[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Kevin Krammer writes: On Saturday, 2011-07-02, Alex Schuster wrote: BTW, ordinary users here means people who often do not speak English. The German localization misses a lot, so KDE 4 is not right for them. Is KDE 4 meant to be for these people? I'm not sure. Hmm, using KDE localized for German myself I can't really agree with this. Do you have an example of something not being translated properly? Sorry, no. Since 4.6.3, nearly all my KDE applications suddenly are in English. An exception is systemsettings, although the applications in it are English again. The K menu also has German entries, and the KDE Help Center has most stuff in German. Must be some bug because kde-l10n is installed, and German is set as application language in the help menu. I don't care much, let's wait and see if 4.7 will correct this. Before 4.6.3, most things were German, but sometimes dialogs were not. But no, I can't remember any specific ones. Do by any chance run something Ubuntu based and using their language packages? No, Gentoo. BTW, who actually does the coding for KDE 4? How many of those people are being payed for this, how many just do this for fun in their free time? I don't think there is any significant number of developers currently being paid to work on KDE. IIRC Aaron Seigo is, David Faure is 50%, some of the people working on Calligra Office are. The Kontact Touch project was done as a contract work for a German covernmental entity, but that has been delivered and there are currently no follow-up contracts as far as I know. Canonical might have somebody working on KDE stuff as well. Thanks. I thought it were some more. So, despite my constant ranting about the bad quality of KDE4, it's astonishing what a group of mostly unpaid volunteers can accomplish. This is a huge project, and it is quite cool. If only the stability were better. Gnome works fine, but I did not use much of it. Networkmanager is a pain, and I had a hard time setting up WLAN. This was not very user friendly. Interesting, I always found NetworkManager to be quite easy, at least when the WLAN is broadcasting its ESSID (which most of them do). Mostly using WPA though, had to experiment a bit when doing WPA-PSK, but work also from UI (i.e. no file editing required). I have never used WLAN with Linux before, and I hoped that it would automagically work. The interfaces came up, but when I tried to connect, I was asked for the WEP password. Some notice that my WLAN drivers were not capable of WPA would have been nice, I did not know what was the problem. Or a list of the interfaces capabilities. I still do not understand why a PCMCIA card did not work, that worked out of the box with an earlier Ubuntu Version. After I flashed the internal card, WPA suddenly worked. But the interface often does not come up after resuming from suspend to RAM or disk. Sometimes the connection also drops during normal usage. I get a notification that the interface is down, but NetworkManager still shows it as up. I have to manually disconnect and then connect again. Should be no big deal, but this is my Mom's notebook, she's 61 years old and has no experience with computers. She does not understand why she has to disconnect something that just told her in a notice that is has been disconnected. But maybe I exaggerated a little, it's not _that_ bad. I have heard many bad things about it, maybe this biased my opinion. I also did not find a quick way to turn it off altogether, I would prefer the interface to be up all the time, even if no one is logged in. maybe this is a nice feature for moving laptops, but this one always connects to the same access point. I also did not like that I had to enter the password for, um, I guess it's the equivalent of KDE's wallet, but I was able to solve this by adding a PAM rule. The password still has to be entered after waking up from suspend, I didn't find a solution for this, but she can live with that. Wonko ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On Monday, 2011-07-04, Alex Schuster wrote: Kevin Krammer writes: On Saturday, 2011-07-02, Alex Schuster wrote: BTW, ordinary users here means people who often do not speak English. The German localization misses a lot, so KDE 4 is not right for them. Is KDE 4 meant to be for these people? I'm not sure. Hmm, using KDE localized for German myself I can't really agree with this. Do you have an example of something not being translated properly? Sorry, no. Since 4.6.3, nearly all my KDE applications suddenly are in English. An exception is systemsettings, although the applications in it are English again. The K menu also has German entries, and the KDE Help Center has most stuff in German. Must be some bug because kde-l10n is installed, and German is set as application language in the help menu. I don't care much, let's wait and see if 4.7 will correct this. Before 4.6.3, most things were German, but sometimes dialogs were not. But no, I can't remember any specific ones. Strange. I am always using German localization myself and have never seen this before. Had been using 4.4.10 until about last week, now on 4.6.4 and still everything translated just fine. Do by any chance run something Ubuntu based and using their language packages? No, Gentoo. Ah. Might not be valid anymore anyway, but at some point Ubuntu (and its variants) had really bad translations due to them being fixed through merges from Canonical's online translation platform. Nice for small programs but borderline to diasterous for software from big projects like KDE or GNOME. Since Debian packages seem to work just fine it could be either a packaging or configuration issue. Does this happen for all user accounts? Also new ones? Gnome works fine, but I did not use much of it. Networkmanager is a pain, and I had a hard time setting up WLAN. This was not very user friendly. Interesting, I always found NetworkManager to be quite easy, at least when the WLAN is broadcasting its ESSID (which most of them do). Mostly using WPA though, had to experiment