karatedog wrote:I'm a desktop linux newcomer (although a bit experienced in servers with command line tools), as I installed Ubuntu, it come with GNOME. I installed the OS on my Lenovo T400.
GNOME was quite good, spent a few days to try every configuration, then I tried KDE (4.3). It is very beautiful, but as I don't see "behind" what else a window manager does, that is all I can see from it. It sucks every resource from my laptop, on battery power the performance is slow. KNetworkManager makes me crazy, crashing about every 30 minutes. Kontact is crashing about every 45 minutes. I sent about 20 crash report within 3 days. So I returned to GNOME. Then my User Switcher panel crashed, I had to reconfigure the login manager to gdm to correct this.
Wouldn't it be better to have less functionality, but a robust, working, heavily tested one? The current version feels like an airplane being repaired while flying...

I haven't had KDE crash in months, except occasional plasma crashes when I knowingly put a potentially broken scripted plasmoid on my desktop. You shouldn't be quite so quick to blame your problems on the KDE team, some distributions have more stability problems with KDE 4 than others.

TheBlackCat wrote:You shouldn't be quite so quick to blame your problems on the KDE team, some distributions have more stability problems with KDE 4 than others.

Exactly! My KDE on Gentoo doesn't crash as far as I remember (for sure more than 4-6 months).

Even on KDE Trunk I rarely encounter a crash with KDE Applications. I use Akregator, Amarok (git), Konsole, as well as the normal workspace applications ( Plasma and KRunner )

PoL666 wrote:well, I like gnome because is simple, easy to configure, more applications, and integrates with Compiz Fusion. also, Gnome Is faster than KDE even, but it's uglier. (this is my opinion certainly)

More applications? Is this true?

There are a lot of reasons why I prefer KDE, but there's only one reason why I require KDE, and that's Konqueror. The file manager, I mean. As a web browser, Konqueror is definitely improving, but there are lots of great web browsers, it's never going to be as irreplacable the file manager. There's just nothing else anywhere that's as powerful. I love to use it in fluxbox, it transforms a simple window manager into a full-fledged Desktop environment. The Folder View function that is destined to make KDE4 worth ALL the aggravation is built directly on Konqueror's special ability to turn any directory into a seperate desktop.

Now there's Dolphin, and while some traditionalists claim to hate Dolphin, and I did too once, I now see it as Konqueror in another package. It's probably a good idea. It's a simpler front-end, that's all. And while Konqueror was built to put all the power of KDE into one application, Dolphin seems to fit better into the KDE4 desktop. Someday, KDE4 won't suck as much, and that will be a good thing.

I prefer Konqueror, but those who claim to love Konqueor and find Dolphin unusable are being influenced by considerations other than the software itself. They're the same paradigm.

I am a KDE user from the time when it came out but today I will switch to GNOME if it doesn't have integrated Evolution email client and evolution-data-server. I don't know why they are doing this. Otherwise IMO GNOME is very good and much better than KDE 4 (I have KDE 3.5).

TheBlackCat wrote:

karatedog wrote:I'm a desktop linux newcomer (although a bit experienced in servers with command line tools), as I installed Ubuntu, it come with GNOME. I installed the OS on my Lenovo T400.
GNOME was quite good, spent a few days to try every configuration, then I tried KDE (4.3). It is very beautiful, but as I don't see "behind" what else a window manager does, that is all I can see from it. It sucks every resource from my laptop, on battery power the performance is slow. KNetworkManager makes me crazy, crashing about every 30 minutes. Kontact is crashing about every 45 minutes. I sent about 20 crash report within 3 days. So I returned to GNOME. Then my User Switcher panel crashed, I had to reconfigure the login manager to gdm to correct this.
Wouldn't it be better to have less functionality, but a robust, working, heavily tested one? The current version feels like an airplane being repaired while flying...

I haven't had KDE crash in months, except occasional plasma crashes when I knowingly put a potentially broken scripted plasmoid on my desktop. You shouldn't be quite so quick to blame your problems on the KDE team, some distributions have more stability problems with KDE 4 than others.

