KDE 4.9.3 November Update Fixes 86 Bugs

[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.

[droste]

People calling Core2 low end, really?

Nobody did this.

Kmail is alright but it sucks too

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

[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.

[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.

[Akka]

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're probably lucky and have very big hardware ressources dedicated to the sole desktop environment (arguably, hard to mesure).

I use Arch linux and KDE, its mostly unpatched upstream package and I think they work excellent.
The only hardware requirement is (I think) working opengl driver. My old core2duo 1.6 GHz run KDE nicely. The only time I have a little to much processor activity is the initial indexing of my hard drive with strigi the first time after I set up the indexing.
Strigi is by the way, supposed to be replaced by some sort of nepomuk based indexer in kde 4.10 (according to a recent blog post).

[orzel]

Well, reading this thread makes me wonder. Maybe it's actually the distributions who are messing up KDE so that it crashes.
I'm running Arch and KDE, and, in all honesty, never experienced a single crash since the day I'm using KDE.
I thinks it's because Arch doesn't modify KDE to the extent other distributions do, though I of course don't have a proof for that.

Or maybe I'm just extremely lucky.
Whatever, KDE always worked best for me, and I'm really longin for the Kwin improvements in 4.10

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're probably lucky and have very big hardware ressources dedicated to the sole desktop environment (arguably, hard to mesure).

[BitRot]

Well, reading this thread makes me wonder. Maybe it's actually the distributions who are messing up KDE so that it crashes.
I'm running Arch and KDE, and, in all honesty, never experienced a single crash since the day I'm using KDE.
I thinks it's because Arch doesn't modify KDE to the extent other distributions do, though I of course don't have a proof for that.

Or maybe I'm just extremely lucky.
Whatever, KDE always worked best for me, and I'm really longin for the Kwin improvements in 4.10

[boast]

KDE is a mess. I get constant crashes regardless of distro and often

I don't like the features and tools of XFCE as much but at least there's way less crashes with XFCE.

Gnome 3 does the same. However, I don't recall as many crashes but I only used it briefly

the bottom line, is every distro that I've used it with has had serious crashes/freezes.

something is wrong with your computer, hardware wise.

[droste]

I'd like to know how a stable KDE (edition) is. :-) Which distro and KDE edition do you use?

I'm using openSUSE 12.2 (standard installation, nothing removed). It comes with KDE 4.8 (you can switch to the upstream theme if you don't like the suse colors ;-)). Should be easy to check if it works for you using the KDE LiveCD.

[Panix]

I didn't say anything about how things are done, but how things are feel when using it. It feels very stable now.

It was clearly stated in may first post, that it is my personal experience and I just wanted to say that there are actually people using it without problems.

That's fine to say that. We don't need to argue, though, right?

I'd like to know how a stable KDE (edition) is. :-) Which distro and KDE edition do you use?

I like some of the features, don't like others but the bottom line, is every distro that I've used it with has had serious crashes/freezes. I tried to pinpoint to certain software or was told to check hardware but most of it was declared okay.

I think it could just be using too many tabs or apps in Iceweasel/Firefox (I have been using KDE with Debian and Debian variants) but it even feels a bit unstable with other apps as well.

I am wondering if it is bloated since some people think it is whereas others think it's improving. I'm not sure how it could be both.

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...