a bit when doing WPA-PSK, but work also from UI (i.e. no file editing required). I have never used WLAN with Linux before, and I hoped that it would automagically work. It usually does. My laptop has had its fair share of unencrypted, WEP, WPA and even one WPA-PSK networks, all quite simple through network manager. Occasionally even mobile broadband (though I prefer PPP tools there for fine tuning some options). The interfaces came up, but when I tried to connect, I was asked for the WEP password. Some notice that my WLAN drivers were not capable of WPA would have been nice, I did not know what was the problem. Or a list of the interfaces capabilities. I still do not understand why a PCMCIA card did not work, that worked out of the box with an earlier Ubuntu Version. After I flashed the internal card, WPA suddenly worked. Ah, I have a nicely supported integrated Intel Wireless 3945. Might be different with plugplay hardware. But the interface often does not come up after resuming from suspend to RAM or disk. Sometimes the connection also drops during normal usage. I get a notification that the interface is down, but NetworkManager still shows it as up. I have to manually disconnect and then connect again. Ah, strange. I have seen drops but then the interface was really gone on all levels. Reconnect after resume (from standby) works every single day (my laptop suspends to RAM every evening and is resumed every morning). I also did not find a quick way to turn it off altogether, I would prefer the interface to be up all the time, even if no one is logged in. Permanent connections can usually be configured by whatever system the distribution uses for networking. Definitely works with Debian's networking/interfaces, with either NetworkManager stopped or not installed. NetworkManager even has support for getting some configurated networks that ways, but I haven't tried that option myself yet. Will likely also depend on some distribution specific plugin and might not be supported on Gentoo. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Alex Schuster posted on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:48:01 +0200 as excerpted: Thanks. I thought it were some more [being paid]. So, despite my constant ranting about the bad quality of KDE4, it's astonishing what a group of mostly unpaid volunteers can accomplish. This is a huge project, and it is quite cool. If only the stability were better. For me, it's not the quality so much, as for early kde4 (thru 4.4) especially, the deception of CLAIMING it was ready for normal users, even as they KNEW that wasn't true, by all the bugs still saying various features weren't available in kde4 yet. And making a very public promise to support kde3 as long as there were users, then breaking it, didn't help matters, when it was the only properly working version of kde available, despite their demonstrably untrue claims about 4.2-4.3 or 4.4. How different it would have been had they continued to claim it wasn't ready for normal users well past the point at which most were actually using it for production despite the official label, taking a clue from the likes of gmail and icq before it, and if that promise for kde3 support that they failed to carry thru on hadn't ever been made... I know that would have changed the situation VERY MARKEDLY for me. That's water under the bridge now, but it still sticks in my craw and that of many others, and it's not something a lot of the community at least is going to forget so easily. The good news is that the plans for kde5 seem to have taken the lessons they needed to. I've been meaning to start a new thread discussing that. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On Saturday, 2011-07-02, Alex Schuster wrote: BTW, ordinary users here means people who often do not speak English. The German localization misses a lot, so KDE 4 is not right for them. Is KDE 4 meant to be for these people? I'm not sure. Hmm, using KDE localized for German myself I can't really agree with this. Do you have an example of something not being translated properly? Do by any chance run something Ubuntu based and using their language packages? BTW, who actually does the coding for KDE 4? How many of those people are being payed for this, how many just do this for fun in their free time? I don't think there is any significant number of developers currently being paid to work on KDE. IIRC Aaron Seigo is, David Faure is 50%, some of the people working on Calligra Office are. The Kontact Touch project was done as a contract work for a German covernmental entity, but that has been delivered and there are currently no follow-up contracts as far as I know. Canonical might have somebody working on KDE stuff as well. Gnome works fine, but I did not use much of it. Networkmanager is a pain, and I had a hard time setting up WLAN. This was not very user friendly. Interesting, I always found NetworkManager to be quite easy, at least when the WLAN is broadcasting its ESSID (which most of them do). Mostly using WPA though, had to experiment a bit when doing WPA-PSK, but work also from UI (i.e. no file editing required). Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Alex Schuster posted on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 14:21:45 +0200 as excerpted: I also gave Sabayon a try, it's like a binary Gentoo. But Gnome did not run, and again I did not bother to investigate. I also wasn't sure which parts of portage I could use safely. But the speed was nice, building a Gentoo system takes quite a while. FWIW, Sabayon's a quite a good choice for those wanting a binary Gentoo. That didn't used to be the case, as there was some bad blood due to technical disagreements there for awhile, but the two sides ultimately came to understand why the other side did what it did. ... One of the issues had to do with the way Gentoo handled KDE's i18n packages, IIRC, so it's somewhat topical. There were not immediately visible issues having to do with from-source packaging that ran rather counter to what would have been most convenient