Re: [kde] Yet another post of KDE 4.2 impressions

On Saturday 28 March 2009 12:32:27 Christian Henz wrote:
Hi.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded from 3.5 to 4.2 and would like to share
some points that bothered me/keep bothering me.

I'm sure I could mention more positive things than I do, but unfortunately
the negative impressions are usually the strongest ;-)
I tried to stay constructive in my criticism though and not rant too much.

It should be noted that I am running 4.2 on Debian/unstable/experimental,
so part of the problems I experienced are probably caused by the volatile
nature of that setup...

Indeed, that is probably true.

Automounter/Removable storage/Dolphin:
--------------------------------------
Positive: Devices now show right up at a standard filesystem location
(/media). Before, these devices where presented at "system://..." virtual
fs paths that were useless for any non-KDE applications, and one had to
find out manually (or remember) where they were actually mounted. Negative:
Copying files around in Dolphin locks up the whole Desktop (at least
Dolphin and the panel) for several seconds before the progress notification
gets shown and the application/panel become responsive again.

That is not generally true, so may be distro-specific or have some cause in
your system. OTOH, some of us have experienced other delays similar to this
(not in dolphin, as far as I can remember) and no explanation has been found.

Application launcher:
---------------------
What makes no sense to me at all is that applications are listed by their
description and not their name. For example there are two entries called
"Web browser", and I have to distinguish them by their icons, or move the
mouse over the Description to find out what the actual application is
(konqueror, firefox). IMO this should be exactly the other way around: List
the application name (konqueror), and then show the description ("Web
Browser") when hovering over the entry.

This isn't my personal choice either. However, it has been argued over in the
past, and I think preferences were about 50/50. The good thing is the fuzzy
search, so that entering 'web' in the box will get you a list of all web-
oriented applications. Don't your menu entries have icons to distinguish
them?

"Add Widgets" dialog:
---------------------
I still have not quite figured out how the star icon is supposed to work.
Sometimes its grey (widget not installed?), sometimes its yellow (widget
installed? - but it is also yellow for "Web browser", which I cannot find
anywhere in the panel or on the desktop, and grey for "Pager" which is
definitely active and visible!),

I haven't come across an explanation either. The only thing that occurs to me
is that the yellow stars on my system are all widgets that I have had
installed, then uninstalled. Maybe it's a bookmark, sort-of? I do know that
in konsole profiles a yellow star indicates that the profile should show in
the menu, so it may be that the widget yellow star is intended for some
development yet to come.

sometimes there is a little "-" ontop of
it (no idea what that means).

It means that if you hit that, it will remove the widget in question.

Sometimes there is a clock next to it (no
idea either).

I've not seen that - no idea.

There are also no tooltips to help me figure it out.

Konqueror (web):
----------------
Positive: The two features from Firefox I missed the most in Konqueror
where adopted: There is incremental search now, and it does not block the
view onto the page I'm trying to search. Also there is a sidebar with
incremental search for bookmarks etc. Negative: I imported several hundred
bookmarks from Firefox, and when I (accidentally) open the Bookmarks menu
now, they literally fill my entire screen - including the Konqueror menu
bar and the panel!

Not normal. I also have several hundred imported bookmarks, and they work
fine.

Konsole (or shortcuts in general):
----------------------------------
Way too many keyboard shortcuts are set by default! I had to manually unmap
half of the shortcuts in Konsole in order to not accidentally trigger them
every 30 seconds (emacs user with clumsy fingers here ;-). Also, the
defaults for tab switching feel completely wrong: "Ctrl-PgUp/Down now" lets
me zap through tabs, like in Firefox or Gnome applications - only it works
in the oposite direction! On top of being "non-standard", having
Ctrl-PgDown switch to the previous tab instead of the next feels completely
unintuitive to me. Finally, "Ctrl-Shift-S", which is a shortcut for
"Save-As" in some applications somehow pops up Kopete instead now.

Take a look at the shortcuts in systemsettings/Advanced tab and see why that
is happening

Kopete:
-------
(Note: This might be a problem of the distribution)
Google Talk does not work anymore. I have made sure that QCA and the
OpenSSL plugin are installed, but it still always fails to authenticate.

No idea.

Panel (Plasma?):
----------------
Icons in the System tray sometimes have screen garbage drawn behind them
(very minor problem).

Known problem.

Crashes occur at least every couple of days (not so
minor problem).

Not normal. I can't say mine never crashes, but no more than once in a couple
of weeks - and it generally recovers without any intervention from me. What
do you actually see when plasma crashes?

Until you get this sorted, try keeping a konsole open. That would not be lost
in a plasma crash and you would be able to re-start plasma from there if
necessary.

Upgrade path/importing old config:
----------------------------------
Korganizer did let me import the old calendar from "$HOME/.kde".
Others (Kopete) had no such option and I had to configure them from
scratch, or manually copy the old rc files and hope for the best.

Audio:
------
(Note: This might be a problem of the distribution)
There are messages on startup that my audio device does not work. Sound
still works in KDE applications, but Flash player in Firefox has problems.
Often Youtube videos etc. will stop playing with sound at some point, and
Firefox usually hangs itself shortly after that. Probably not KDE's fault,
but it used to work before upgrading...

The "Multimedia" entry in System Settings does not help much, cause all I
can seem to do is to determine the order of preferred devices. A tooltip
popup over my soundcard's output entry then informs me that this device
will be tried to be accessed via a bunch of alsa plugins (x-phonon?, dmix)
etc., but does not let me configure this in any way.

Also, I've been experiencing studdering or glitchy audio output especially
when starting to play an audio file. I am now trying to remove as much of
pulseaudio as possible and use alsa directly wherever I can to see if that
makes any difference.

Sound is problematic on some hardware. Please do not remove pulseaudio until
you have explored all possibilities of fixing it. You need to ask specific
questions, probably both here and on a debian list.

Well, Linux audio has been a mess for a long time, and adding a new stack
of APIs and servers into the mix every couple of years has not fixed it (to
no surprise).

Conclusion:
-----------
I think the KDE project has done itself and the linux desktop a disservice
by advertising this release as "recommended for majority of end users",
because for me personally, upgrading to 4.2 has been a step backwards in my
user experience. There are just too many things that feel unfinished.

The potential of KDE 4 is clear to see though an I am looking forward to
the next release :-)

There are glitches, but few things are broken beyond repair. However, it
sometimes takes some work to find out why things are not happening as
expected. You will be aware, too, that major upgrades, so as going from 3.5
to 4, can have more problems than a clean install. It's hard to say whether
any of your problems start from there.

Try new threads for the things that cause you most trouble.

Anne
--
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