On Saturday, April 09, 2011 09:44:14 Mark Wallace wrote: > I temporarily switched over to KDE. I was using it until 4.0 came > along and then learned the hard way when to duck for cover.. > > But the nice thing about Ubuntu is that they are slow to get on a > bandwagon. There is a Firefox 4.0 out but they are still giving > people 3.6.16. I put 4.0 in a Windows system last night and none > of my son's favorite add ons had upgraded, yet. > > Open office 3.0 was out for over six months before Ubuntu put it > in their distro. Let the slackware and Debian people polish it > on their weekends. The Ubuntu people want something that is ready > to go, now. > > KDE 4.6 is still kind of buggy. Things don't crash in it like > they used to but i had to put Synaptic in it to see if I had a > full install. The package manager is not user friendly and you > can't quickly see what options you have available with it. It took > three tries to get Microsoft core fonts installed because you have > to accept an agreement and I don't think that the package manager > in KDE can handle that. It just fails to install. > > Mark
Ubuntu being "slow to get on the bandwagon"; actually I think of Ubuntu as an early adopter. However their parent, Debian, tend to be more conservative, so Ubuntu ends up with an interesting mixture. For example, when KDE4 was first released, Ubuntu was one of the distributions that quickly picked it up and released a beta version containing it, which is how I got to try it and see just how awful the very first version was at the time. [At first it was quite unstable, but at the same time showed promise.] It's since gotten tremendously better by comparison. Today I'm using KDE 4.4.5 because that's what Debian is using in their repository, so I haven't seen KDE 4.6 yet. At least the version of KDE 4.4.5 in Debian is quite stable, although does show bugs occasionally. Best I can suggest is to file detailed bug reports if possible, in order to help the maintainers know of them so that they can help fix them and report them upstream. I still think KDE 4.4.5 isn't the "well oiled machine" that KDE 3.5 was at its peak, and I'm still not using all of the capabilities that KDE4 offers, either. When it comes to OpenOffice 3, Debian Stable has it -- but the other branches have moved on to LibreOffice. I'm not sure where Ubuntu stands on this -- last I remember I think their plan was to migrate to LibreOffice as well. Here again I consider Ubuntu to actaully be an early adopter. In this case I think it's simply a matter of being the best decision because OpenOffice is going to stagnate under Oracle due to most of the development team working on LibreOffice, and Oracle demanding developers to choose to work on one or the other, but not both, which has accelerated their departure from OpenOffice. Concerning the KDE4 package manager, I'm assuming you're speaking of 'Adept'. I've used it under Ubuntu in the past, but because I do so much package management via ssh I tend to use the command line tools like 'aptitude' instead. The problem you're mentioning concerning questions not showing up during an upgrade may have to do with the 'debconf' package, which is what dictates what method to use to ask a question. If you try running this at the command line: sudo dpkg-reconfigure debconf and try using the "KDE" option. That should allow Adept to ask you package related questions via a KDE GUI rather than sending those queries to a text- based dialog box that you won't see. Concerning Firefox 4; this is interesting, as originally Debian Unstable had Iceweasel 3.5 and Experimental had 3.6 -- but recently after some discussion Debian has made a difficult joint decision to stick with 3.5 for Unstable and have upgraded to 4.0 in Experimental, skipping over 3.6. From the user perspective I feel that 3.6 is better than 3.5 as well as 4.0, but from the developer standpoint there are a plethora of library dependencies that have to be standardized on for other packages, and going with 4.0 makes much more sense in that regard. Sticking with 3.6 would have put off migration pain until later but also made migration more difficult, especially being that Mozilla is planning on releasing Firefox 5 sometime this year. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium May 4 - Inkscape Jun 1 - Zimbra Jul 6 - Jul 2011