for Sabayon. After the Sabayon folks realized the issues with the from-source and the Gentoo folks the issues the Sabayon folks were dealing with trying to repackage the binaries, it became apparent that Sabayon would have to keep managing those rather independently of Gentoo, but there were other areas they could cooperate closer in. Anyway, the bad blood has generally evaporated now, and one of the primary Sabayon devs is even a Gentoo dev, now, thus being a useful go- between for devs on both sides when there are questions. =:^) But more than that, it has been my believe for some time (and I'm not alone, tho the belief is definitely not held universally by Gentoo devs) that Gentoo has a unique niche as a from-source distribution, and that trying too hard to make it a good binary distribution as well simply won't work. To do so will make it only one after all rather mediocre binary distribution among many that are specialized in the area and do it far better, while inevitably provoking technical compromises that take Gentoo out of its comfortable niche where it's widely known as being /the/ /reference/ scripted-from-source distribution. So there's definitely areas where I believe Gentoo itself shouldn't go, in terms of becoming a binary distribution. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with some OTHER gentoo-based distribution, Sabayon here, targeting binary distribution users. And there's nothing wrong with close cooperation between them, or even dozens of developers working on both, if they're so interested. So I'm very glad Sabayon's there, providing the lets take gentoo binary escape mechanism, so fewer devs have the urge to take Gentoo itself that way, something I strongly believe would have no good end, at least from the perspective of most current gentoo users and devs, as it would near- to-certainty destroy gentoo in the niche it currently occupies, however successful it might be going binary (and I doubt it would be successful at all, tho it might limp along for some time, simply look at the number of competitors in the space to give you an idea of the odds!). That's actually much the same way I look at Gnome vs KDE. I want no part in the our way or the highway, no config opts for you! project that Gnome seems to be, but I'm **EXCEEDINGLY** glad they exist, because if they didn't, many of those SAME devs would be working on KDE, trying to take away the various config options that allow me to customize it to the level I do. Only I have the idea that I might well use Sabayon at some point, while no such illusions exist for Gnome, at least as long as it continues down it's ONE TRUE WAY highway, which for sure I hope it does, because otherwise some of those devs would be trying to make that the KDE philosophy as well, and I **REALLY** don't want that! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Alex Schuster posted on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 14:21:45 +0200 as excerpted: Mine is a Windows user. I had also installed Linux for him, but he wanted to use some Windows software he got, and booting Windows was easier than to run his software in an emulator, so he sticked with Windows. Sometimes I have to fix some things, like Thunderbird no longer starting, Folders suddenly being readonly, update and run the virus scanner, but all in all it's not too much work. My mom is very happy with Linux, but she only uses a web browser and mail client, and the OS does not really matter for her. I finally gave up trying to help people with Windows a couple years ago. It was just getting to be more and more awkward, both from their perspective as I seem to have a reputation as a good computer guy, but was finding myself returning more and more computers without being able to do much for them, and from my own, as it's about as interesting to me as working to clean up the filth (both chemical and biological/sewage) of a flood would be, except that I felt I was empowering them to continue living in it instead of encouraging them to move, so it really wasn't something I was particularly happy doing at all. Rather the opposite! And I wasn't doing it for money so there wasn't that reward, nor particularly interested in DOING it for money, so... Better to just tell people I don't deal with Windows directly any more. If they're interested in Linux, I'll be more than happy to help them with that, and to work with Windows to the extent that I don't break it (any further than it already is) while getting the Linux up and running, but that's it. If they want help with Windows problems, the can go elsewhere, and both they and I will be FAR happier if they do. But as mentioned, my family is several states away, so I didn't have that aspect of things to deal with. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Hi :) On Thursday 12 May 2011 00:27 Alex Schuster wrote Rafa Griman wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 1:49 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org [...] So the thing is: have you tried another distro? Honestly, change distros and you'll see that KDE SC isn't as bad as you think. Nooo way, this won't happen :) Sorry, but I just love Gentoo Linux. I'd rather give up KDE4 than using another distro for my personal purposes. So, Gentoo. Also a Gentoo user :) Could it be the compile options you're using? I know some people use very agressive compiler options and then the system is quite unstable ... [...] Rafa -- We cannot treat computers as Humans. Computers need love. Assume the problem is with whomever is asking the question. Happily using KDE 4.6.3 :) ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On Tuesday 10 May 2011 00:49:49 Alex Schuster wrote: Automatic spell checking stopped working in 4.4.4, and still does not work. It's no longer set in KMail, but in System Settings Locale. It works for me Anne -- New to KDE Software? