Greetings, Okay, this is going to come across as pretty much just one big whinging email. I've been moved to tears these past several weeks, though, as I've battled KDE 4 on my laptop (Wind, 1.6GHz 2GB RAM - a reasonable if not hugely powerful machine). I've often wanted to revert to 3.5, but I know that's a huge amount of re-work, and it'll be high maintenance to start pegging everything there, and even testing isn't a safe haven by the sounds of it.
I simply can't believe that every other unstable user, now using KDE 4, can be having the same types of experiences that I am and not talking (complaining) about them here. Up front I should point out I've been a Debian user & advocate since the mid-90's, and a KDE one since late '98. I entirely *get* that the following are upstream software, not Debian packaging, problems. OTOH, as above, I fear we're about to really turn off a bunch of KDE users by forcing v4 on our testing demographic. Unstable users tend to be a bit tougher skinned, but to be candid, this is the biggest mess I've had to wade through in a decade and a half. Again, I emphasise that I understand this is not a Debian maintainer's problem -- my experience with our maintainers has always been very positive. The one possible packaging problem I've seen is Kaboom, which seems to fail (bits are not visible on-screen, and you can't alt- mouse-drag during that part of the process) on a 1024x600 screen. I've set up a page, just so that I can track the issues that I have against various bug sites (mostly b.k.o) that you're welcome to have a look at, too. These are things that I can, for the most part, replicate consistently and/or that I can identify the actual component that's breaking. http://dgwiki.dingogully.com.au/Jedd/Excogitations/IT/KDE_4 Now, if anyone wants to read my litany of woes, and possibly shed some light on how to resolve some of my problems (or even offer me some empathy with a 'hey, me too') .. read on. I've turned off all 3D features, as whilst pretty they just slowed the system right down - even scrolling in konq (a decidedly non-3D act) was painfully laggy with that stuff enabled. In general I'm seeing between one and five crashes a day, mostly when I try to do something 'challenging' like plug an external VGA monitor into my laptop, but sometimes 'just for the heck of it' (eg. after successfully playing a 25-min avi, the system will hang if I try to play a second one). Crashes vary between just X (which is just annoying) and full system crashes (which is bewildering, as well as annoying). While I was typing this email, f.e., I had a total system crash (amarok, ktorrent, iceweasel and konq's running on other desktops, CPU hovering around 25-30% at the time). Things are slower than they were with 3.5, and most applications have fewer and/or dumber features. There are little things - like no longer having the option to have a 'hide the taskbar' button on the panel / task-bar - something sorely missed when working on a small screen. Right-click on the title bar, and the 'move to desktop' is now the top item - which strikes me as (one of many) gratuitous changes. But it just feels dodgy when you find the same menu when you right-click on a task in the task bar and 'move to desktop' is where it was with 3.5 (second from top). For a .2.2 release, a year after the .0 release, with a stable template (3.x) to work from, it feels very .. unpolished. I'm trying to be polite here. krunner (alt-F2) often spends an extra second or so, after I hit return, showing me icons for things that I've clearly decided aren't the thing I want (I've already hit return!). It doesn't let me run things as a different user (and it's not like kdesu is easy to find, let alone in the path) or at a different priority - both things were of course painfully easy with 3.5. Stripping out all the weighty options with krunner makes it slightly more responsive, but even still it acts inconsistently. F.e. - 'kdict word' fails to run - just sitting there blankly when I hit return, until I strip it back to just 'kdict'. kmail spends 2-10 seconds whenever I go into a large folder, sorting it by threads - something it never did before, and something that gets repeated each visit (not each session). It doesn't remember my folder layout (sender, subject, date, size) and instead reverts to its default on each login. It doesn't respect custom fonts as there seems to be a clash with custom themes. It shows slashes either side of a word as italicised, and doesn't seem to offer a way to disable this pseudo-markup (which makes describing *nix sub-directories quite the challenge). The panel has been instructed to not sort tasks, as I liked the predictability of the 3.5 default, where the most recent tasks were shown to the right. Nonetheless it seems to sort tasks in there quite randomly, making the thing far less useful. I used to (3.5) keep maybe 20-40 konqs open across 6 desktops, but kde4 just never stays up long enough, and takes so long to restore the session, for me to build up / trust it back to that level. The pager seems to randomly revert to single-row mode, despite the settings clearly saying two-rows and 'force number of rows'. konqueror .. heck, where to start. Lots of graphic artifacts, with bleed-throughs sometimes from *different desktops*! The artifacts include stuff within menu/toolbars, as well as within the display area proper. Toolbars come and go (but mostly go) and when you try to restore them they're randomly located on the top, or on the left (where I usually keep them) or icons+text or just icons (which is how I always show them) and set to default size (I always set them to small). Session management of konq browsers seems to imply duplicating every web-konq I had open the last time I logged in, but dumping all duplicates to whichever desktop has focus at login. Login credentials for various sites (codeigniter.com f.e.) are not remembered between kde logins - but this worked perfectly on 3.5. I can't do in-line renaming of files anymore, instead getting a little pop-up that frequently occludes the original filename or its neighbours. If you liked the search pop-up (which I did) and hate the new in-line search status bar (which I do) then you're stuffed. The little 'x' icon to clear the location bar, previously sensibly located on the left, right near the thing you would want to clear, is now located way over on the right and in my case appears to be a mini-icon for an openoffice impress document type. Scrolling is a hit and miss affair, with the middle-mouse-scroll thing often finding dead spots on a given page (perhaps blocked images, perhaps empty space, perhaps the colour blue, who knows) and often requiring hovering over the scroll bar in order to get it to actually scroll. Similarly opening a new konq often results in cursor keys not being respected for scrolling that page - until after I click somewhere in the window. ktorrent seems to crash whenever I quit it (4 out of 5 times), as does kontact. Amarok usually doesn't remember to start up (is this a session problem or an amarok one?). Even though file systems are configured to be opened by konqueror (of course) the USB devices plugin still offers me the option to 'open with Dolphin'. There's no way to disable that feature for certain devices (say, crypto usb devices). I could go on ... as evinced by the above. But I'll stop here. J. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kde-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org