KDE Does Its Second 4.7 Release Candidate

[mugginz]

Currently I use Kontact 4.4.11 on SC 4.7RC which uses Akonadi for the address book only. KMail is still the 'classic' one.

Which means I wont be using Kmail then I guess.

Shouldn't happen if you use distro defaults. If you try to be smarter than the distributor who has years of experience packaging the best combination of KDE software and its dependencies, you'll likely fail.

Well certain people may, but if I'm going to build KDE from source and then bash it for being unstable, I'm going to make sure all my ducks are in a row.

But...

No, I used the distro packages.

I use it with IMAP all the time with tens of thousands of mails. No problems at all.

Our experiences differ here. May I suggest for a laugh you try a current Thunderbird install for comparison. Perhaps an update to Kmail has sped it up?

Update your drivers.

I did.

I didn't. The few pieces of KDE software that crash (mostly rekonq with Flash) are not part of the Software Compilation.

I don't use rekonq. When I ran KDE 3.5 and earlier I generally used Konqueror for browsing. I loved the way you could split up a Konqueror window to suite the task at hand. If I hit a site that did't work well with it, I'd switch to something like Firebird (now Firefox)

PulseAudio ? esp. in conjunction with Flash ? has the habit for me to randomly mute all sound. No idea what's causing that but as I don't have headsets, I don't need its functionality anyway. Ploain ALSA is enough for me.
I just mentioned PulseAudio because I don't use it and maybe (just maybe) some behavior not experienced by me can be related to that.

I actually have no issues with Pulse and Flash these days, though of course there were well publicised issues when Pulse was just starting to get rolled out.

At least on my system applications that directly link to GStreamer (like Cheese) constantly crash and on top of that music players using Phonon can't even seek when using GStreamer as back-end. Bugginess of multimedia-related applications may or may not be related to GStreamer. VLC works better here.

I tried all three. I also ran into the seek issues you speak of.

[kraftman]

At least on my system applications that directly link to GStreamer (like Cheese) constantly crash and on top of that music players using Phonon can't even seek when using GStreamer as back-end. Bugginess of multimedia-related applications may or may not be related to GStreamer. VLC works better here.

I had the same experience with Cheese in Fedora and the same problems with gstreamer in Kubuntu. However, there are few gstreamer packages which provide mp3 support and afaik one is working right. It was fluendo or something, but I'm not sure.

[kraftman]

But I thought i'd just throw in that the dbus developers were quite honest in admitting that the bug was in their code. They didn't want to commit the fix right away because they cared more about preserving backwards compatibility for GNOME than fixing the crashes that KDE was having. Eventually, it was shown that the fix would maintain compatibility in all but a very obscure case that no one was actually hitting, and they decided to fix it.

So this all freedesktop.org is a bullshit. It should be called gnome-lovers.org

[BlackStar]

Wait, a KDE flamewar without me? Ah, it hasn't devolved into flames yet, phew.

:P

My recent experience with KDE reflects mugginz's pretty closely. I bought a new laptop recently that failed to run Windows (...don't ask) but runs Linux flawlessly. This is a netbook-class CPU (Fusion) with an Intel SSD and 6GB of memory - should be plenty fast.


I wanted up-to-date packages so I went with Arch + KDE4.6.x. That was a mistake. KDE 4.6.5 is still way too unstable for day to day use, if you use your machine for anything work-related. The most aggravating issues:

1. I have used a vertical taskbar on the left side of the monitor since the WinXP days. On KDE 4.6.x, the taskbar would randomly disappear from there and reappear in the center of the screen. No way to fix other than a logout - absolutely maddening!

2. With a vertical taskbar, many kwin animations start going crazy. They work alright at first but as they gradually start flowing towards the wrong side of the screen, which is confusing and downright sloppy-looking.

3. Media players would not play sound with phonon-xine. Phonon-gstreamer fixed this.

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

5. KMail gets bogged down pretty hard on large IMAP accounts. (But at least it looks nicer than Evolution).

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

7. Startup speed. Why does it take 10 seconds to login once I enter my password? Booting to the greeter takes less than that!

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

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?


Now for the good stuff:

1. Hide menubars on Ctrl+M. This is perfect for small monitors! (Someone should make the menu collapsed into a button instead, that would be perfect).