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On Wednesday 11 May 2011 10:27:14 Duncan wrote: Anne Wilson posted on Wed, 11 May 2011 09:57:19 +0100 as excerpted: On Tuesday 10 May 2011 00:49:49 Alex Schuster wrote: Automatic spell checking stopped working in 4.4.4, and still does not work. It's no longer set in KMail, but in System Settings Locale. It works for me FWIW, it's working (and has been all along) here on Gentoo with, now kde 4.6.3, too. But I'm running ~arch with the kde and x11 overlays, always emerge --update --deep --newuse, and always etc-update, revdep-rebuild and emerge --depclean after I've finished updating. It's quite possible that particularly the revdep-rebuilds, but also the --deep updates and the fact that I run ~arch, have all the versions and dependencies synced so it's working for me, where it might not be for those on stale^H^Hble who aren't so meticulous about keeping all their dependencies updated and revdep- rebuilt. I run Fedora, but I do keep it properly updated Anne -- New to KDE Software? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On Tuesday, 2011-05-10, Alex Schuster wrote: Actually, I'm quite okay with kmail, although there's some more problems. Sometimes it shows new mails in my IMAP inbox that I already deleted, the solution is to log into my mail server, start mutt, and let it purge these mails. It also hangs sometimes, especially if my IP had changed, but that's not always the case. I close it, and if it doesn't restart because there's still a hanging kontact process, I kill it. And I avoid to delete IMAP folders, or I navigate really quickly out of the folder, because if not kmail will crash. And I really would like to use multiple tabs, but when other tabs are open, mail in those folders is not being checked. Umm, actually that's a lot of bugs. Maybe you are right, but I got used to Kmail, and I tend to prefer the KDE application over other alternatives. What you could be trying is to use Disconnected IMAP instead of normal one. This is a two way sync of a local cache and the IMAP server, meaning you can access mails at any time, even when offline. I am using this with several IMAP accounts and have never seen a problem with stability. Additionally it allows KMail to apply local filters on incoming messages. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On Tuesday, 2011-05-10, Duncan wrote: The same message comes thru when one considers the official name change, from kde, to The KDE Software Collection. Nobody's going to use that in normal usage, or even the shorter KDE-SC, for the same reason nobody uses GNU/Linux in normal usage -- it's too long and inconvenient to say, however correct it arguably may be. The introduction of KDE SC wasn't as name change but rather a much needed disambiguation between producer and product. Lots of people started to be mix the producer KDE (the people who are the KDE contributor community) with the products (e.g. Kontact, Desktop workspace, etc). Software Compilation might not be a very good term for meaning simulationous release of new versions of all products, but there was little (if at all) precendence in this area to go along with. Maybe Software Bundle or Collection would have been better. Anyway, because of this exception (i.e. no other software vendor releasing all its products simultaniously using an umbrella name), the phrasing at KDE has also been adapted to the more common approach of referring to each product (or product group) individually and just say they have all been released on the same date. Of course old mistakes are hard to fix, i.e. in this case referring to the set of products by the same name as the initial product and using the initial product's name as the vendor name. But hopefully continued efforts of using the more meaningful and disambiguated terms will lead to resolving all these misunderstandings previously caused by referring to several distinct entities by the same name. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Kevin Krammer posted on Wed, 11 May 2011 17:14:42 +0200 as excerpted: Software Compilation might not be a very good term for meaning simulationous release of new versions of all products, but there was little (if at all) precendence in this area to go along with. Maybe Software Bundle or Collection would have been better. Thanks for the (gentle) correction on compilation vs collection. They're obviously essentially synonymous to me in this context or I'd have not made that mistake. But I still think it's a Freudian slip in terms of retargeting. It explains /so/ much about the early kde4. (I just deleted a whole section repeating material that's been done to death so many times by now... it's not going to help repeating it at this point.) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Duncan writes: Alex Schuster posted on Wed, 11 May 2011 13:46:10 +0200 as excerpted: On the test account, it's still not working. I have only the German language to choose there, although American English is enabled in systemsettings. You have the dictionaries for both installed, right? Let's see... according to the kdelibs dependencies, USE=spell depends on app-text/enchant, which depends on either aspell or hunspell depending on /its/ USE flags. I switched to hunspell some versions ago, and have myspell-en as the dictionary used based on my my linguas=en setting. If you have German as well, presumably you'd need either myspell-de or myspell-de-alt installed for hunspell, or the parallel aspell and its dicts if you have USE=aspell instead of USE=hunspell. (enchant has a third USE flag as well, zemberek, but that's Turkish only, apparently.) Whoa, that's it! I had aspell (with aspell-de and aspell-en) and hunspell installed (with myspell-de). But myspell-en was missing. I installed it, and now it's working! Thanks for the hint. Turns out that I was missing 'en' in $LINUGUAS, so it's quite my own fault. But still, my test account has no automatic spell checking capability (I logged out and in again). And manual checking also works for American English, not for German. But as it's only a test account, so I close the case :) Wonko ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Kevin Krammer writes: On Tuesday, 2011-05-10, Alex