Plasma still crashes on me pretty regularly, BUT it's worth noting how much less disruptive the crashes are than they used to be. At first, the screen would come back up all messed up, with all my widgets stacked up in the corner in their original size. Now, when the crash happens, it's just a hiccup. I know that nothing is going to be significantly disrupted and I'll be back where I left off in just a few seconds. So the occurrence of plasma crashes is by no means the only measure of progress.

For me the first transition from Gnome wasn't good. The interface I fell in love with right away but at the time (Kubuntu w/KDE4.1) was too unstable and lacked a few things that made a difference like thumbnail previews for video.

Now it's a different story. After a failing hard drive forced a complete reinstall I gave Kubuntu 9.10 with KDE 4.3 a go and there will be any looking back. Mplayerthumbs deals with the video thumbnails, KDE it is a lot stabler and the new file preview features are a dream. Overall Linux+KDE feels like the OS I've always wanted.

In Gnome I used KTorrent and K3b anyway so no problems there. For internet apps I'm Firefox and Thunderbird across the board and everything else is third party anyway like VLC, Blender, Gimp etc.

It feels like a step forward.

JontheEchinda
KDE4 has been quite stable for me since 4.1. It's pretty much solid in 4.2.

By what standard do you judge stable? I'm still having problems here and there with 4.3.2


waldelf
i second that.. one month everyday use and NO crash at all.

I'm not having many crashes anymore, but some parts of the desktop still have annoying bugs that cause wasted time

Sonadow
The only thing which i got quite turned off with Gnome was that it looked really....plain and bland. Uglier? Definitely.
Easy-to-use? Definitely as well. And many a times, i find myself agreeing with Gnome's design policy of 'less is more'. After
all, KISS always applies, even in computing.

I didn't want to switch to gnome because of what you say, its quite bland looking, but at least it's quite stable in comparison.


XiniX
I would suggest martinkunev to first actually try KDE before making any comments. Seeing his / her postcount is only '1' I believe
we have some trollski around....

And this attitude is what keeps some bugs in the KDE desktop. "It works for me" syndrome is rife in the KDE ecosystem.


merlyn
The other thing to be aware of is that there are those who will try to convince you to stay with GNOME for all the wrong reasons.

i.e KDE 4.x is 'buggy' and 'lacks features', blah blah.

But KDE 4.x is still buggy. As far as lacks features goes, a lot of the advertised features don't work as described and are buggy.


Dante Ashton
Something that has struck me, though, was not KDE 4 itself, rather the transition to it. The devs could of made incremental adjustments
until the whole thing was QT4 based. This would of allowed for a greater range of feedback from the community, instead of that 'culture-shock'
that people are only getting around now due to KDE being so diffrent.

While there was some "culture shock" and a bit of getting used to things here and there, I still think the biggest problem KDE 4 has is a lack of stability.


TheBlackCat
I haven't had KDE crash in months, except occasional plasma crashes when I knowingly put a potentially broken scripted plasmoid on my desktop.

Whos plasmoid is crashing your desktop. By what you say, I guess it isn't one of the standard ones. I still find bad bugs in some of the standard suit
of plasmoids though.

StopTheFail wrote:JontheEchinda
KDE4 has been quite stable for me since 4.1. It's pretty much solid in 4.2.

By what standard do you judge stable? I'm still having problems here and there with 4.3.2

Stable generally means "does not crash during normal use"

StopTheFail wrote:waldelf
i second that.. one month everyday use and NO crash at all.

I'm not having many crashes anymore, but some parts of the desktop still have annoying bugs that cause wasted time

Have you reported these as bugs at bugs.kde.org? They cannot be fixed if the developers do not know about them.

StopTheFail wrote:Sonadow
The only thing which i got quite turned off with Gnome was that it looked really....plain and bland. Uglier? Definitely.
Easy-to-use? Definitely as well. And many a times, i find myself agreeing with Gnome's design policy of 'less is more'. After
all, KISS always applies, even in computing.

I didn't want to switch to gnome because of what you say, its quite bland looking, but at least it's quite stable in comparison.


XiniX
I would suggest martinkunev to first actually try KDE before making any comments. Seeing his / her postcount is only '1' I believe
we have some trollski around....

And this attitude is what keeps some bugs in the KDE desktop. "It works for me" syndrome is rife in the KDE ecosystem.

