[Cialug] New desktop ?

[Jeff Chapin]

Granted, some of these might not be KDE4 related, but due to a bug I
list, I cannot test in gnome.

Stability, mainly. Things crash. Alot. Which combined with some of the
following make it exceedingly annoying.

Other than that, missing features.

I use it with 2 monitors -- One works at boot, the other needs to be
reenabled every time I *log out*. Which involves adding a second panel
-- again, since it forgot I had 2.

And adding all the widgets to it.

Which don't space themselves right -- since they are only allowed to
autospace. Adding a clock and a task manger results in the clock
claiming 50% of the space, and the task manager getting 50%, and trying
to cram all the applications into that space. Evidently they have a 3rd
party app that can be used to manually consume space, so I can give it
x%, and the clock and task manager 1/2 of what is left. That would let
me move the clock, but make the lack of task manager space worse. I have
to reset my wallpaper everytime, as well.

The system tray doesn't work -- I am guessing due to the fact that I had
it on the second panel. At first, my icons only appeared in one small
square on my desktop, since the default setting is some goofy container
thing -- but I fixed that. Now the icons appear twice on my desktop --
once on each monitor.If I tell KDE to put the tasks on the left screen
on the left handed task manager, and those on the right, on the right,
it does the opposite. Tasks on the left go on the right, those ont he
right, go on the left. The alternative setting? yeah, that is to have
all tasks on *both* task managers. This is related to the fact that you
cannot make a single panel span 2 monitors, and need to set up a second
panel on the second monitor.

You cannot have 2 panels on the same edge of the screen -- they will sit
on top of each other. Which means the setup I like and have used on
every OS since win98 no longer works. I cannot have one panel with quick
launch icons and one of open tasks.

Sound randomly breaks. Sometimes mplayer works with sound, but not xine,
or vice versa.

I cannot test in gnome, since every time I log out, or reboot, it
automatically logs me right back in again.

In KDE (but not on a tty) the left and up arrows do not repeat. The
other keys all do.

The clock only supports 24 hour time. I am being picky here, but I am
not in the military and seeing that it is 23:30 is not my preferred
method of viewing the clock.

These are all things I opened bug reports for. Most of them were closed,
or I was told to go upstream, upstream told me to go downstream, and
then the bugs got closed -- or I was told to fix them myself. I wish I
could, as I would in a heart beat.

I am sure most of these have work arounds, but I gave up finding them
after finding so many work arounds that just create more issues.

I have been contemplating a reinstall and/or a move to a different
distro, but I spend so much time with redhat/centos machines that I can
do things from memory -- and I have gotten my self in trouble trying to
do things the redhat way on a Ubuntu machine before, and it took me a
few weeks to find out what I was doing wrong. (Apparently you are not
supposed to use apt-get from the CLI anymore -- it breaks things. So my
first reflex of logging in and updating immediately after installing was
breaking everything, and it took me a long time to figure it out)

I'm sure one of these days KDE4 will be ready for a non-alpha release,
but until that point, the fact that I was left the choice of an
unsupported, unmaintained OS, switching DE, or using KDE, combined with
the negative attitudes, and unwillingness to assist left a foul taste in
my mouth.

Right now, I just live with it, and I have found that I use my one
Windows box more than ever (puke). Now I am glad that I have left it
sitting around and hooked up with Synergy. I pretty much just use Fedora
10 to watch videos and listen to music any more, it is way too much
effort to have to re set things up the way I like and find usable all
the time, and things with no work around (like tasks appearing on the
wrong screen or the panel on the second screen crashing once or twice a
day)  that I just use the features that work, anymore.

Running yum update often gives me some hope for the future, though



Todd Walton wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Jeff Chapin <chapinjeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> That and the whole KDE4 being crap fiasco....
>>     
>
> What do you not like about KDE 4?  I'm having trouble finding
> something to not like.
>
> --
> Todd
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