Schuster wrote: Actually, I'm quite okay with kmail, although there's some more problems. Sometimes it shows new mails in my IMAP inbox that I already deleted, the solution is to log into my mail server, start mutt, and let it purge these mails. It also hangs sometimes, especially if my IP had changed, but that's not always the case. I close it, and if it doesn't restart because there's still a hanging kontact process, I kill it. And I avoid to delete IMAP folders, or I navigate really quickly out of the folder, because if not kmail will crash. And I really would like to use multiple tabs, but when other tabs are open, mail in those folders is not being checked. Umm, actually that's a lot of bugs. Maybe you are right, but I got used to Kmail, and I tend to prefer the KDE application over other alternatives. What you could be trying is to use Disconnected IMAP instead of normal one. This is a two way sync of a local cache and the IMAP server, meaning you can access mails at any time, even when offline. Which would be nice indeed. DSL is acting a little instable here sometimes. I am using this with several IMAP accounts and have never seen a problem with stability. Additionally it allows KMail to apply local filters on incoming messages. So I created a new account (when I found out there is no option to set in the existing account), there I can select 'Disconnected IMAP'. I never noticed this account type before, is it new? A little glitch was that suddenly (maybe after the update to 4.6.3?) KMail is no longer able to access the wallet for new passwords. It can retrieve the existing ones so I have not noticed this yet, but new accounts cannot store their password in the wallet. Downloading messages... whoops, KMail does not like when the partition gets full :) But no harm was done, KMail threw some error messages and exited cleanly. Okay, it seems to work, thanks for the pointer! Now let's see if I also have trouble with new mails that are not shown. Wonko ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Rafa Griman wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 1:49 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: [Oh, this has become rather lengthy. It's a description of my various problems with KDE4, the details are not so important, no need to read it all. My question is: Are your experiences similar to mine?] No and yes. My experiences WERE similar (not any more :) The thing is that the issues I had with KDE SC stability/hiccups/whatever were on a certain distro. When I switched distro ... KDE SC was stable. I have not had any stability issues with KDE SC on ArchLinux. Previously I was running openSUSE, Mandriva, ... Same KDE SC versions. With ArchLinux I have had NO issues whatsoever since KDE SC 4.2. Strange. I did not expect so many differences. Stability issues that is. As you say, maybe some features are missing ... but whn I'm at work with Windows ... I also miss some features (hell ... I miss ALL the features I have in my ArchLinux + KDE SC at home ;) I agree. I use it on my notebook right now while I'm away from my desktop PC, but I only run thunderbird and firefox, and an xterm with a tmux session running on my desktop PC. So I'm doing most things in the shell, which is also okay for me. But on my Linux desktop I often prefer to use the user interface KDE gives me. So the thing is: have you tried another distro? Honestly, change distros and you'll see that KDE SC isn't as bad as you think. Nooo way, this won't happen :) Sorry, but I just love Gentoo Linux. I'd rather give up KDE4 than using another distro for my personal purposes. I also have some experience with [open]SUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu, but I did not use KDE4 much there, and did only basic things that would work here, too. Yes, I do suggest other people to use KDE. OK, OK, ... ArchLinux, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, ... are difficult to use. You can't get your dad/mom/aunt/whatever to use it. TBH, that's BS. My sister in law is running ArchLinux on an ACER ONE 800 KM from me. She has NO idea of computers (much less Linux). What I did was install ArchLinux with KDE SC on her netbook on the weekend, she left on Sunday ... and hasn't had an issue in over 2 years. Just one support call because she changed DSL provider and the guy that came to install the DSL didn't know Linux. She called me, told her to start a konsole, su -, /etc/rc.d/network stop, /etc/rc.d/network start ... WOW !! I can browse the web again !!! That's all it took. She listens to music, edits her own videos, edits her own music, browses the web, watches movies, ... Oh, BTW, she's an aerobics instructor ;) My small sister ... same case, but with Debian. ex-girlfriend ... same case with Gentoo (maybe that's why she's an ex-girlfriend ;) My small sister's PC runs Gentoo, because I installed it and I know this distro best. But she only uses KMail, Firefox and aMSN, nothing special. Not sure what to install on my Mom's notebook. ArchLinux and Gnome maybe. Something very very simple, this stuff is new to her. She does not speak English, so a good localization is necessary, KDE4 still has too much English stuff. My wife: ArchLinux + KDE SC ... I work 100 KM from home and travel a lot. Support calls since she uses KDE SC 4.2? None ... The trick is to setup the computer with all the stuff they need. It's stable, it works, no virus, ... no calls :) In the openSUSE Spanish mailing list, there have been all types of regrets towards KDE 4 ... how many have tried KDE on another distro ? ... But people keep on ranting that it's KDE's fault. That's not true. We all know that distros usually add some features to help you and make your life easier and nicer. Honestly, try ArchLinux. It just works. Maybe you have to spend a whole weekend installing it and configuring it. But once it's up and running ... you never ever configure it again: it's a rolling distro :) Yes, I heard good things about ArchLinux, I think it would be my choice if there were no Gentoo. And a rolling distro is great. Back in