KDE SC 4.6.2 Codename Is Dedicated To GNOME 3.0

[kraftman]

You are mistaken. Ubuntu does not ship patent-encumbered codecs. It asks the user whether he would like to install them (and assume responsibility) as necessary.

The main difference is that codec installation is painless in Ubuntu (click 'yes' and enter password), unlike in openSUSE (click 'yes', navigate to a website, enter linux version, click download, click run, enter password)..

That's why Kubuntu is better option imho. It could be much better distribution, but Canonical is Ubuntu oriented.

[Remco]

You are mistaken. Ubuntu does not ship patent-encumbered codecs. It asks the user whether he would like to install them (and assume responsibility) as necessary.

The main difference is that codec installation is painless in Ubuntu (click 'yes' and enter password), unlike in openSUSE (click 'yes', navigate to a website, enter linux version, click download, click run, enter password)..

It's even worse. You have to ignore that Yes button in the first dialog and click on the inline link instead. If you click on Yes you'll get stuck in a useless repository manager.

It's too bad that openSUSE/KDE is not up to snuff, because I really like their intentions. I'm almost tempted to go in and fix a bunch of the issues I mentioned myself, but I know how much effort that'll take.

[BlackStar]

It's hard to not mention Gnome now. Exactly the same can be said. If you follow Arch Linux forums you will notice Gnome 3 is unstable. It's in testing, but those bugs are rather Gnome, not packages bugs. Or just go to gnome bugzilla.

I'd expect such bugs in testing but not in the second revision of a stable release. It's embarassing, since 4.6.0 I haven't logged into a single KDE session without some random application crashing.

You have mentioned only one application. There are more serious stability problems in Gnome3. Btw. let's take a look at Evolution to make a fair comparison. There are 250 critical bugs open and dozens of bugs which causes Evolution to crash. Like this one:

(a) Two wrongs don't make something right. (Bugs in Gnome don't make KDE any less buggy).

(b) I just tried reproducing this Evolution bug and it didn't crash.

I recommend to stop playing in what software is more buggy, because Coverity did the report and KDE is much better when comes to number of bugs per LoC.

But you know what? My Ubuntu/Gnome desktop is significantly more stable than my Arch/KDE one. I don't get random crashes, I don't get random compositor restarts and I don't get windows animations randomly moving to the wrong corner of the screen!

[devius]

let's take a look at Evolution to make a fair comparison. There are 250 critical bugs open and dozens of bugs which causes Evolution to crash.

(a) Two wrongs don't make something right. (Bugs in Gnome don't make KDE any less buggy).

Exactly. That's why I switched to Thunderbird. It's unbelievable how crappy both leading linux DE mail clients are.

PS: Anybody tried running Evolution on a 1024x768 or smaller resolution? Why the fuck isn't it possible to resize anything?? Even when it's just blank space?? WHY?? It drives me crazy... What?? Try evolution express you say? But that way I only get a mail client!!! What if I want to manage contacts or a calendar?? And also, what's the difference anyway? The only thing I notice (besides the lack of contacts/calendar/etc buttons) is that you're now able to resize things. And don't even get me started on KMail...

[devius]

Oh yes, that's right. I just upgraded to 4.6.2. This is how my desktop looks now:


Notice how the top panel is located away from the top edge of the screen, where it used to be. I have to push it up every single time I restart the computer. Luckily suspend/hibernation works! Also note how the cashew button on the bottom panel is covering the shutdown/end session icons, although the panel's max size is set to the maximum width of the screen. Sure these aren't show-stopping bugs, but they are irritating.

[mat69]

I have to agree there. KDE is _really_ unstable. Different tools crash at a regular pace. Sometimes I have > 2 crashes per day, e.g. NepomukSomethingService [1] crashing when I navigate in Dolphin, Ark often crashing, Akregator crashing [2] ...
If you'd say Linux is stable you should for sure not mention KDE. In my experience Gnome is a lot more stable. For me also Windows XP is a _lot_ more stable. I can't remeber the last time I had a crash in Windows XP.

And I think it is unfortunate, because KDE has lots of potential but as was mentioned before it lacks polishing nearly everywhere. Maybe KDE would need more design people, more women (on Gnome were are working quite a lot as it apears on planetgnome) or ... I don't know.
Direction is kinda missing.

E.g. those great "activities" which I use. A nice concept but very buggy. Often Dolphin windows or konsole windows of suspended activities appear on my current one when starting a KDE session. Also it is a real pita to assign windows to activities. Hardly anyone will use or even learn about those.

Then you have the notifications. Man I really hate them, they take so much place and are the complete reverse of unobtrusive.


