KDE 4.9.3 November Update Fixes 86 Bugs

[Awesomeness]

I dont think it's distribution's fault. I've also used KDE from svn/git or from (mostly unmodified) gentoo packages, and it was the same.
Actually, i think it's the contrary : distribution sometimes manages to fix/enhance/hide KDE mess. The most obvious is SuSE i guess. But it costs a lot of manpower to do the QA that KDE fails to do.

You have no clue. First: SUSE does not modify KDE software. It only ships custom artwork. In seldom cases a crucial bugfix patch is applied to SUSE packages in order to not wait for the official SC update.
Second, and where your cluelessness really comes to light, you totally ignore the dependencies. If some other layer ? glib, glibc, Mesa, Xorg, etc. ? changes something, it can result in misbehavior of higher level software. Distributions that do not ship KDE software as default usually tend to miss that because they concentrate on Gnome or whatever.
Especially rolling release distributions such as Gentoo have next to no QA process. There is a reason why credible Linux distributions have development cycles with version freezes of up to several months.

So to sum it up: There is no KDE mess. There is mostly a dependency mess caused by rolling release distributions that ship new dependency versions without much testing.

[hax0r]

People calling Core2 low end, really? To me low end are low clocked Pentium 4, and anything after and including Athlon 64 are pretty damn fast CPUs. I have had pretty good experience with KDE 4.9.3 on Archlinux, but that's on a laptop with Sandisk Extreme SSD, i3 CPU using i915 driver, H67 chipset, and 4GB slow ass DDR3 single channel stick. On the other hand my high end 2.0GHz Athlon64 X2 with 74GB raptor, DFI nf4 LanPARTY (heck yeah best mobo ever), 1GB DDR400 2-2-2-5, and GeForce 9600GT crawls under KDE.

I still get ~25sec delay after KDE logs in where I can only move mouse cursor and everything else is unresponsive, I have to disable pulseaudio to fix this. Amarok is still total crap, it is just sad. Kmail is alright but it sucks too, and it depends and this slow bloat called akonadi. Big fat balloon tooltips are still annoying, kickstart is dumb, kwin is excellent, logout is still slow, themes are still ugly--too much space wasted everywhere, dolphin is ***** slow as hell to startup takes like 1sec.

[droste]

People calling Core2 low end, really?

Nobody did this.

Kmail is alright but it sucks too

Splitted personality? :-D Or just angry? ;-)

[orzel]

Second, and where your cluelessness really comes to light, you totally ignore the dependencies. If some other layer ? glib, glibc, Mesa, Xorg, etc. ? changes something, it can result in misbehavior of higher level software. Distributions that do not ship KDE software as default usually tend to miss that because they concentrate on Gnome or whatever.
Especially rolling release distributions such as Gentoo have next to no QA process. There is a reason why credible Linux distributions have development cycles with version freezes of up to several months.

So to sum it up: There is no KDE mess. There is mostly a dependency mess caused by rolling release distributions that ship new dependency versions without much testing.

Mmm, you really seem to hate rolling releases and/or gentoo. But you kinda miss the point and arrive late in the conversation. Gentoo was only raised because someone suggested that distro were messing with KDE, which original code was "perfect" to start from. The original distributions we were speaking about were the mainstream ones like ubuntu, SuSE or Red Hat based ones.

[deanjo]

You have no clue. First: SUSE does not modify KDE software. It only ships custom artwork. In seldom cases a crucial bugfix patch is applied to SUSE packages in order to not wait for the official SC update.

Not entirely true. openSUSE has frequent "kde bug-squashing" days. The result of those are usually immediate patches to opensuse and the fixes are sent upstream where they appear in the next KDE release. As well openSUSE goes through great pains of integrating items like Firefox and Libreoffice with KDE.

[cardboard]

I still get ~25sec delay after KDE logs in where I can only move mouse cursor and everything else is unresponsive, I have to disable pulseaudio to fix this.

Uh, that's not KDE's fault. You have two Pulseaudio autostart entries. You need to delete one so they stop clobbering each other. Why would you blame KDE for a problem your distro created?

Amarok is still total crap, it is just sad.

Amarok is great. Integrates wonderfully with the shell, you can even play, append and queue songs to the playlist directly from KRunner. No other DE has that...

Kmail is alright but it sucks too, and it depends and this slow bloat called akonadi.

