neverendingo wrote:

SashFFM wrote:Speaking about design failures? Who had the idea of limiting some essential apps like konsole to one instance at a time? I wanted to have several processes running if I run konsole from the menu or the Alt-F2 starter. If I want another window, I would use the new window option. There were other apps with this behaviour as well, I can't remember and cannot check anymore.
Ok, I could work around that by opening a konsole and run the command from there. Feature, Bug or poor design?
SashFFM

Hmm? I am not sure i understand. I can open as many konsoles as i want from Alt+F2 or from anywhere else.

Same here, it is also possible to open (without limits) from the menu bar "New windows", no problemo.

While I had some, but not others, of the issues people report in this thread, I do find myself agreeing with the theme expressed by Sanette:

Sanette wrote:So PLEASE kde devs, stop trying to invent new stuff, new graphics, new great gadgets, and work on stabilising the core. Make it *really* rock solid.

About kmail: I had to give up on it. I wanted to use the native KDE mail solution, but I had to move to Thunderbird due to the number of showstopper bugs in kmail. I know others in real life who have done similar.

I do believe KDE is THE best desktop environment, overall. It's the least dumbed down, the most flexible, and it provides both power and ease of use. The design of KDE is top notch, second to none. But it needs, like Sanette says, a period where new functionality isn't just piled in more and more, but stabilizing what is there. Getting rid of all the annoyances that people are reporting. If it could move in that direction, man... it'd be amazing. Right now it's just mildly astonishing

....but stabilizing what is there. Getting rid of all the annoyances that people are reporting. If it could move in that direction, man... it'd be amazing. Right now it's just mildly astonishing

I agree.
Crashing kwin with FF and gimp back to the login screen.

Nepomuk "mucking" about throwiing errors at every boot, etc....

Have tried Kontact before and since akonadi and it just doesn't work as I would need it to work (real syncing with gmail contacts and calendars).

Liking my TB 7.0.1 with lighning and gmail sync in real time but would love to go back to Kontact.

So yes, make this great WM stable and even greater

Edit: Oh, I alsmost forgot network manager. I have to delete and add my wired connection then rebootevery time I plug my laptop back into my network (Internet)

Nepomuk "mucking" about throwiing errors at every boot, etc....

Have you tried disabling it in desktop settings, and seeing if that helps? I disabled both nepomuk and strigi since they seemed unstable and slowed down the system a lot (mostly strigi was slow I think), and I never saw that they were doing anything for me.

You're not alone in seeing nepomuk related crashes, by the way.

I kinda wish I could contribute time and debugging to these projects to help stabilize them. The trouble for me is that I need a paying job and that doesn't leave me with much time for trying to learn a large new project. I dunno, maybe that's exactly the problem behind a lot of this instability in projects like KDE. People volunteer their time, and it's always more exciting to add new features than to debug problems and fix stability issues, so we go year after year with the same crashes being reported by many users, while new "features" that aren't used by almost anybody keep being added. It's a hard problem: if someone is donating their time, you can't really tell them what they should work on, unlike with commercial software where some boss stands over to crack the whip . So people work on the fun stuff, and fixing the bugs isn't fun.

Just to fix a confusion about the konsole stuff:
Sure you can start multiple konsole windows, that's not the problem.
The problem is, it's still one process. This is what I want and needed to avoid.

I'm currently trying other Desktop environment, but so far KDE 4 had the best looks and features. But sadly the most and the most serious bugs.
I really don't know what the gnome 3 developers did smoke to make such horrible design and usability decisions.
Right now xfce looks best. Can be setup to look like KDE, but needs only about 20% of RAM and is lightning fast and seems to be stable (unless KDE). Running now for > 6 hours continuously, not a single crash. KDE only survived 1-2 hours.

VogonZarniwoop wrote:So people work on the fun stuff, and fixing the bugs isn't fun.

At least regarding Nepomuk, since is what you're starting off your post with, you are mistaken: see http://trueg.wordpress.com (the blog of the Nepomuk maintainer, Sebastian Trueg) as of why.

And in general terms, this is a generalization: remember that KDE's bug database also contains a lot of invalid, duplicate, or non-reproducible reports that are noise to the developers. And with this, every community member can help (see the forum announcement, for example).

Right now xfce looks best. Can be setup to look like KDE, but needs only about 20% of RAM and is lightning fast and seems to be stable (unless KDE).

Well, yeah, but it's not exactly a fair comparison, either. Yeah, I've seen XFCE being more stable bug-wise than KDE, but it's also only doing a small fraction of what KDE is doing. KDE is just a much more powerful and feature rich environment, so it's somewhat natural it's going to have more bugs in it.