Btw. before you also say here that the error is the human behind the pc ... well you'd be right but other than you think --> programmers are the error most times, not the users. I have fixed quite some crashes by now so it is not just my imagination which experiences those.


In contrast I tried out Gnome 3.0 lately and imo it is really nice. Yes it has bugs but it is already very smooth and very useable. Best of all it does not constantly say "hey look at me, here I am, hey, HEY, HEY, HEY, ok, now I am hiding ..." So it is unobtrusive. And to be honest it has already more polish in the desktop area than many counter parts in KDE.

So what does that mean in total? For me it means that the KDE Desktop has nice ideas, nice concepts but nothing is really finished. Heck 4.0 was released at the beginning of 2008. We are 3 years later now. And yeah I myself could have done better.


PS.: I also failed to install a network printer via the KDE gui. Then I did it directly via cups, which actually worked. Interestingly the gui in Ubuntu 10.4 also hardly worked in my specific case.

[1] Nepomuk itself is shaping up nice lately, even though it is still hard for users, unfortunately it is even harder for developers to use right. Though Sebastian Tr?g is working really hard to improve the situation, he'd probably need some clones though.
[2] famous bug that won't be fixed (guess none knows how), instead we are waiting for an Akregator version using Akonadi which hopefully should not have that problem.

[BlackStar]

Exactly. That's why I switched to Thunderbird. It's unbelievable how crappy both leading linux DE mail clients are.

How sad is it that even webmail clients, like gmail, are more usable than the full-blown email suites in the two DEs? I tried hard to like both Evolution and KMail - but they both suck compared to gmail.

In the end, I just gave up and went with Opera Mail instead. Nice, clean, fast - and opens right there in a tab.

PS: Anybody tried running Evolution on a 1024x768 or smaller resolution? Why the fuck isn't it possible to resize anything?? Even when it's just blank space?? WHY?? It drives me crazy... What?? Try evolution express you say? But that way I only get a mail client!!! What if I want to manage contacts or a calendar?? And also, what's the difference anyway? The only thing I notice (besides the lack of contacts/calendar/etc buttons) is that you're now able to resize things. And don't even get me started on KMail...

Yeah, what's up with this shit? Around 30% of this is wasted space that you can't resize. What's worse, you cannot collapse email discussions into threads, so you have to waste space on both email titles and an email view or read emails on a different window (try that on a netbook - unbelievably annoying).

[liam]

Punchcards are for pussies Hardwiring is where it's at.

Now you're just being a masochist

The name of the game should always be sensible defaults, even where other options are on offer. I find Gnome a little on the under-configurable side but I still use it so I can't find it too terminal.

I see the pro-gnomes try to justify its level of configurability based on the "too many switches spoils the broth" principle but I don't buy their explanation. Sure, there's a level where things get out of control but I and others think they've gone too far with simplicity. Thankfully, if it gets too much to bear there's other environments to jump ship to.

By "pro-Gnomers" I assume you mean users? Also, are you speaking primarily about GS? If so, I agree, but they had time constraints and they WILL add more configurability into the shell. I promise you you'll see a way to tweak fonts either as an update or for .2.
Something that does bother me, though, is this idea amongst the main devs (Owen/Jon, mostly, IIRC) that Gnome should be recognizable like OSX. A product that people shouldn't be able to tweak(much). I think you'll see this somewhat even with the wallpaper fiasco on F15. That is simply going too far and is against a core principle of *nix-y design. Designing things to work BEST with each other is smart, but making it near impossible to change almost anything IS non-political fascism (again, I don't think for a moment that the devs have anything sinister in mind, but truly believe that this leads to the best end user experience).
Taking some ideas from OSX is fine, but some are just not well thought-out (like the new toggle switches used on the desktop -- when I first saw these in GS months ago I had never encountered them before and wasn't sure how to use them, or which side was on/off -- the later bit was mostly due to bad theming, but the fact is the metaphor is a sliding switch just doesn't work well on a normal desktop).

Your response along the lines of "just edit the config file you noob " to Joe Sixpack's comment didn't seem to be a viable answer for your garden variety user though. I think he was saying that it's a weakness of Gnome that they don't provide enough configurability and my respone was aqlong the lines of "and config file editing isn't really a very good answer to that." For the more 1337, tweaker tools, gconf and config file editing gets it across the line though I guess.

Again, I wasn't being serious. The desktop (gnome 2) was fine for almost any user, and the things that they wanted to change could be changed easily, but if someone is really complaining about, say, the position of the window title in the title bar, then edit the xml theme file, or install another theme.
One more thing, gconf-editor makes it really easy to change tons of things, but something that is annoying is that you can add key/values that are essentially undocumented. That really sucked.

