daedaluz wrote:

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.

There is no ending in sight yet for KDE4. Only the platform of KDE will be named KDE Platform 5. Biiiig difference. And i wonder how hard it is to understand that there are different parts of KDE. KDE is not just the entire software collection, and even those are splitted up.
Also, i even heard many voices complaining about gnome3. Is it really necessarly to complain for every single bit in a global perspective? I am sure gnome3 rocks for many users, same does KDE SC 4.x
There will never be a perfect system, but at least you have the choice to use what you want. Least users try that way...

I think this topic is very interesting and it raise a major question: the one of the way KDE is developed and especially tested.
To me, in KDE Community, Software are usually released far too quickly ant it's clear that a lot of them haven't been enough beta-tested before they go with a Released Status.
I think we should reconsider the whole way we test our software and do like the industry does.
With quality gates, functional analysis functional testing and so on.

Kontact is a good example of that problem: it has a released status, hence a common user would think " I can use it for my every day life " while to me, it is still in alpha-beta transition.

When I look at Calligra 2.4, three things shoks me.

First of all, some month ago they announced a released date. I am not an expert but a question that immediately come is :
Since even the industry quite often delay their planning, how the opensource world with the whole variability in terms of human ressources (not all dev work full time) could be sure about the day they will release something? Last week they decide to delay and add a Beta 4 and 5 before the release. Thanks God...

Secondly, Calligra is very ambitious piece of software, wider than Ms Office Professional (I mean not the common version but the Profi one with Ms project, Visio etc..)
I remember when MS launched its 2010:
1 year before I grabbed the beta version. At that time Ms didn't even want to announce a release date although there were only minor bugs or feature lacks. And it took them 1 YEAR to finish the beta phase!!.
The change from office 2007 was minor (no big change in the UI). But once it has been released, no bugs anymore. (And by this I mean really stable..)
Instead of this Calligra beta phase will have taken only a couple of weeks... Are Microsoft Developpers really so retarded ?

Finally, for a couple of days, I read from a Calligra teammember saying they are searching for use case in order to test it. This is typically what would never happen in the industry. It would be unthinkable to be so close to the end of a development phase of a product and to wonder which use case are to be tested. They should be defined as soon as possible from the very begining, prior to write any lines of code.
By saying this, I want to emphasis on the fact that I don't criticize dev from Calligra, neither from the rest of the KDE Community.
I just want to make pepole aware of my point of view that is: if we want to make a stuff that has professional quality, that compete against industrial OS and softwares, we definitly have to mimic the way they work. To increase the quality we have to work like the industry would do, through quality workflow, quality gates functional analysis etc... Industry didn't invented boring stuff like Quality principle, ISO 9001 just for fun. They have done it because without that they didn't managed to achieve the quality level they wanted their product to have. Just like us right now.

I don't think that KDE is the wrong DE. In fact if all KDE's feature would work well it would be the bettest on Earth. If they only would....



Tell me what you think about my point of view? I would enjoy to discuss about it with dev and people from the community !

I mostly agree with wotan.

I myself wondered many times how thourough software like kontact was tested before release.

In fact, I'd be happy to volonteer testing kmail.
Considering the number of hours (or rather, days, weeks)
surfing the web trying to find answers, or simply optimistic comments that would make me wait for bug corrections), testing certainly won't take more of my time.

Very recently I had to take the sad decision to switch to thunderbird.
Considering again the time it took me to migrate to kmail2, it was not an easy decision to make. I had been using kmail for ages. It simply isn't stable anymore for my everyday professional use.

The thing that scares me is that kmail was largely split into akonadi components, and it makes it even more difficult to seriously test.

Most people here love KDE and where it is preteninding to go.

But:

There will never be a perfect system, but at least you have the choice to use what you want. Least users try that way...

Is a feeble excuse to real users who use this on an every day real work enironement..... we chose KDE 4.x.x!!!!!!!

Kontakt / akonadi / nepumuk (mucky) just do not work.

I cannot re-login every time my kde4.7.3 decides to give a panic. I have work to do!!

KDE 4.7.1 was much more stable.

Get the sstability back, as a few of these posters have maintained. Then do the fun part

Fintan wrote:...........................

I cannot re-login every time my kde4.7.3 decides to give a panic. I have work to do!!

KDE 4.7.1 was much more stable.

Get the sstability back, as a few of these posters have maintained. Then do the fun part

Just don't understand this "every time my KDE decides to give a panic".
I actually never expereince these kind of panics, and use KDE for an average of about 8-10 hours a day.
And that since a long long time already.
Sometimes i think there are combinations of distributions and KDE that are the base to such behaviour. On the other hand, i can not point the finger on it.

I think I once had a problem with KDE 4.x - and it was due to too little RAM (only had 2GB in my laptop).

I've got Akonadi and Nepomuk running. I got rid of Kontact because for some reason Akregator cannot tag posts.

With that in mind KDE has not really given me any problems - despite the fact that my current install is some three years old and my .kde and .kde4 have never been removed or tinkered with (I did clean up my .kde to save some space when all mail got moved to .kde4 on the advent of KDE 4.x).

