I just wanted to share my sad experience with the latest KDE SC 4.10 and hear the opinion of more people on the release.

First of all let me tell that I am a super KDE fan since I started using only Linux back in 2005, and I have never used (and do not plan to use) any other desktop environment since then, but this is the first time I am really disappointed of a KDE release. 4.10 has many more critical bugs than many of the beta KDE releases I tried in the past.

After I upgraded from KDE SC 4.9.5 on my Kubuntu 12.10 64 bit system, I can barely use my desktop as plasma-desktop keeps on crashing but it's not only this. I also face software regressions and memory leaks. The situation is just a mess and very non productive giving the feeling the my desktop is fighting me.

Plasma-desktop: Tons of plasma-desktop crashes. This looks like it is the buggiest plasma-desktop since plasma-desktop was born. I have already reported a couple or more bugs on this but it still keeps on crashing with different backtraces each time. I was tired and stopped reporting bugs as I can't even find the root of the problem anymore. It will crash on normal everyday use.

KDED: Power management service leaks memory, making the desktop unusable after a couple of hours (restarting kded4 releases the memory but this is not a real solution)

Kate regression: Builtin autobrace has been removed and the autobrace plugin will not replicate all the functionality of the built in function.

Nepomuk: After the upgrade it could not index anything. A patch has been pushed in the repositories fixing this problem, but another one introduced and nepomuk is crashing when indexing.

Akonadi regression: My kaddressbook contacts will not show in krunner search anymore

And the cherry on top of everything else, is that apps will not show in my task manager or icon-only task manager. When I login on my desktop and start an application, it will not show in the task manager and some of them running apps will disappear from time to time and not even alt+tab can bring them back (they are still there if I check "ps xau". If I create an empty activity and change to it, I will usually get a plasma-desktop crash (yes, a different one) and then If I go back to my previous activity some of the windows that they haven't disappear will show in the task manager.

Many more small annoying bugs that are solved with workarounds.

For all of the above I made different kinds of troubleshooting like creating new "clean" users on my system, moving my .kde directory to .kde-backup and then trying to slowly find the culprit "misconfiguration", but it doesn't look like there is something specific there. Some of the problems might go away temporarilly but they will come back randomly and after they come back they won't go away again.

And these bugs are only some encountered by me. If you make a google search, you will see tons of other bugs in many different distributions on this release.

Stricter testing procedures assuring the quality of a stable release should seriously be considered for the future, and "not ready" features should be excluded, or added with reduced "well tested" functionality instead of making a whole release totally unusable. Maybe a rock solid Long Term Support release with all of the advertised features working from time to time, would also be a good idea.

Cheers,
Vangelis

This shouldn't be occurring.

Do you have a backtrace for the Plasma Desktop crashes? I suspect you have a faulty, possibly third party, applet causing this.

For the KDED memory leaks - do you happen to use KMix with Pulseaudio? If so, try disabling "KMixD" in System Settings > Startup and Shutdown > Service Manager. It can be found in the Startup Services section. I suspect it may be the cause.

For the Nepomuk crashes - please provide a full backtrace for this, it shouldn't be crashing when indexing. A possibly corrupt or otherwise unknown type of file may be causing this.

For Akonadi and KRunner - the Contacts runner is enabled?

With regards to the missing applications from the Task Manager applets, please check the "Filters" which are enabled for the applets in their settings. As a basic test, I would suggest unchecking all four filters (for current screen, desktop and activity, as well as minimized).

Given your problems with Nepomuk crashes and Akonadi, you may find it helpful to run "nepomukcleaner". Be aware that it may take many hours to complete, but it should improve Nepomuk performance once completed - especially if your Virtuoso database was operated on by pre-KDE 4.10 code.

Most of the plasma-desktop crashes will show 0/3 stars of usefulness but they are continuous. Today for example I booted my desktop twice, and right after logging in I encountered 3-4 crashes in a row. The I had to run the plasma-desktop command manually because it wouldn't restart automatically.

The cause for kded4 memory leak is the power management. I have disabled this now.

For akonadi and krunner the Contacts runner is enabled but it doesn't work all the time. This specific moment right now it is working.

After nepomuk finished indexing (with some crashes in between) it looks like it's working fine.

I have done what you mentioned for the task manager and Icon-only task manager but the problem is always there when I boot. I have to change an activity which causes another plasma-desktop crash and then it works.

Have you tried installing debug symbols to generate useful backtraces? It certainly sounds like activities are broken on your system.
By the sounds of what you are reporting with the Task Manager, you still have the activities filter enabled - I suggest that you disable that filter.

I have the debug symbols installed since I was using KDE 4.10 from the latest RC versions, and Kubuntu forces the installation of the debug packages from the beta ppa repository. Except that, I have checked again and again just to make it sure they are there, and yes, the debug packages are the. I have obtained some useful backtraces but lately the frequent plasma-desktop crashes that I cannot track down shows 0 or 1 stars of usefulness.

Here is a list of bugs I reported (or someone else reported but I added some comments as I face the same bugs as well)

Especially the activity change crash shows 3 stars usefulness (bug 315249 which was marked as a duplicate of 306556):
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315249

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314986

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314507

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314559

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306206

Bug report 314507 is the one for the endless crashes which initially I thought it was partly solved by removing one plasmoid, but eventually not. After a few days (and probably some kubuntu qt related updates) it got worse and worse.

I might be facing the famous 311751 bug, because many of the crashes come when I interact with the system tray:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311751

As far as your debugging symbols are concerned, I'd suspect that your crashes go deeper than KDE software, thus debugging symbols for at least Qt are required. Actually, to test beta software, i use my gentoo installation that has ALL debug symbols installed (takes aroung 15 gigs of space) by following http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml. On every binary distribution I eventually got a crash that didn't have all the debug symbols, and I never took the time to chase them down.

With the task managers, try disabling all filters (Activities, Screen, Desktop). It took me a while to get it work as I want.

A nepomuk bug was fixed not long ago, it was recommended that distributions patch it. Chakra did it, Archlinux and Gentoo too. No idea about Kubuntu.

Serafean.

PS ; my opinion : Works great, no big issues. My update went perfect, haven't tried a clean install though.

If you are using 64 bit with KDE 4.10 then you very likely could be affected by that bug. I believe the bug in Qt now has a fix staged for integration into the next patch release of Qt (although hopefully distributions will patch it first).

With regards to the crash which you keep getting - that looks like memory corruption to me, as it is not even able to determine the binary which contains the code involved in the crash. Please do ensure the Qt debug symbols are installed - it is quite difficult to generate a good quality KDE backtrace without them.

bcooksley wrote:If you are using 64 bit with KDE 4.10 then you very likely could be affected by that bug. I believe the bug in Qt now has a fix staged for integration into the next patch release of Qt (although hopefully distributions will patch it first).

With regards to the crash which you keep getting - that looks like memory corruption to me, as it is not even able to determine the binary which contains the code involved in the crash. Please do ensure the Qt debug symbols are installed - it is quite difficult to generate a good quality KDE backtrace without them.

I think I just found the responsible application for the crash and it makes sense that I cannot get a backtrace if it this one!
Dropbox!
Whenever it will try to synchronize new files and the systray icon starts this "recycling" animation, I will get endless plasma-desktop crashes (maybe more than 6-7 in a row) and weird task manager behavior.

I will test a little bit more and report back.

Thank you