde (or a similar package), and your distribution should pull in all the relevant stuff.

On Gentoo, you type "emerge kdebase-startkde" and you're done. You get a bare-bones, functional desktop.

Finally, Kate sucks. As in really, really sucks.

I found it OK for what it is, but I will only use (g)vim for anything more serious than a shopping list.

[energyman]

Who's with me? Lot's of polish over 4.4, it's almost as good as Ubuntu/Gnome now and much much better than out-of-the-box Gnome. Fix the performance and we'll have a winner!

Remaining pet peeves (Arch/KDE):[list][*]KDM->desktop takes 10''. GDM->desktop takes 2'' (yay SSD). Why?

because of font-loading. It also might try to set some hdd setting. Stop both, KDE loads very fast. Put /tmp into ram.

[yotambien]

It starts giving results as soon as you type the first letter you type (not the third), the results tend to be more relevant, it learns from your previous searches and you don't have to randomly press enter twice to launch the application (the app launcher ignores the first keypress randomly - don't know if this is a bug or a responsiveness issue).

the "enter" thing is a responsiveness issue introduced in 4.5 (I didn't have it in 4.4), and I agree that it is annoying.

I haven't had problems with relevance of the recommendations, but I am more of a shell person and I'm used to typing more than a few letters. Different use-cases, I guess.

Well, I agree that it should be more responsive. It annoys me that half of the time I finish typing the name of the program by the same time it displays the right recommendation. Also, it seems to be rather limited in terms of what it knows, it pales in comparison to bash-completion. Also, it could well do tab-completion. I too type more than one character, but this is useful when you don't remember the name or spelling of the application you're calling. For instance, it's been a lot of times I got stuck trying to remember the first THREE characters of gvwview...gnview...gwvw...ah, fuck it, do it from the terminal.

Finally, Kate sucks. As in really, really sucks.

I found it OK for what it is, but I will only use (g)vim for anything more serious than a shopping list.

My stuff aren't long and complex programs, but I welcome the tabbed design, splitted windows, syntax highlighting (e.g. Octave and not just Matlab is a plus for me), simple configuration of colours and fonts, and the possibility to customise shortcuts for everything. Performance used to be appalling in the 4.X series due to (I think) and underlying bug in Qt plus a hundred of others in kwrite/kate, but it's now OK.

But you made me curious, what do you find lacking in Kate that you don't consider it good enough for serious work?

because of font-loading. It also might try to set some hdd setting. Stop both, KDE loads very fast. Put /tmp into ram.

Font-loading? How do you go about changing this? It really takes a long time to load here.

[BlackStar]

because of font-loading. It also might try to set some hdd setting. Stop both, KDE loads very fast. Put /tmp into ram.

Intel SSD, /tmp was in ram from the beginning (8GB). Not sure what happened but it started loading faster recently, now the desktop fades in before the splash icons come into focus. Might have something to do with enabling trim support and adding noatime to /etc/fstab (but I've also customized my installation a lot so it might be something else entirely).

My stuff aren't long and complex programs, but I welcome the tabbed design, splitted windows, syntax highlighting (e.g. Octave and not just Matlab is a plus for me), simple configuration of colours and fonts, and the possibility to customise shortcuts for everything. Performance used to be appalling in the 4.X series due to (I think) and underlying bug in Qt plus a hundred of others in kwrite/kate, but it's now OK.

I feel Kate lives in that no-man's land between glorified text editors and full-scale IDEs. It excels as neither: there are better text editors out there (e.g. scite) and it isn't integrated enough to be called an IDE (unless it has debugging capabilities I haven't seen?)

I also find its session management cumbersome.

Actually, you should just install startkde (or a similar package), and your distribution should pull in all the relevant stuff.

On Gentoo, you type "emerge kdebase-startkde" and you're done. You get a bare-bones, functional desktop.

Yeah, it's called kdebase on Arch. The issue is that I'm not a KDE user, so I don't know which packages I need (yet). Once I'm comfortable with its features and its appearance I'll remove whatever I don't need - but until then I need a complete desktop to work in and evaluate.

I was simply surprised that this complete desktop included 48 wallpapers (77MB), 14 decorations, 9 widget styles and 10 desktop themes. I could understand if it included two or three variations of Oxygen/Air - but were the KDE 2, 3, Win95 and Gnome lookalikes really necessary? Especially since it offers integrated repositories to download and install new themes from.

[energyman]

Font-loading? How do you go about changing this? It really takes a long time to load here.

have a look at /usr/bin/startkde

[pingufunkybeat]

For instance, it's been a lot of times I got stuck trying to remember the first THREE characters of gvwview...gnview...gwvw...ah, fuck it, do it from the terminal.

Haha. It's GWEN, named after a girl. That one is very easy to remember

But you made me curious, what do you find lacking in Kate that you don't consider it good enough for serious work?

I think that it has many features needed for serious work, but I don't know a serious (Unix-based) programmer who doesn't use either Vim or Emacs.

Here's a short list:

- macros are much better in vim. For example, sometimes I need to load a list of strings from a text file and turn them into a python list (add "" around them, add commas, remove newlines, etc). Very easy to program in vim
- scripting is much better. I need this to customise how the auto-commenting works
- far more control over indentation
- vim works from a terminal, which is important as I sometimes need to program over ssh
- vim is more keyboard-centric. You do everything using the keyboard through a combination of modal interface, ex-style commands and keyboard shortcuts. Kate doesn't have enough shortcuts to approach this
- regular expressions. Not even close

These are just the ones I need daily.

Kate is just fine, I'm impressed at how far it's come. It's basically a middle-level editor whose strength is that it can be embedded into IDEs (like KDevelop). But Emacs and Vim are true heavyweights.

[pingufunkybeat]

I was simply surprised that this complete desktop included 48 wallpapers (77MB), 14 decorations, 9 widget styles and 10 desktop themes. I could understand if it included two or three variations of Oxygen/Air - but were the KDE 2, 3, Win95 and Gnome lookalikes really necessary? Especially since it offers integrated repositories to download and install new themes from.

The problem is that you installed everything ever made for KDE and ever packaged for Arch. That's a ridiculous amount of stuff, including obscure things nobody's ever heard of.

I understand that it's more convenient this way, and I know people who do this, but this is really an overkill, and not a "typical" complete KDE install.

Something more typical would have been kdebase + Amarok + K3b + SMPlayer/Kaffeine/VLC + Gwenview, which should cover 95% of everything you need to do

Depending on special needs, you can add Kdevelop, KOffice or a couple of others.

[Melcar]

Just upgraded yesterday. A few quirks aside, it seems fine. Fonts with certain Plasma themes are a bit too big, folder view no longer shows previews for me, overall desktop seems a bit less responsive, Kwin disables 3D effects every time I start a session, blah blah blah. No crashes so far, which is good. An issue I do have; who though defaulting the CPU scaling to ondemand and removing the ability to switch governors from the power-management GUI was a good idea?