KDE Does Its Second 4.7 Release Candidate

[kraftman]

4. Konqueror is horrendous, get rid of this thing!

There's also Rekonq which isn't so bad.

6. Dolphin is horrendously slow. Like 1sec delays when opening any folder with images or PDFs. Ugly.

Dolphin displays the files content, but this is tunable. Did you had this enabled?

8. KWin is visibly slower than Compiz on the same hardware.

Not in everything. I find it faster than Compiz sometimes.

9. The Alt-F2 prompt is horrendously slow and inefficient. Why does it need 3 letters to start matching applications? Why doesn't it learn from my preferences? Why do I need to press enter twice? Why do the animations lag behind the mouse?

When do you need to press enter twice? Animations are really smooth on my box.

In the end, I bit the bullet and went with Ubuntu/Unity: it works, it's fast and it's stable - and that's what matters. Yes, it has its rough edges (multimon support...), yes, it's Canonical but in the end it's something that lets you do your work without much hassle.

Unity is cool. However, they should make Ubuntu/Unity more consistent. In example there's no global menu for LibreOffice and there are no native scroll bars in some applications like Firefox etc. There should be some categories in app menu, too.

[kraftman]

Interesting. I wonder if the imap services my accounts are with use the protocol in slightly different ways?

And about such bullshit I was talking about. If it's broken for you it doesn't mean it's broken for everyone.

[Awesomeness]

With the Xine vs GStreamer - I can see two likely explanations one is that the soundcard was muted out of the box and GStreamer picked this up and Xine didn't. The second is that the non free codecs were installed for GStreamer but not Xine.

Phonon-Xine is unmaintained since quite some time and was deprecated in favor of Phonon-GStreamer (yuck) and Phonon-VLC (yay).

KMail does have weak IMap Support. I am going to take a look at KMail 2 once the dust settles (currently I use gmail).

You're confusing two things:
GMail has weak IMAP support!
If you try to use an IMAP client with GMail problems are highly likely to occur because GMail's IMAP is broken. It's so broken, it's nothing more than an alibi for Google to claim to support interoperability but actually tries to force its users into using the web interface with ads.

[kayosiii]

Phonon-Xine is unmaintained since quite some time and was deprecated in favor of Phonon-GStreamer (yuck) and Phonon-VLC (yay).

Yeah it's just a pity that VLC won't connect jack devices automatically and GStreamer -> jack sucks... Phonon Xine currently works best for me - I am something of a corner case though (firewire based soundcard).

You're confusing two things:
GMail has weak IMAP support!
If you try to use an IMAP client with GMail problems are highly likely to occur because GMail's IMAP is broken. It's so broken, it's nothing more than an alibi for Google to claim to support interoperability but actually tries to force its users into using the web interface with ads.

Quite possibly. It has been a while since I looked at KMail and when I did KMail and IMap did suck I haven't tried GMail + Imap. I use GMail because I like GMails interface better than KMail and the convenience of web based mail. In general I am not a fan of adds but I find the way that gmail does it inoffensive enough not to bother me. I will probably take a look at the new KMail (when 4.7) is released and see if I like it any better.

[mugginz]

And about such bullshit I was talking about. If it's broken for you it doesn't mean it's broken for everyone.

Yet you've stated that KDE is perfect.

I've responded that it's not perfect for me. My reports of KDE's failings are In addition to those of others. There is a meaningful level of discussion regarding KDE's stability or should I say, lack thereof.

Yet, pro KDE guys want to talk as if there's no issues with KDE of any consequence.

For that matter, as we've seen in this very thread, we are directed to believe most of the blame is to be focused not on KDE itself, but on other sub-systems on which KDE relies.

If other desktops had KDE's reputation of instability then I guess we'd all be in trouble.

For those having issues with KDE's stability, luckily there are alternative platforms to choose from.

Of course you'll likely point out the those suffering from any undesirable behavior of Gnome have the same options, and you'd be right. You might try to suggest that Gnome is as unstable as KDE, or even more so. Given that there are more Gnome desktops than there are KDE, I'd find it surprising that those using the supposedly inferior Gnome desktop wouldn't simply install KDE along side. Even those looking for the ubiquity of packages available for the Ubuntu platform could install KDE along side.

[mugginz]

You're confusing two things:
GMail has weak IMAP support!
If you try to use an IMAP client with GMail problems are highly likely to occur because GMail's IMAP is broken. It's so broken, it's nothing more than an alibi for Google to claim to support interoperability but actually tries to force its users into using the web interface with ads.

Yet given Gmail's weak IMAP support, Thunderbird seems very happy to get along with it.

Performance issues I've had with Kmail aren't isolated towards only Gmails IMAP servers though. Had I had great performance from various non Gmail IMAP servers, but poor performance with Gmail's, I'd of likely concluded that Gmail itself was the issue and perhaps shutdown my Gmail accounts.

