Nepomuk Sees Major Improvements In KDE 4.10

[orzel]

How can you use a KDE desktop but not use anything plasma related?

You remove every plasmoid your distro has installed by default, and you dont install any new. This boost your average time between crashes and prevent memory use to explode. And of course, you kill Amarok, but plasma is not the only reason why.

And kwin usually knows about driver bugs: It disables certain features known to be broken with ceratin hardware/driver.

Yes, i know it's supposed to. But it kinda fail somehow as I have to disable it manually on lot of computers (middle-end usually). I'm not sure why, but i think the "black list" of kwin is about buggy/unsupported drivers. The problem on my users'computers is rather that it slows down the computer like hell, even though there's no obvious 'bug' with opengl.

This bug took YEARS to get fixed, and when it finally was nobody mentioned that in the report...)

Did i mention total lack of QA in KDE ?

[Teho]

Did i mention total lack of QA in KDE ?

KDE has a QA Team and a Extra Mile Initiative and I would say that they are doing pretty good job nowadays. There hasn't been major bugs that would have affected me in 4.x.0 in a long time and even the first betas are usually working fine but if that isn't enough KDE releases five bug fix releases for every major version.


I think there's something seriously wrong with your distribution if Plasma, Amarok and Nepomuk are crashing or "exploding". I remember Nepomuk crashing in some beta year or two back, Plasma used to crash in the 4.3 times but after that and Amarok has never crashed for me, I think. I'm sure you have reported those bugs for your distribution/KDE?

[schmalzler]

You remove every plasmoid your distro has installed by default, and you dont install any new. This boost your average time between crashes and prevent memory use to explode. And of course, you kill Amarok, but plasma is not the only reason why.

Quite random action which may hit the "bad boy"
memory usage:
- Don't show events in the calendar (needs to configure any clock on your desktop!): this prevents akonadi from starting (and with that mysql...). In the same way disable contact runners from KRunner (+ several others you don't need)
- remove anything python-related: no printer applet (forces python2.7! if you have python3.2 configured as your default you may end up with both versions (+PyKDE4-packages!) getting loaded), no python-runners

This should also "fix" startup time.

The problem on my users'computers is rather that it slows down the computer like hell, even though there's no obvious 'bug' with opengl.

Probably tuning kwin might help:
* change the scale method (kwin desktop effects -> advanced-tab)
* disable blur effect!
* probably disable translucency effect, but that one should not hurt.

I am running kwin on a quite old pre-coregpu (~10 years old) without any problems.

[orzel]

Probably tuning kwin might help.

I dont wanna tune every computer i'm supposed to manage. But thanks for the hints on how to make KDE usable, that will probably help people still trying.

[orzel]

KDE has a QA Team and a Extra Mile Initiative and I would say that they are doing pretty good job nowadays.

They do. What i meant was that buggy stuff keeps on being merged and bugs keep on being piled on the bugtracker. Or, if you prefer, they might be the 'structure', but it fails doing its job.

There hasn't been major bugs that would have affected me in 4.x.0 in a long time and even the first betas are usually working fine but if that isn't enough KDE releases five bug fix releases for every major version.

KDE has a release plan that they honor it, but as almost nothing is being fixed on the stable branches, minor releases are almost empty. Just make a diff for a minor release, remove all the obvious/paperwork stuff such as renaming version strings and check what remains. Those are mostly identical versions.[/QUOTE]

I think there's something seriously wrong with your distribution if Plasma, Amarok and Nepomuk are crashing or "exploding".

I keep on reading this excuse "it's distro fault". But as said, those bugs are uniform among distribution. I see this around me on the computers i administer, and you can easily check on forums/trackers for different distributions how the problems are uniform.

My point of view is that it must be a real pain for distribution to handle all KDE bugs reported by users. It adds a lot of work for them just to triage them. I'm not sure how many distributions actually try to fix KDE (my wild guess: mostly opensuse?), but if they do, it must require a HUGE lot of ressources.

I'm sure you have reported those bugs for your distribution/KDE?

I did lost a lot of time carefully reporting bugs with details and so, but none were fixed, most were ignored, and few of them were just denied. I've stopped reporting bugs to KDE when i stopped using it.

[Teho]

They do. What i meant was that buggy stuff keeps on being merged and bugs keep on being piled on the bugtracker. Or, if you prefer, they might be the 'structure', but it fails doing its job.

There has been a lot of advancement on that area in the recent years. For example thanks to Git the master branch should always be ready to release; leading to less breakage in practise. There has been action to triage, fix and clean up the bug in bug trackers for projects like Dolphin, KWin, Nepomuk, Kate and Plasma just to name a few. In 2011 Trueg for example fixed all Nepomuk crashes and I would say that the project has been rock solid since (not that it would have crashed for me anyway).