my SuSE/Mandrake/Debian/Libranet days, there was not a single upgrade from one version to another that did not have big flaws. Some bugs were fixed, but others appeared, all in all things went not much better, and I had to put time into discovering the new problems and finding workarounds for them. Gentoo sure also has it problems, but if some update refuses to install I can continue working. I do not have to take a free weekend like for a Mandrake update, hoping that the time would be enough to get a working system again, and being prepared to restore the backup just in case the update would mess up everything. I do not even have to take the machine down for upgrading, my home server once had an uptime of 400 days, running the newest software. Well, except for the kernel, which is why I had to reboot eventually. And I've run ArchLinux + KDE SC with and wothout the official closed source ATI catalyst drivers. No stability issue
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Hi :) On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 1:49 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Hi there! [Oh, this has become rather lengthy. It's a description of my various problems with KDE4, the details are not so important, no need to read it all. My question is: Are your experiences similar to mine?] No and yes. My experiences WERE similar (not any more :) The thing is that the issues I had with KDE SC stability/hiccups/whatever were on a certain distro. When I switched distro ... KDE SC was stable. I have not had any stability issues with KDE SC on ArchLinux. Previously I was running openSUSE, Mandriva, ... Same KDE SC versions. With ArchLinux I have had NO issues whatsoever since KDE SC 4.2. Stability issues that is. As you say, maybe some features are missing ... but whn I'm at work with Windows ... I also miss some features (hell ... I miss ALL the features I have in my ArchLinux + KDE SC at home ;) So the thing is: have you tried another distro? Honestly, change distros and you'll see that KDE SC isn't as bad as you think. I'm somewhat diesappointed with KDE4. I'm using it since 4.2, and it's become much much better - but still, there are just so many bugs. Is it just me, or it this normal? Would you suggest other people (being unskilled uses, not hackers) to use KDE4? What OS and desktop environment does your Mom's PC run? Yes, I do suggest other people to use KDE. OK, OK, ... ArchLinux, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, ... are difficult to use. You can't get your dad/mom/aunt/whatever to use it. TBH, that's BS. My sister in law is running ArchLinux on an ACER ONE 800 KM from me. She has NO idea of computers (much less Linux). What I did was install ArchLinux with KDE SC on her netbook on the weekend, she left on Sunday ... and hasn't had an issue in over 2 years. Just one support call because she changed DSL provider and the guy that came to install the DSL didn't know Linux. She called me, told her to start a konsole, su -, /etc/rc.d/network stop, /etc/rc.d/network start ... WOW !! I can browse the web again !!! That's all it took. She listens to music, edits her own videos, edits her own music, browses the web, watches movies, ... Oh, BTW, she's an aerobics instructor ;) My small sister ... same case, but with Debian. ex-girlfriend ... same case with Gentoo (maybe that's why she's an ex-girlfriend ;) My wife: ArchLinux + KDE SC ... I work 100 KM from home and travel a lot. Support calls since she uses KDE SC 4.2? None ... The trick is to setup the computer with all the stuff they need. It's stable, it works, no virus, ... no calls :) In the openSUSE Spanish mailing list, there have been all types of regrets towards KDE 4 ... how many have tried KDE on another distro ? ... But people keep on ranting that it's KDE's fault. That's not true. We all know that distros usually add some features to help you and make your life easier and nicer. Honestly, try ArchLinux. It just works. Maybe you have to spend a whole weekend installing it and configuring it. But once it's up and running ... you never ever configure it again: it's a rolling distro :) And I've run ArchLinux + KDE SC with and wothout the official closed source ATI catalyst drivers. No stability issue whether I used catalyst or not. I have Arch on AMD64, AMD 32 bit, Intel Atom, Intel Centrino. NVIDIA, ATI and Intel GPUs are what these computers have. FLOSS and closed source for NVIDIA and ATI, no stability issues. OK, so you're not going to switch to a new distro, fair enough ... What about your hardware? Are you sure it's stable, well configured, ... I've seen people ranting about how unstable Linux is ... the reason was flaky hardware: cheap RAM, wrong HDD cables (specially during the PATA timeframe), ... Check the hardware. On the other hand, KDE SC is not perfect. We all agree with that: Human Made ;) And yes, I do have a wish list, but before ranting about KDE ... maybe you should chek whether it's KDE's fault or not. Honestly, check your hardware and try another distro ;) MHO Rafa ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Billie Walsh writes: On 05/09/2011 06:49 PM, Alex Schuster wrote: I'm somewhat diesappointed with KDE4. I'm using it since 4.2, and it's become much much better - but still, there are just so many bugs. Is it just me, or it this normal? Would you suggest other people (being unskilled uses, not hackers) to use KDE4? What OS and desktop environment does your Mom's PC run? I've never hesitated to suggest Kubuntu to someone unfamiliar with Linux. I usually tell them that there is a bit of a learning curve to make the changeover. I suggest that they dual boot with whatever they are using and play around with Kubuntu when they have some spare time until they get used to it. That's pretty much how I made the switch from Windows to Linux. After a while I realized that I hadn't booted into Windows for weeks. I never looked back after that. I also suggested Windows people to give Linux a try, and they were okay with it. It works different, but for most purposes (mail, WWW, some word processor) there's no big difference. And they were happy that they no longer got their PCs infected by viruses or spyware. But htey were no power users. And thast was before KDE4. I never used a distribution list with kontact, so I tried this for myself. I created a new contact group 'Testgroup' in kaddressbook and added some people with their e-mail addresses. Kmail then knows about this Testgroup (it auto-completes it) - great, I think before KDE 4.6 addressbook and kmail did not exchange their data, Kmail did not know about the people in the address book. But when I send a test mail, nothing happens. It turned out that the mail is being sent to testgr...