I certainly don't But gerard82, Fri13 is correct about Arch (and the rest).

However, I fail to see that this discussion has to do with KDE.

I've been reading this thread for weeks, and it seems to be wandering very far from usefulness. Please can we focus on discussion and opinions of the future of KDE? Suggestions for folks such as how to get involved in testing, bug triage, etc. are welcome. Let's remember that KDE isn't software, KDE is community. We the community produce the software to delight the world, and make the world a better place. So shall we put our heads together and work out better ways to do that?

I've split the thread 'cos of hijacking/off topic, etc.

For those who fancy it, here is the link to the split topic entitled source compiled distros: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=98059

And from now please stay on topic

toad wrote:I think I once had a problem with KDE 4.x - and it was due to too little RAM (only had 2GB in my laptop).

ONLY 2 gigabytes? I'm sorry, that's kind of insane. Not everyone has the spare money to put a gazillion gigabytes of RAM in their computer; not everyone has a computer that supports a gazillion gigabytes of RAM.

Let me put it this way: KDE is a free desktop. It could potentially make day-to-day computing possible for people who simply cannot afford a computer that runs Windows 7 - and yes, I know people who fall into that category. If you make a free desktop, you might as well keep its requirements affordable too.

And KDE3 did that. Right now I have Debian Lenny with KDE 3.5.10 running on a Powerbook G4 with an 800 MHz processor... And it is faster and more responsive than KDE 4.5.5 on my dual-core 1.6 GHz netbook. KDE4 barely even runs on the Mac. KDE3 starts in 4 seconds on the Mac, and KDE4 starts in 25 on the netbook.

To be brutally frank, I think the focus on eyecandy needs to die.

You are of course correct - it does seem insane! I haven't said it in so many words but I didn't disable anything and pretty soonish kswapd killed my machine. Who knows what might have happened if I had disabled nepomuk et al.

Also bear in mind that these days it is nigh impossible to buy a machine with less than 4GB RAM. I opted for xfce for my T61 until I upgraded and fared well. And with 4GB KDE is flying on it once again

Gullible Jones wrote:

toad wrote:I think I once had a problem with KDE 4.x - and it was due to too little RAM (only had 2GB in my laptop).

ONLY 2 gigabytes? I'm sorry, that's kind of insane. Not everyone has the spare money to put a gazillion gigabytes of RAM in their computer; not everyone has a computer that supports a gazillion gigabytes of RAM.

2 Gigabytes is more than enough.
I have used KDE SC 4.7 with computer what had 768MB RAM. Runs smoothly. CPU is just 1.2GHz AMD Athlon and difference is that I can enable OpenGL acceleration for older Nvidia card (what is about to be left out of drivers) so CPU does not need to render stuff.

KDE SC does not need gigabytes of RAM or multicore CPU's if it is just compiled correctly. So choose your distributor well or compile it yourself.

KDE SC future is so on very bright because it has still maintained the lightness and speed for most users and most computers.
If older computer does not run it, it can not be blamed first hand a KDE (community) but distributor first, has it done something for it so it does not work well.

I have seen distributions (like Ubuntu) what grawl on quad core computers. Lags on newest laptops.... But I do not blame GNOME community or KDE from it but the distribution when software runs fine when just switching distribution.

What I would say what is problem in the future is that what technologies we offer. Example, the Activities and Nepomuk are still something what most people dont know. It isn't good at all. People want to search files. They want to do small and quick multitasking. They want to use computers.

Fri13 wrote:2 Gigabytes is more than enough.
I have used KDE SC 4.7 with computer what had 768MB RAM. Runs smoothly. CPU is just 1.2GHz AMD Athlon and difference is that I can enable OpenGL acceleration for older Nvidia card (what is about to be left out of drivers) so CPU does not need to render stuff.

I'm sure it is but I didn't have time to dabble as I had a tight deadline to deal with so instead of getting to the root of the problem I simply switched to xfce Call it laziness, but I never got down to the kswapd problem (which, incidentally, is reasonably well documented in the Arch forums).

toad wrote:

Fri13 wrote:I'm sure it is but I didn't have time to dabble as I had a tight deadline to deal with so instead of getting to the root of the problem I simply switched to xfce

There is no shame to switch a tool at the time when needed when current tool is broken by some reason (etc).

That is one great things why I love whole Open Source and especially KDE community what they do as people have so many possibilities to do things. So if one fails, just swap. No need to worry that no everything is stopped until IT guy comes after few hours Even in that time you download a new LiveCD and run it

Fri13 wrote:I have seen distributions (like Ubuntu) what grawl on quad core computers. Lags on newest laptops.... But I do not blame GNOME community or KDE from it but the distribution when software runs fine when just switching distribution.

it is a bit easy to blame the distribution. I'm a simple user and for me KDE is *nothing* without a distribution.

If what you say is true, it means that KDE should give precise instructions to distributors to make it run smoothly.

If there is a fault somewhere, it is certainly shared.