2. Plasma is a classic desktop on steroid overload. Very nice.

3. Kopete, KTorrent, Gwenview are pretty good.

4. Nice configurability (per-window customization in KWin, keyboard shortcuts, everything).

5. Pulseaudio worked perfectly and *improved* audio latency and quality significantly, compared to kmix.

6. The date/time applet is great!

7. I love it that you can hide the chrome of any window with a simple keyboard shortcut! Great flexibility.

8. Yakuake is by *far* the best drop-down terminal emulator available today. Nothing else even comes close (gnome-terminal, guake and terminator all suck in comparison).

9. Dual monitor support works well.


I stayed with KDE for around a month this time. I *really* wanted to like it, but the raw bugginess finally got to me and I installed Ubuntu/Unity instead. Moving wasn't an easy decision. After KDE, I tried every other DE and WM I could get my hands on (Gnome3, XFCE, LXDE, e17, OpenBox and a couple of others) but nothing really compared to it. Gnome3 was nicer than I thought, but wasted way too much vertical space for my 1366x768 monitor (plus its dock is not very usable). XFCE is measurably faster on the netbook but is very lacking in polish. LXDE crashed on startup, e17 would have been great in 2001, OpenBox was fine for what it was.

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.

KDE has great potential. It's very flexible, it has some great underlying technology and I love how screenspace-efficient it can get. However, they must *really* tighten quality control before I'd trust my living to it.

[Awesomeness]

May I suggest for a laugh you try a current Thunderbird install for comparison.

I use both Thunderbird and Kontact. TB is my mail client for work-related stuff, Kontact/KMail for private stuff. I like to have both completely separated and using two different clients is easier than using the same client for both as different users.

TB handles a few thousand mails on the IMAP server, KMail a few tens of thousands. So far I can't see any difference in IMAP performance.
However TB's workflow sucks balls:
No sane keyboard shortcuts. In KMail I simply press R to reply to default, L to reply to mailing list, A to reply to all, Shift-A to reply to author.

TB's address book is a joke. It is not even in the same league as KAddressbook.

TB takes years to open but by default hasn't even much functionality. PGP and such all require add-ons.

TB's search sucks most.

[devsk]

The issue has been already noted before I posted here.

The issue was a bit on the amusing side to me, and a little bit annoying as well.

As a long time KDE user, suffering through the 4.0/4.1 debacle in the hope that a reliable desktop would be finally forthcoming at some point in the future, I waited patiently release after release, only to finally switch to Gnome in the 4.5 time frame. When I did, I was presented with a much more reliable day to day experience, however, compared to KDE, seemingly much less feature rich. After acclimatizing to Gnome, I found it was pretty much on par for the core stuff, and very much more robust.

I had noted to several people the various bugs/crashes/issues I was having with KDE only to be essentially told that it wasn't really KDE's fault at all, and that the real culprit were those pesky distro packagers. No, the bugs were being introduced by evil forces external to the KDE folks, and that I should swap to distro A, then B, then maybe even C, because that crash was the distros fault, and that all my stability answers were lying just around the corner, with that one blessed KDE based distro that did something that all the others didn't do, not crash. I was left to wonder why KDE was so non fault-tolerant as to be rendered unstable by the act of putting it into a Linux software suite that was complete enough to provide a fully functional environment.

I grew weary, and swapped to the "other guys'" desktop in the hope of finding a stable desktop, and indeed that's what I found.

When news of the 4.7RC2 was posted here, I thought to myself now might be a good time to test KDE again to see if it'd finally become stable enough for day to day usage only to run up against the linkage breakage in the official KDE statement. Obviously not a biggy, but perhaps indicative of the level of quality control in general practised by those over in KDE land. It was that simple issue that brought back vivid memories of some of those old crashers reminding me that no, maybe I'm just better off with what I have now.

Pretty good rant from a "long time KDE user"!

I moved to KDE 4 with KDE 4.1 and never ran into any issue which reduced my love for KDE.

Try 4.6.5 next time!

[kayosiii]

Wait, a KDE flamewar without me? Ah, it hasn't devolved into flames yet, phew.

:P

My recent experience with KDE reflects mugginz's pretty closely. I bought a new laptop recently that failed to run Windows (...don't ask) but runs Linux flawlessly. This is a netbook-class CPU (Fusion) with an Intel SSD and 6GB of memory - should be plenty fast.