@myhost.my.domain, and not to the members. This seems to be a known bug that was already fixed, but it's happening again. [1] I tried Kmail once years ago and absolutely hated it. Haven't tried it since, and with all the issues I read about on the help lists I wont ever try it again. Actually, I'm quite okay with kmail, although there's some more problems. Sometimes it shows new mails in my IMAP inbox that I already deleted, the solution is to log into my mail server, start mutt, and let it purge these mails. It also hangs sometimes, especially if my IP had changed, but that's not always the case. I close it, and if it doesn't restart because there's still a hanging kontact process, I kill it. And I avoid to delete IMAP folders, or I navigate really quickly out of the folder, because if not kmail will crash. And I really would like to use multiple tabs, but when other tabs are open, mail in those folders is not being checked. Umm, actually that's a lot of bugs. Maybe you are right, but I got used to Kmail, and I tend to prefer the KDE application over other alternatives. I used Thunderbird in Windows when it was first released. When I switched over to Linux I continued to use Thunderbird. It just simply works. No fuss, no muss. Creating a distribution list is very simple. I _do_ use thunderbird on Windows (right at the moment), and it also has its problems. Like hanging when quitting, and eating 100% CPU time until I kill it. And it tends to not remember that I want my folder views threaded. But it's okay for me. [FTP with dolphin] get the password and downlaod the file. BTW, I wouldn't have been able to download it with dolphin anyway [3], because it has German umlauts in the file name. I use Gftp. OK, I know it's not a K program, but it's much easier to use that any of the K programs. Sorry. Save everything to the bookmarks. One click and I'm ready to upload and download. Well, two actually. One for the bookmark menu and one for the actual site. I keep everything set up so that when I click on a site it changes the local directory to where it's supposed to be as well as the remote directory. It's simple. I'll have a look... ah, right, I've used in the past already. I guess there are lots of FTP frontends, but if you say it's working fine, why not use it. I have no problem with Gnome applications, although I would prefer to use dolphin if it were working correctly, as it integrates better into my KDE desktop. I thought about krusader, but there I find no bookmark facility. One thing you mention, about the warning box's. I find that sometimes they wind up behind anything else on the desktop. they should pop on top of whatever, but By now I know about this effect, but when it first happened it took me a while to figure out what's going on. The application seemed to hang, and I killed it two times until I saw what was going on. Wonko ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Kevin Krammer writes: On Tuesday, 2011-05-10, Alex Schuster wrote: I never used a distribution list with kontact, so I tried this for myself. I created a new contact group 'Testgroup' in kaddressbook and added some people with their e-mail addresses. Kmail then knows about this Testgroup (it auto-completes it) - great, I think before KDE 4.6 addressbook and kmail did not exchange their data, Kmail did not know about the people in the address book. KMail had access to the addressbook from some version of the KDE2 cycle. KAddressBook, KMail (and other applications, e.g. Kopete) basically read the same files. But I rememer that auto-completion in Kmail did not work for addresses in Kaddressbook, and I'm pretty sure I read about this in a bug report. And that it's fixed now, which I can confirm. My friend who quit KDE4 also experienced this problem, but with a rather old version of KDE4 at that time. But when I send a test mail, nothing happens. It turned out that the mail is being sent to testgr...@myhost.my.domain, and not to the members. This seems to be a known bug that was already fixed, but it's happening again. [1] Could be a problem with the Nepomuk setup. It might not be running or it might not have told about the contacts. At least Kmail autocompletes the name. So I had to first add the system tray plasmoid, then I could get the password and downlaod the file. Just for future occasions: kioclient copy ftp://someserver/somefile /some/local/dir Hmm, normally I do not know the name of 'somefile'. But I did not know about kioclient, that's a nice utility that will come handy I think! BTW, I wouldn't have been able to download it with dolphin anyway [3], because it has German umlauts in the file name. Might depend on the way your access FTP. If you have an ftp:// URL there won't be any problem no matter of character, because they needs to be encoded anyway. I have an ftp://user@host/directory/ URL, the file name I don't know until I look into this directory. Dolphin shows the file with the correct name (including the umlaut), but insists the file does not exist when I try to download it. gftp show the file name in the remote folder as empty, but it is able to download the file. Dolphin now replaces the umlaut in the local file with a question mark in a black diamond, and still is not able to do anything with it. My system is UTF8, the files with umlauts are latin1. The shell also does not show the umlaut in the file name, it is replaced by two question marks. But I can access it by using tab completion or wildcards. Or I convert it with convmv -f latin1 -t utf8. Wonko ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