I'd say compared to KDE, G2 isn't very tweakable out of the box. As for editing config and xml files, they are hacks for end users though. If you know what you're doing, nothing is impossible. If something about Windows 7 gives me the shits, there's the option to disassemble the code, gain an understanding of it, and patch accordingly. Many would consider that going too far. I think the environments default position should be to be somewhat tweakable outta the box.

Editing binaries and editing xml/css is about as far apart as things could be. Regardless, of course KDE is more easily configurable, but so what? As I said, I think that for the majority of users (which is what Gnome has been going for) it (gnome 2) provides a good balance, and if more is needed there are also tweak tools available that can end up exposing KDE levels of configurability, but these are unsupported and can break from release to release.

I generally argue how things should be for the end user though. Again, with source code on the table, no proper computer nerd can ultimately argue that something isn't unalterable, but most people aren't proper computer nerds.

Amen

I have that dream as well but as we're so far off from it at the moment preferences panes are a necessary evil.

Agreed. I think our argument is over the amount not there existence (at least in the near-to-mid term). That then becomes a debate purely of preferences once you pass a certain level of configurability (which I think Gnome2 passed).

My beef with unconfigurability is mostly pointed at Gnome 2.

If Gnome Shells uncomfigurability is the result of decisions following a "If we haven't got time to implement if properly and bug freely, we'll wait till we can" type process, then I'm all for it.

I won't argue about G2 with you, but peoples gripes with G3, as far as things like theming/fonts/etc) will be resolved, IMHO. If simply doesn't make sense that they wouldn't since part of the reason (if not the sole reason) for moving to css theming was the idea of bringing in more user/devs. Why do this unless you encourage modification?

The mechanism for tweakability, that is hitting config files and gconf, is not the place for the majority of it though I think. I guess for those that use G2 it must be "good enough" or they'd find something else. I hope for a world where things are as they should be, not just good enough.
Sometimes the gnomers try to paint the lack of configurabilty as based in good design and that less is more. My point is less is more only up to a point, and then less becomes less.

I have to say, having used KDE on and off for years, I loathe its way of exposing options. I don't think I am particularly dense (experiences with gtk3 switches excepted) but it appeared (both in K3 and K4) to be a mess. Supposedly OSX does a nice job of this, but I couldn't say for certain.
As for gconf, I really like it, but it needs to be better documented (even if it is only doxygen generated). If it were, it would be a nice intermediate option but currently, I am not sure they are going to maintain g(d)conf-editor. The commandline version is full of hateful suckage, IMO
Lastly regarding Gnome's design philosophy, I think it a very good thing that they think deeply about problems, but they mustn't eliminate a hack (like user window management) until they have a solution. So, no, I don't think Gnome developers are making excuses, I think they are expressing a genuine belief. I mean, does anyone doubt that they couldn't hack up a monstrous tweak-tool that exposed almost all toolkit/kernel/driver/etc runtime options in a few months? The ability to make these changes are already there, all they would need is a gui to contain them and gio to handle file alterations.

[prophet5]

It's interesting that different people have experienced different bugs. Kubuntu 10.10 KDE 4.6.0 was a dream for me; everything worked. KDE 4.6.1 broke a few things for me; ie. apps that ran as root (update manager for example) lost the Oxygen style and defaulted to "Windows" style. CD tray would instantly close if ejected when Dolphin or K3b were open. Ejecting from device manager would sometimes report device busy as a result. Device Notifier would pop-up in the middle of the screen somewhere. K3b reported errors reading newly burned discs and creating ISO's.I nearly went for a complete reinstall but...

Installed KDE 4.6.2: Root apps style Fixed. No shutdown issues that others have experienced. K3b is playing nice again (although haven't burned anything but have created an ISO image). Had to manually add "dev.cdrom.autoclose = 0" to /etc/sysctl.conf to keep the cd tray open. The only outstanding issue is the device notifier popping up in the middle of the screen; however this only happens when the icon is set to "Hide". If it is set to "visible", it's business as usual.

As for printer setup; I haven't seen the CUPS web interface since Sabayon 4.2 KDE 4.2.4

[mat69]

CD tray would instantly close if ejected when Dolphin or K3b were open.

Yeah that issue got on my nerves a lot. Though even worse was the issue of the CD/DVD spinning up if activating the dolphin window or if having the open/save dialog. That drove me quite mad. Now that is fixed in 4.6 though I have that issue again in master. ^^

You see if I'd show these issues to friends not using KDE they'd laugh, since they have never experienced such problems.
In contrast we have/had all these in recent time.