Re: [opensuse] Am I the only one?

On December 24, 2008 08:12:53 am Jerry Houston wrote:
Am I the only one who's happy with v11.1 and KDE4?

I'm a cautious user. Here at home, we have four machines running Linux --
our server, my desktop workstation, my wife's desktop workstation, and one
of my laptops.

My laptop isn't an important machine. It doesn't archive emails, or run
Apache. It's not an FTP server. It's just a machine that I can use to
read and write emails (as I'm doing now), and browse the web. So it seemed
like the perfect first choice to try the new stuff.

After using 11.0 with KDE4, and updating it to 11.1 with KDE4, my
experience was so generally favorable on the laptop that i likewise updated
my desktop. Once I found that everything I need on that machine seemed
unaffected by the update, I did the same with my wife's desktop. She loves
it.

Probably not. But my experience is different. I have a laptop and three other
computers at home, plus one at the office all running OpenSuse 11.0 with
KDE3.5.

I use the laptop more than any of the others, but I tried OpenSuse 11.1 64 bit
with KDE 3.5, and with KDE4.1.And Yast Software management quits after a
single installation and you have to restart it every time.

I found a number of things with OpenSuse 11.1 I didn't much care for. The new
partitioner, for example seems particularly badly thought out, and is much
less intuitive to actually use.

On the other hand, there were also improvements, like handling nfs networks
which seemed faster with 11.1. My wireless worked out of the box, and so did
my sound card. I had no issues with video selection, and it was easy to get
all my multimedia working.

It was with grave trepidation that i considered updating the server. It
was working fine with v10.3 and KDE3. And that's where our email archives,
shared DejaClick macros, digital images, MP3s, and ripped DVDs are. Not to
mention my web site, mono projects, and our svn repositories.

In fact, I did have problems with the NIS server that prevented us from
logging on to the other machines as ordinary users. After a couple days of
trying everything else, and double-checking everything, I finally resolved
that by removing the NIS server and reinstalling it. Problem solved. In
hindsight, I could have fixed it in about 10 minutes if I'd only done that
to start with.

So we now have all four machines running v11.1 and KDE4. Neither of us has
found anything that we wanted to do with KDE3 that we can't do with KDE4.
And so far, I'm lovin' it!

Ah yes KDE4. Where nothing is where you expect it to be. Where all the menus
are changed from what we had. Where we get krippleware like Dolphin and they
take features out of Konqueror. Where very few of the KDEPIM settings or data
is migrated to KDE4. I heartily dislike KDE4.

For sure, there are going to be bugs to fix, and features to implement.
The same was true of every earlier version. But I'm delighted with what we
have so far, and looking forward to what's yet to come.

Well this is where we differ. I like OpenSuse, but I don't care much for some
of the changes in 11.1 that make it less functional. I really don't like
KDE4, but I'll keep trying new versions to see if they're ready to use. Not
yet, in my view. And that may be in part because we're so used to the
polished nature of KDE 3.5.

I guess my view is that I prefer software to evolve, and not leap ahead. I
want to be able to continue doing things the way I'm used to without having
to relearn everything. I'm not opposed to changes that get rid of bugs, make
it faster, make it more functional or even add new features, but I really
don't want to have less functionality "because it's good for me".

I think everyone would benefit from a longer release cycle. KDE 4.0 certainly
wasn't ready for prime time, and I have great hopes that 4.2 will finally
give us what we thought we were getting with 4.0 but software shouldn't be
released in such an unfinished state as 4.0.


Merry Christmas, all.

And a Happy New Year!


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