[Awesomeness]

And when KWin performs badly with the drivers I have
(...)
And for those who don't need the most OpenGL performance available, the FLOSS drivers are a good bet.

Could you please get your arguments straight? Your drivers cause performance regressions, so the argument you're forced to use the buggy binary drivers for performance reasons is bogus.

If you for whatever reason choose to use KDE software on a broken foundation, fine. But blame yourself for glitches resulting from that and not KDE.
What's next? When all the world moves to Wayland but Catalyst still doesn't support it, will you bitch at Wayland because the drivers won't work? Seems like it because all you do is point the finger into the wrong direction.
It's AMD's fault that Catalyst is broken, not KDE's.
NVidia's drivers were buggy as well. NVidia got a lot of beating for that until NVidia finally fixed the drivers. It's just that NVidia's bugs surfaced earlier. http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/nvidias-...lly-on-kde-4x/

[BlackStar]

There's also Rekonq which isn't so bad.

Never heard of that. Fortunately, there are many suitable browsers available (went for Opera&Chrome instead).

Dolphin displays the files content, but this is tunable. Did you had this enabled?

Tried with both. Didn't really make a difference (the delay happened after clicking on a folder and before displaying its contents).

When do you need to press enter twice? Animations are really smooth on my box.

The animations are really smooth but take 1sec to finish! Move your mouse over the options and see how the selection box lags behind.

Unity is cool. However, they should make Ubuntu/Unity more consistent. In example there's no global menu for LibreOffice and there are no native scroll bars in some applications like Firefox etc. There should be some categories in app menu, too.

Yeah, there's a lot of work to be done for Unity. It was better than I expected, though.

[Awesomeness]

Yet given Gmail's weak IMAP support, Thunderbird seems very happy to get along with it.

TB contains hacks to be compatible with ?GMail IMAP?. Most of my mail lies on a friend's private mail server. KMail handles more than 20.000 mails, accumulated over the past 10 or so years on his IMAP server in addition to high-volume mailing lists (which are redirected to local storage via filter rule because I don't want to spam my friend's server).

[mugginz]

Could you please get your arguments straight? Your drivers cause performance regressions, so the argument you're forced to use the buggy binary drivers for performance reasons is bogus.

I'm not arguing that the performance regressions are all down to drivers, others are. However, not all drivers for Linix are perfect. Scratch that. None are. But... the nVidia binary drivers have a reputation for being the most performant, stable, and up to date. It is with these drivers that I have the most experience with KDE. I've also used KDE with FGLRX and it's what I use Unity with at the moment.

The second most amount of time spent with KDE for me has been with the Intel drivers.

If you for whatever reason choose to use KDE software on a broken foundation, fine. But blame yourself for glitches resulting from that and not KDE.

And as I've said, I did test with multiple drivers.
And I also said that I'd been using KDE as a full time desktop from 3.0 through 4.5 (KDE 4 series full time since 4.1) though have a lesser used machine with 4.6
I did have 4.0 on a testing machine as I was pretty excited about KDE 4 and wanted an early look at it.
Prior to that, I'd run KDE 3 on a Mandrake 9.0 install.
I've run KDE as my full time desktop from 2002 through to 2009/10 on various distributions.

Let me assure you I'm not someone that hasn't given KDE a bit of a run.

What's next? When all the world moves to Wayland but Catalyst still doesn't support it, will you bitch at Wayland because the drivers won't work? Seems like it because all you do is point the finger into the wrong direction.

Not at all. In fact I would expect FGLRX not to support Wayland until way after nVidia and friends.

If that's how it is, I'll be annoyed at AMD, not at the Wayland dev team.

It's AMD's fault that Catalyst is broken, not KDE's.

And if the issues I had were predominately on an AMD card that'd be a relevant statement.

NVidia's drivers were buggy as well.

Not all the time though.

NVidia got a lot of beating for that until NVidia finally fixed the drivers. It's just that NVidia's bugs surfaced earlier. http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/nvidias-...lly-on-kde-4x/

So if I deliver a desktop environment, and in testing I notice issues that I want to blame on a sub system, shouldn't I code around those? When other environments demonstrate that it's possible to deliver an operational result on a given platform there are valid questions to be directed to the KDE team.



So, we know that there are no perfect graphics drivers for Linux.

We know that generally speaking, the nVidia binary blob has been the best bet for a decent user experience.

I've been using nVidia graphics cards almost exclusively for my Linux machines since 2002, only switching to AMD when I had a use case that ultimately was better met by the "Red Team."

My complaints about KDE's lack of stability are from my nVidia using period.



So, you say, don't use Catalyst and don't use nVidia? Well then I guess that leaves Intel. Yay!