I keep on reading this excuse "it's distro fault". But as said, those bugs are uniform among distribution. I see this around me on the computers i administer, and you can easily check on forums/trackers for different distributions how the problems are uniform.

Well they sure aren't that commont and crashes are usually the stuff that is fixed first. They can also easily result from bad packaging.

I did lost a lot of time carefully reporting bugs with details and so, but none were fixed, most were ignored, and few of them were just denied. I've stopped reporting bugs to KDE when i stopped using it.

Assuming that you are Orzel in KDE bug tracker then you have not reported a single bug for Plasma or Nepomuk (unless I'm missing something). Most seem to be fixed too. If not then please point me to the bugs you are refering to.

[ChrisXY]

KDE has a QA Team and a Extra Mile Initiative and I would say that they are doing pretty good job nowadays. There hasn't been major bugs that would have affected me in 4.x.0 in a long time and even the first betas are usually working fine but if that isn't enough KDE releases five bug fix releases for every major version.


I think there's something seriously wrong with your distribution if Plasma, Amarok and Nepomuk are crashing or "exploding". I remember Nepomuk crashing in some beta year or two back, Plasma used to crash in the 4.3 times but after that and Amarok has never crashed for me, I think. I'm sure you have reported those bugs for your distribution/KDE?

Plasma has been randomly crashing for me up to 4.7 but it's better now. But I can still (4.10 beta) reliably make it segfault by using the panel resize function and quickly "shaking" it a little bit.

Kwin sometimes crashes with the intel driver. It's only very occassionally but it does happen.

Then the taskbar plasmoid even in the 4.10 beta not reliably ordering entries. Just yesterday it stacked two entries.

The real buggy things are the programs that don't belong to kde itself but are kde related like akregator. It segfaulted randomly (probably while fetching feeds) up to 4.10 beta, but I think it stopped now. But it still can't get ordering feeds right. Especially the feed from fefe's blog is bad (http://blog.fefe.de/rss.xml?html). There are entries from phoronix, planet archlinux, smbc, spiked math, etc. randomly "leaking" into it.

[Ericg]

Then the taskbar plasmoid even in the 4.10 beta not reliably ordering entries. Just yesterday it stacked two entries.

That came up in the last "KDE" Thread. That bug, for all intents and purposes, is "WONTFIX" since the taskbar is being rewritten in QML which will either 1) Fix the stackng issue on its own or 2) Make all the bug reports for that bug completely useless since its not even remotely the same code anymore. Rewritten taskbar was SUPPOSED to hit 4.10 but the developer didnt finish it so its been pushed back to 4.11...unfortuntately.

[orzel]

That came up in the last "KDE" Thread. That bug, for all intents and purposes, is "WONTFIX" since <blabla>.

They are all WONTFIX because all parts are being written and written again. Great way to clean the tracker. This taskbar has been since.. kde 4 ? That is 4 years ago ? Whether design-wise or maintenance-wise, something that is still as broken 4 years later shows that there is a BIG engineering problem somewhere. Definitely. My opinion is that LOT of code in KDE shouldn't have landed there at first.

[orzel]

The real buggy things are the programs that don't belong to kde itself but are kde related like akregator.

I disagree.

First, because if this was true, then we could happily use KDE and just ignore such garbage. But it is not possible. All those so-said "technologies" they are so proud of are deeply connected / interlocked, and this is design decision (or lack of) at the very core of KDE, not in applications. The user is forced to have all this ugly mysql / java / whatever stuff killing his ressources.

Then because i think that (currently) the best part of KDE are some very great applications (okular, gwenview, dolphin, okteta). Unfortunately, indeed, there are a lot of garbage one, and 'akregator' is actually the worse i've seen. Have any developper ever has a look at the code in the last 10 years ? I guess that all those who did died righ away. You can check the logs, only minor stuff is touched (CMakefiles, translations, typos..). No wonder why : this is one of the ugliest code i've ever seen. It's UGLY AS HELL. If you're a developer, just have a look by yourself (be warned, this is frightening). There is some stuff like 3 or more "high-level-concept-i've read design patterns" classes with (Qt-)connections looping between all of them. It's a miracle that the application even starts. When some kind of event happens, an exponential sequence of signals are raised in loop, and it's yet another miracle that it actually stops one day.

I didn't mention konsole in the great applications, even though i use it daily. It is (imho) a very good application, just borked by the great idea to put all konsole shells in only task, so that any problem with one konsole tab will kill all your tabs. Yes, this is still valid, check current konsole code. More or less the same way they do with plasma so that any badly written plasmoid will kill your whole plasma (that is, if plasma doesn't kill itself before). And believe me, there are some very badly written plasmoid.