The "works for me syndrome" is essentially because the developer cannot fix it if they cannot reproduce it, since they cannot debug it. The bug in some cases can also be triggered by misconfigurations or broken packages in the users system.

StopTheFail wrote:merlyn
The other thing to be aware of is that there are those who will try to convince you to stay with GNOME for all the wrong reasons.

i.e KDE 4.x is 'buggy' and 'lacks features', blah blah.

But KDE 4.x is still buggy. As far as lacks features goes, a lot of the advertised features don't work as described and are buggy.

Which features do not work correctly?? Bug reports help, complaints like this are useless to developers.

StopTheFail wrote:Dante Ashton
Something that has struck me, though, was not KDE 4 itself, rather the transition to it. The devs could of made incremental adjustments
until the whole thing was QT4 based. This would of allowed for a greater range of feedback from the community, instead of that 'culture-shock'
that people are only getting around now due to KDE being so diffrent.

While there was some "culture shock" and a bit of getting used to things here and there, I still think the biggest problem KDE 4 has is a lack of stability.


TheBlackCat
I haven't had KDE crash in months, except occasional plasma crashes when I knowingly put a potentially broken scripted plasmoid on my desktop.

Whos plasmoid is crashing your desktop. By what you say, I guess it isn't one of the standard ones. I still find bad bugs in some of the standard suit
of plasmoids though.

bcooksley wrote:

StopTheFail wrote:JontheEchinda
KDE4 has been quite stable for me since 4.1. It's pretty much solid in 4.2.

By what standard do you judge stable? I'm still having problems here and there with 4.3.2

Stable generally means "does not crash during normal use"

Your definition of stable is very much a sub-set of the average users. Stability also relates to software not auto deleting users data, not behaving in unpredictable and quirky ways, operating as expected among other things.

bcooksley wrote:

StopTheFail wrote:waldelf
i second that.. one month everyday use and NO crash at all.

I'm not having many crashes anymore, but some parts of the desktop still have annoying bugs that cause wasted time

Have you reported these as bugs at bugs.kde.org? They cannot be fixed if the developers do not know about them.

Yes I have.

bcooksley wrote:

StopTheFail wrote:Sonadow
The only thing which i got quite turned off with Gnome was that it looked really....plain and bland. Uglier? Definitely.
Easy-to-use? Definitely as well. And many a times, i find myself agreeing with Gnome's design policy of 'less is more'. After
all, KISS always applies, even in computing.

I didn't want to switch to gnome because of what you say, its quite bland looking, but at least it's quite stable in comparison.


XiniX
I would suggest martinkunev to first actually try KDE before making any comments. Seeing his / her postcount is only '1' I believe
we have some trollski around....

And this attitude is what keeps some bugs in the KDE desktop. "It works for me" syndrome is rife in the KDE ecosystem.

The "works for me syndrome" is essentially because the developer cannot fix it if they cannot reproduce it, since they cannot debug it. The bug in some cases can also be triggered by misconfigurations or broken packages in the users system.

It can indeed be caused by other broken packages.
Indeed some failures can be quite hard to reproduce.

Developers should stop letting themselves off the hook so easily though when they can't quickly find fault with their software.

Unit testing across a wide variety of potential target "software eco-systems" needs to be the default scenario.

bcooksley wrote:

StopTheFail wrote:merlyn
The other thing to be aware of is that there are those who will try to convince you to stay with GNOME for all the wrong reasons.

i.e KDE 4.x is 'buggy' and 'lacks features', blah blah.

But KDE 4.x is still buggy. As far as lacks features goes, a lot of the advertised features don't work as described and are buggy.

Which features do not work correctly?? Bug reports help, complaints like this are useless to developers.

I do report bugs I find. Some other users do not however. My complaints are to draw attention to various problems.
One of these is users proclaiming "OMFG, KDE 4.3.2 is just so fantastic, not bugs, no problems" after using it for what might as well amount to five minutes.

Another problem is that some developers are also of this mindset. If they think their software is good to go and it isn't, well then the world ends up with a buggy KDE desktop, and this halts adoption pretty quickly.

bcooksley wrote:

StopTheFail wrote:Dante Ashton
Something that has struck me, though, was not KDE 4 itself, rather the transition to it. The devs could of made incremental adjustments
until the whole thing was QT4 based. This would of allowed for a greater range of feedback from the community, instead of that 'culture-shock'
that people are only getting around now due to KDE being so diffrent.