On 05/10/2011 03:48 PM, Alex Schuster wrote: I_do_ use thunderbird on Windows (right at the moment), and it also has its problems. Like hanging when quitting, and eating 100% CPU time until I kill it. And it tends to not remember that I want my folder views threaded. But it's okay for me. I haven't used any e-mail client in Windows in several years, but I haven't seen any of those issues in Linux/Kubuntu. -- A good moral character is the first essential in a man. George Washington _ _... ..._ _ _._ ._ . ._.. ... .._ ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Duncan writes: Alex Schuster posted on Tue, 10 May 2011 22:48:36 +0200 as excerpted: But htey were no power users. And thast was before KDE4. You were saying something about your spellchecker being broken. That's too bad, as you NEED it. =:^) Nah, I'm putting in these errors deliberately until someone finally fixes the spllchckr bug :) Wonko ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
[kde] Re: A week of KDE4 usage
Alex Schuster posted on Tue, 10 May 2011 01:49:49 +0200 as excerpted: [Oh, this has become rather lengthy. It's a description of my various problems with KDE4, the details are not so important, no need to read it all. My question is: Are your experiences similar to mine?] I read it all, because I'm interested in such things, but I snipped the list, as replying to all the individual items wasn't the point. I'm somewhat diesappointed with KDE4. I'm using it since 4.2, and it's become much much better - but still, there are just so many bugs. Is it just me, or it this normal? Would you suggest other people (being unskilled uses, not hackers) to use KDE4? What OS and desktop environment does your Mom's PC run? With kde4 it has been made /very/ apparent that the kde devs simply aren't interested in creating a just works desktop for ordinary users, or even ordinary /power/ users. If they were, they would NOT have insisted 4.2 was ready for ordinary users, when it /very/ clearly was still alpha quality at best -- huge gaps of missing functionality, and bugs with the devs saying that's not implemented yet, so it's not as if they weren't /aware/ of the problem, what was there often broken, good as a technology preview, but not for use by people actually wanting to get stuff done. Yet they INSISTED it was ready for ordinary users! And were they interested in normal users, they'd have not dropped support for the stable kde3 at the same time, when kde4 clearly wasn't ready. So it's quite clear that the kde folk would rather simply have people who just want things to work, move on to other desktop environments and quit bothering the kde folks. The same message comes thru when one considers the official name change, from kde, to The KDE Software Collection. Nobody's going to use that in normal usage, or even the shorter KDE-SC, for the same reason nobody uses GNU/Linux in normal usage -- it's too long and inconvenient to say, however correct it arguably may be. But further, looking at the PR for the name change, it again becomes apparent that they're simply no longer targeting the ordinary end user, but rather, now, they consider developers, etc, their target. I remember wondering about the name change, until after reading the announcement, it hit me -- the were no longer focused on the ordinary end user and the name change, adding Software Collection was aimed at making the platform more inviting to developers, etc, who could build upon that collection, using it as a basis for their own apps and possibly their own platforms, etc. Now, arguably (and I've repeatedly made this point myself so I obviously argue it to be so), by later 4.5, say 4.5.4 and 4.5.5, KDE (um... KDE-SC) had improved to the point that it was ready for what /should/ have been the official 4.0 release -- had it been aimed at ordinary users. But again, it's NOT aimed at ordinary users any more. So what they called 4.0, which they clearly labeled as developer-only, freezing the libraries but with a barely functional UI skeleton over top, really /WAS/ a .0 release IF YOU'RE TARGETING THE DEVELOPER AUDIENCE FOR WHOM A LIBRARY FREEZE IS SIGNIFICANT. Looked at thru that filter, the filter of who their actual target audience is, now, all the rest begins to fall into place and make a WHOLE lot more sense! Now, it's possible some will argue with that viewpoint. But, I'd simply point at the facts. How /else/ can they be reasonably interpreted? Given the facts on the ground, the actual actions, tt /certainly/ makes more sense for KDE (KDE-SC) to be targeting developers than it does for them to be targeting ordinary users. There may be other explanations, but I've yet to see any others that even remotely matches the facts as good as this one does. You and I are both Gentoo users. I make it a point to read the Gentoo-dev list, and occasionally find myself pointing out yet again that Gentoo has never been about hand-holding/baby-sitting the user. Gentoo does try to provide good documentation, but if there's a choice between making a choice available that a user could hurt themselves with if they don't heed the news pre-warnings and post-install log-warnings, and Gentoo main site announcements, and... and..., and hiding that choice to protect the user at the expense of making Gentoo far less flexible (tho there are certain limits), time and again, Gentoo chooses to make that choice available, and if the user breaks their system because they couldn't follow the clear warnings and instructions, well, they get to keep the pieces. In that regard Gentoo's nothing like the hand-holding distros that Ubuntu and the like try to be, nor SHOULD we be, nor SHOULD WE TRY to be. Gentoo has its own niche, and fills it quite well. It's not for everyone and we don't pretend that it is. If people find it too difficult, etc, well, there's other distros out there, and we're happy enough to point