KMail is ugly as hell and needs some serious polish, I agree. There's nothing like Kontact on any other DE though.

themes are still ugly--too much space wasted everywhere

Really now. That's the same thing I thought about GNOME Shell when I last tried it-- 35 pixel height titlebars, huge fonts, huge padding around everything. Horrible. Unity, same thing, with two panels on the screen. On my KDE desktop I have a single 25px panel with a menu, some launchers, a task manager, the system tray, and a clock. It's 2012 and something simple like that is seemingly too much to ask for anywhere else.

I'm not about to defend KDE. I'm fully aware of its track record. But please don't try to spread your delusions. People might take them as fact.

[Awesomeness]

Mmm, you really seem to hate rolling releases and/or gentoo. But you kinda miss the point and arrive late in the conversation. Gentoo was only raised because someone suggested that distro were messing with KDE, which original code was "perfect" to start from. The original distributions we were speaking about were the mainstream ones like ubuntu, SuSE or Red Hat based ones.

You miss the point where I explain my main argument that misbehavior is often caused by dependencies and Gentoo was also just an example.
The original code was ?perfect? because KDE devs obviously do not have a time machine and can only develop their software against older, usually unmodified versions of the dependencies. I could've raised the equally valid example of Kubuntu because even though Canonical is no longer responsible for the KDE packages, they are still responsible for e.g. Qt which Canonical patch heavily to integrate with their Unity/Ayatana usability idea and Canonical do not care whether they break KDE or not.
A similar thing is true for Fedora. As cutting edge distribution they usually include the latest of everything and because Gnome is default, dependencies are usually only thoroughly tested against Gnome. One relatively recent example I can remember was the Fedora release that shipped Gnome 3.0. Gnome 3.0 demanded a beta version of NetworkManager 0.9 which KDE?s Network Management module was never developed for. Fedora added a patch to NM 0.9 to emulate NM 0.8. No idea how well it worked but it serves as an example how even non-rolling mainstream distributions sometimes handle KDE.

Even openSUSE users where at one point struck by such a bug. It was during a 11.x release and there was a bug in glibc?s time and date handling which only manifested after a specific version of the NVidia binary driver was installed. The bug caused most KDE software and some GTK applications to crash all the time.
Nobody noticed because NVidia develop the driver only on Debian or a derivative that ships eglibc instead of the original glibc and nobody at openSUSE noticed before because the driver was released later.

Not entirely true. openSUSE has frequent "kde bug-squashing" days. The result of those are usually immediate patches to opensuse and the fixes are sent upstream where they appear in the next KDE release. As well openSUSE goes through great pains of integrating items like Firefox and Libreoffice with KDE.

You must have missed the financial troubles previous SUSE owner Novell was in and team reforms current owner Attachmate did. After Novell fired a whole bunch of people there are not many KDE contributors left. The ones that are left, have sometimes been assigned different tasks. Releases such as openSUSE 11.0 that wrote and backported so many bugfixes, even Plasma Desktop 4.0 was mostly usable are no longer possible.
The times, SUSE employed 3 full-time developers and 15?20 part-time developers for the KDE team alone are long gone.

[a user]

I agree with the previous comment that all the DEs have major issues. I guess that is why so many people are trying them all out now, it seems. DE hopping...

now this is a statement i truly can agree with.

but before somebody gets the wrong idea: the above statement holds true even for non-linux systems. at least on linux we have the chance to chose from several options to find the one we can live best with. also, they are fighting for users

[XyC0]

For me kde is running fine, when i was switching from gnome2(didn't like gnome3/unity) to kde I was a bit afraid that I would encounter many bugs after reading many comment here on phoronix but it worked better than I expected(not more than gnome2).

It could be hardware dependent if kde works good or bad for people, not necessary faulty hardware(in a way yes but) but maybe only not as good drivers and stuff.

Running Kubuntu 12.04 if it matters, works good for me, but ymmv.

But what i really want to say is, don't listen too much on all complaints on kde, instead try it out for a while and see if it works out for you, if not, try something else that is the beauty of open source

[accumulator]

I wonder

I wonder why the KDE haters are even on this thread

If they hate KDE so much, then they aren't actually using KDE, so what they say is probably based on some bad experience 3 years ago..

It was nice to see some insightful posts in between the trolling though