While there was some "culture shock" and a bit of getting used to things here and there, I still think the biggest problem KDE 4 has is a lack of stability.


TheBlackCat
I haven't had KDE crash in months, except occasional plasma crashes when I knowingly put a potentially broken scripted plasmoid on my desktop.

Whos plasmoid is crashing your desktop. By what you say, I guess it isn't one of the standard ones. I still find bad bugs in some of the standard suit
of plasmoids though.

I haven't been in this forum for a very long time but now when I saw some old comments, I decided to respond.

XiniX wrote:I would suggest martinkunev to first actually try KDE before making any comments. Seeing his / her postcount is only '1' I believe we have some trollski around....

I would suggest you to first read my comment and then make conclusions. I have used KDE 3 more than 3 years and KDE 4 for several months and it wasn't its early versions - the last I tried is 4.2.4. I can't prove that but you can see that I used to report some bugs about KDE4. I started to do that because I was disappointed of it. You can't judge about me from how often I write in some forum.

I will say again - I loved KDE3 and then I switched to 4 (I think it was 4.1). There was very big difference - most of the things weren't working well or at all, a lot of features that I was using were missing, it was very slow. Some problems were solved in the next versions. I know that making KDE 4 was a very hard work but I just still don't like it enough to use it.

I suppose KDE 4 was designed for simplicity, but for me it was mostly confusion - not only by the difference but also by the lack of information and the strange behavior.

Dante Ashton wrote:the community is excellent, the devs arent ignoring us

I can't say that the developers are perfect. I know that I can't expect them to do something because I want to, but I think that a little feedback could be helpful for them.

I don't want to be offensive. I am just saying what I think. This all may sound a little unspecified, but I can give details if someone wants. Maybe finally KDE 4.4 will be something good enough for me.

karatedog wrote:I'm a desktop linux newcomer (although a bit experienced in servers with command line tools), as I installed Ubuntu, it come with GNOME. I installed the OS on my Lenovo T400.
GNOME was quite good, spent a few days to try every configuration, then I tried KDE (4.3). It is very beautiful, but as I don't see "behind" what else a window manager does, that is all I can see from it. It sucks every resource from my laptop, on battery power the performance is slow. KNetworkManager makes me crazy, crashing about every 30 minutes. Kontact is crashing about every 45 minutes. I sent about 20 crash report within 3 days. So I returned to GNOME. Then my User Switcher panel crashed, I had to reconfigure the login manager to gdm to correct this.
Wouldn't it be better to have less functionality, but a robust, working, heavily tested one? The current version feels like an airplane being repaired while flying...

In all honesty, most of the problems I've had with KDE 4 are specific to Kubuntu - they like to break the packaging. They have to rebuild everything from scratch for 4.4, though, because it depends on a new version of Qt, so we'll see how the LTS release...

I believe that 4.4 will be worth trying. Personally, I am happy with the performance, but crashes are something that bother some times -- although I don't have them very often (and as I pull from backports in Kubuntu, I shouldn't ideally be complaining at all).

Yeah. Kubuntu backports are comparatively broken. They only apply fixes to the version they shipped Kubuntu with.

gnome is easier. (but not for everyboy )

for multimedia i think is the worst think in the world.

i get a lots of problem with ubuntu , really i hated linux for that .. luckly i have tried mandriva knopix suse and of course kubuntu my love.


too much problems with pulse , on ubuntu , omg everytime a lots of guys come on irc with the same issue ... audio doesn't work properly... answer kill pulse...

brasero .. the same ... thousand of guys with the same problem it just works bad for many of them ... answer ... install k3b

cinellera wtf is a video editor that? it's a silly stuff that doesn't work well every time problems and problems i really get angry for that i can't read tons of topic to understand how it works and how to fix it ...



kde is what i choosen to create my multimedia stuff and i really enjoy now kde 4.3.4 it's a great system.

k9copy k3b kdenlive , amarok, kwave, recorditnow , videoporama , man2dvd , digikam , krita , vlc


this is what i use everyday.