I wanted up-to-date packages so I went with Arch + KDE4.6.x. That was a mistake. KDE 4.6.5 is still way too unstable for day to day use, if you use your machine for anything work-related. The most aggravating issues:

1. I have used a vertical taskbar on the left side of the monitor since the WinXP days. On KDE 4.6.x, the taskbar would randomly disappear from there and reappear in the center of the screen. No way to fix other than a logout - absolutely maddening!

2. With a vertical taskbar, many kwin animations start going crazy. They work alright at first but as they gradually start flowing towards the wrong side of the screen, which is confusing and downright sloppy-looking.

3. Media players would not play sound with phonon-xine. Phonon-gstreamer fixed this.

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

5. KMail gets bogged down pretty hard on large IMAP accounts. (But at least it looks nicer than Evolution).

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

7. Startup speed. Why does it take 10 seconds to login once I enter my password? Booting to the greeter takes less than that!

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

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?


Now for the good stuff:

1. Hide menubars on Ctrl+M. This is perfect for small monitors! (Someone should make the menu collapsed into a button instead, that would be perfect).

2. Plasma is a classic desktop on steroid overload. Very nice.

3. Kopete, KTorrent, Gwenview are pretty good.

4. Nice configurability (per-window customization in KWin, keyboard shortcuts, everything).

5. Pulseaudio worked perfectly and *improved* audio latency and quality significantly, compared to kmix.

6. The date/time applet is great!

7. I love it that you can hide the chrome of any window with a simple keyboard shortcut! Great flexibility.

8. Yakuake is by *far* the best drop-down terminal emulator available today. Nothing else even comes close (gnome-terminal, guake and terminator all suck in comparison).

9. Dual monitor support works well.


I stayed with KDE for around a month this time. I *really* wanted to like it, but the raw bugginess finally got to me and I installed Ubuntu/Unity instead. Moving wasn't an easy decision. After KDE, I tried every other DE and WM I could get my hands on (Gnome3, XFCE, LXDE, e17, OpenBox and a couple of others) but nothing really compared to it. Gnome3 was nicer than I thought, but wasted way too much vertical space for my 1366x768 monitor (plus its dock is not very usable). XFCE is measurably faster on the netbook but is very lacking in polish. LXDE crashed on startup, e17 would have been great in 2001, OpenBox was fine for what it was.

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.

KDE has great potential. It's very flexible, it has some great underlying technology and I love how screenspace-efficient it can get. However, they must *really* tighten quality control before I'd trust my living to it.

To be honest it sounds like you have a graphics driver issue. I run two KDE based workstations (4GB of ram, 460 Geforce, binary drivers), In past i have run an intel based netbook. I run with a vertical taskbar on the left hand side of the screen (have since it was possible) and have not seen the issues you speak of.
Taking one and two together makes it look like gfx hardware. It could also be a bug in KDE related to a configuration setting or another software component.

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.

I am surprised that Konqueror was there by default now days it's there because some people still prefer it to dolphin as a file manager.

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

Dolphin is damned near instantaneous for me here. But I remember that there was a bug at one point that made it quite slow. Startup is usually a few seconds but 10 sounds a little high in this time I think kded is started and all the services that go with that, kde/qt libaries are preloaded etc. Taken that Dolphin,Startup and run are all acting slow - It sounds like disk access is being a bottle neck. Either from slow hardware (unlikely) or through something else generating a lot of disk activity. If a KDE component was doing this I would suspect Nepomuk.

KWin and Compiz use different hardware paths (Compiz uses OpenGL 1.x and KWin 2.x+ IIRC) some hardware and some drivers don't perform as well on the new code paths. The KWin developers have elected to not fix bugs that should really be fixed in the Graphics drivers, this reduces the complexity and increases the serviceable life of that code considerably and benefits everybody since hardware should work as advertised for other projects as well. The downside is that the owners of some hardware are going to be left in the cold for longer than otherwise would be.

One other neat feature for netbooks is the ability to hide the title etc for any application that is maximised.

[mugginz]

Pretty good rant from a "long time KDE user"!

I moved to KDE 4 with KDE 4.1 and never ran into any issue which reduced my love for KDE.

Try 4.6.5 next time!

Wish I could say the same.

Edit: Been running KDE since Mandrake Linux 9.0. It was the first Linux desktop I ever ran. Ran 3.5 and had a 4.0 install on another machine for testing which was not suitable for day to day use for all the obvious reasons. The main machine went to the KDE 4 series with 4.1

Edit2: The reason the install's at 4.6.2 and not 4.6.5 is because I'd run out of patience with KDE.