VogonZarniwoop wrote:You're not alone in seeing nepomuk related crashes, by the way.

Once again, if you are using kubuntu, please try to convince them to update their version of soprano. The current version has a large number of critical fixes compared to the one being used by kubuntu.

TheBlackCat wrote:

VogonZarniwoop wrote:You're not alone in seeing nepomuk related crashes, by the way.

Once again, if you are using kubuntu, please try to convince them to update their version of soprano. The current version has a large number of critical fixes compared to the one being used by kubuntu.

Exactly that, even Mageia 2 Alpha 1 is doing better!!!

I agree with OP. KDE is bloated, sometimes extremely obnoxious and unfortunately most of the time I noticed I used KDE more than applications to get things done. Quick dive to GNOME3, few drives with XMonad and now I'm on Windows XP again. I really tried to like KDE4 but it's in such horrible mess I don't know it wants to live. I can almost hear KDE whispering "please kill me" from time to time.

Maybe after graduation I'll get enough free time to fork it, I've been planning that for a good time now. Instead of throwing new stuff on it three times a week and seeing what sticks, what about focusing on code correctness instead and proper modularity? Actually, even forking sounds like terrible idea. Might be easier to just Qtely code from scratch than axe.

regards,
disillusioned ex-fanatic

EDIT: just one prime example of KDE dev mentality is the sudden wave of retard that flooded over Kickoff. Take away the large back-arrow from a menu that already requires more mouse clicks to navigate than one game of Diablo II. Really now, developers, really?

daedaluz wrote:EDIT: just one prime example of KDE dev mentality is the sudden wave of retard that flooded over Kickoff.

Please have a look at http://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct before making such statements.

einar wrote:

daedaluz wrote:EDIT: just one prime example of KDE dev mentality is the sudden wave of retard that flooded over Kickoff.

Please have a look at http://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct before making such statements.

It was a retarded decision, no way around it. I have yet to see one single comment applauding it, going "wow that's really neat". It simply has no purpose other than confuse user who is used to having a damn back button in Kickoff, or new user who might not know that in order to get backwards in labyrinth of Kickoff he/she needs to focus on that tiny Windows Vista breadcrumb navigation ripoff thingy.

And KDE is filled with similar "whoops we just did it for the lulz" decisions. Like the sudden decision to "tidy" control panel by mixing those things requiring admin acces with those tweakable by user - just for the sake of getting all options on one page. And this reaches into core decisions as well: right now Akonadi is being pushed everywhere like cancer despite it being still unstable. Kontact upgrade to kde-pim with Akonadi resulted in failure, brief panic and cold sweat (luckily I managed to rescue data).

I've used KDE4 since 4.1 and the way it is developed reminds me of fifteen professors explaining enzyme kinetics at once: theory is elegant, but students get a confusing mess. Same with KDE: in theory well-designed and elegant, but what users get to use doesn't manifest that theory at all.

Wow 2.0 was forever ago!

Akonadi is still killing KDE. lol!

I left about a year ago because of Akonadi. Until then, I could get it working for periods of 1~2 weeks by deleting the config directory (.local/share/akonadi) and letting it recreate it. When that stopped working, I pounded my head against the wall for a couple of weeks, trying everything I could find on the Internet and asking on various forums, including these ones. Mysql -> mysql-lite, rebuilding the databases, nothing worked.

On the weekend, I realized I needed to fetch some information from my old Kontact notebooks. It's important personal information from a couple of years ago. No problem, I'll just install Kubuntu 11.10 and see if the latest Kontact can be used to migrate backups of my old system.

Kontact wouldn't start. akonadi errors. lol!

It's a fresh format, too. Right out of the box.

Is akonadi working for anyone? We're beyond fix it or dump it. Now KDE is evidence FOSS isn't an idea that is ready for a production environment.

I love developing for Qt. It's beautifully easy. I would love to like KDE but alas, KDE seems bent on integrating akonadi. Nepomonk didn't work for years either but at least it didn't ruin the whole platform.

By the way, I came along during KDE 2.0, also. It was always glitchy until the later days of 3.5. That was the first time I ever had a system that was bug free and stable.

TomB17 wrote:By the way, I came along during KDE 2.0, also. It was always glitchy until the later days of 3.5. That was the first time I ever had a system that was bug free and stable.

KDE was never bad before 4.0 happened. To put it in the most friendly way possible: KDE developers got way too ambitious with KDE4. After 4 years it is still broken. GNOME3 is already perfectly usable in technical regard for comparisons' sake. To add to the pain, there have already been discussions of transition to Qt5, thus ending KDE4 and starting this cycle again. I'm not angry, just very sad.