[mugginz]

I use both Thunderbird and Kontact. TB is my mail client for work-related stuff, Kontact/KMail for private stuff. I like to have both completely separated and using two different clients is easier than using the same client for both as different users.

I've done this in the past also. It's what highlighted performance differences.

TB handles a few thousand mails on the IMAP server, KMail a few tens of thousands. So far I can't see any difference in IMAP performance.

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

However TB's workflow sucks balls:
No sane keyboard shortcuts. In KMail I simply press R to reply to default, L to reply to mailing list, A to reply to all, Shift-A to reply to author.

TB's address book is a joke. It is not even in the same league as KAddressbook.

TB takes years to open but by default hasn't even much functionality. PGP and such all require add-ons.

TB's search sucks most.

As far as the address book is concerned, it's one of the reasons I wanted to use Kmail. To have your email package utilise the desktop wide address book that most other software uses in your desktop environment is a definite win and I'd say my Thurnderbird experience is a little less good then Kmail as far as this functionality is concerned.

I should say that for most arguments regarding KDE vs Gnome2 that focus on functionality, I'd be inclined to side on the KDE side of things. At least to some degree. It's not KDEs feature set that concerns me. I would say though in recent times I think the Gnome2 desktop has become nicer to use and so the feature gap is a little less than it once was.

[BlackStar]

To be honest it sounds like you have a graphics driver issue. I run two KDE based workstations (4GB of ram, 460 Geforce, binary drivers), In past i have run an intel based netbook. I run with a vertical taskbar on the left hand side of the screen (have since it was possible) and have not seen the issues you speak of.
Taking one and two together makes it look like gfx hardware. It could also be a bug in KDE related to a configuration setting or another software component.

A graphics driver issue that makes the taskbar move to the center of the screen? Ok, I've seen stranger stuff happen due to driver bugs, but in this case I'm more inclined to believe it's memory corruption that's messing things up.

Why? Because this also happens if I disable composition.

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.

Hm, that's quite possible. Doesn't really matter now, since GStreamer worked fine, but Ill keep that in mind when I reinstall.

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

I've turned to gmail, too. It's quite sad that none of the desktop email clients can quite match its feature set and usability (esp. conversation mode).

Dolphin is damned near instantaneous for me here. But I remember that there was a bug at one point that made it quite slow.

You need to keep in mind that I'm running KDE on a 1.6GHz E-350 CPU. On a faster machine, I can imagine that Dolphin would be much faster,but this "weak" CPU highlights relative performance (Nautilus responds visibly faster and Thunar is near damn instantaneous).

Startup is usually a few seconds but 10 sounds a little high in this time I think kded is started and all the services that go with that, kde/qt libaries are preloaded etc. Taken that Dolphin,Startup and run are all acting slow - It sounds like disk access is being a bottle neck. Either from slow hardware (unlikely) or through something else generating a lot of disk activity. If a KDE component was doing this I would suspect Nepomuk.

No, the SSD is certainly not the bottleneck here (170MB/s sustained read speeds, trim enabled), since applications start up instantaneously once KDE loads.

I think this is CPU-related, since KDE started up quite a bit faster (3-4sec) when I used the same disk on a 2.6GHz desktop CPU. That said, I don't know what could be hitting the CPU so hard on startup.

Ubuntu/Unity is just as bad here, so it's not an isolated issue. (Gnome3 and XFCE load up visibly faster).

KWin and Compiz use different hardware paths (Compiz uses OpenGL 1.x and KWin 2.x+ IIRC) some hardware and some drivers don't perform as well on the new code paths.

Well, this is a quite capable OpenGL 4.1 GPU. I find it quite hard to swallow that it can run Portal 2 at 30fps with antialiasing enabled, yet choke with simple KWin effects.

When I say simple, I really mean simple: no OpenGL 2.x shaders (blur, lanczos) or any other fancy thing. I disabled everything other than the minimize animation and it *still* choked on that.

Did the animation cause to re-render the whole screen? No idea. Compiz behaved better here.

I'm not certain this is all due to performance differences, though. It could be that KWin is using a different timing method that might cause it to miss more screen refreshes than compiz (due to vsync), giving it the illusion of jerkiness.