Hi,

I was using KDE nonstop since the 2.0 release back in the old millenium.
So I have seen a lot of changes there, a lot of bugs come and go.
Now I'm really considering alternatives to KDE.

I don't know if anyone who has something to say will read this, but I hope and I really hope for improvements (very soon).

Some good things I like and why I was using KDE until now:
I like the look and feel and the posibilites to customize it to my likings.
I liked (yes, past tense) the kontact all in one package for its usability and integration of all needed services.
but now we come to the things I don't like:
It looks to me, that nobody is testing their stuff!
I tried to upgrade to the new kmail2 packacke and the new kontact stuff.
A total desaster with complete data loss. Several times.
It became slow and unreliable.
I could live with slow, but unreliable is a showstopper. But I made a own thread about that a while ago, not much improved, a lot of new bugs came.
I moved to a different email client now. May kontact, kmail & co rest in peace.
Now the next desaster was the no longer correctly working task manager.
Hello? How can you mess up a task manager for several releases?
Next thing that annoys me is the akonadi desaster. It came with kdepim but hooks everywhere. I don't want to have it running just because I want to know the time in the panel.
It won't display any appointments because I gave up on kontact anyway.
Next major thing is the insane memory consumption.
Yes I have a powerful computer with a lot of memory and 64 bit OS but does that mean KDE may take it all?
Just a few programms (all values are VIRT, RES) consumption:
amarok: just to play some audio files: 1058 MB / 388 MB
kwin: 780 MB / 127 MB
konqueror: only this page open after fresh start: 560 MB / 106 MB
plasma-desktop: 703 MB / 93 MB
another plasma-desktop: 600 MB / 80 MB
krunner: 742 MB / 47 MB
konsole: (only displaying top): 436 MB / 45 MB
and so on.
A quick add gave me 9.7 GB virtual / 1.3 GB resident memory.
Wow, thats 1.3 GB for a taskbar, 4 desktops, some icons and 3 windows.
Ok, maybe thats would be fine for some of the developers, but I want to use my memory for other things as well.
Just as an unfair comparission: fluxbox uses about 20% of the memory my kcalc used when doing the math above.

But wait, memory wasting is not all, I disabled all those indexing stuff for semantic desktop and metastuff, but kde ignores my settings and does some indexing anyway. Looks like it knows better than me.
I can delete several GB of index stuff each week.

When writing about config stuff, I would like to have back a working configuration for my graphics tablet. As soon as I set something in the config, my tabled starts to acting weird. I can click some buttons, but the release event is not sent. Only If I change the mode to relative it works again. Maybe a driver bug, bug it only got triggered after running the config tool once.

And how do I set the maximum amount of cache for thumbnails? I recently deleted 200GB of thumbnails from my KDE dir. They are broken anyway because
they don't recognise when the file has changed since thumbnail generation.

So whats the conclusion?
I don't know. But if kde continues to go down the road with this speed, it will crash horribly. 4.7.3 was a big disappointment(again). Not sure if I will see 4.8.
So please stop experimenting and adding new unneded bloat like akonadi, experimental activity stuff and make a desktop that is resource friendly, fast and most important: actually work. And please start fixing those billions of bugs without creating new ones.

Maybe I will switch to gnome, or go back to a working kde (like 3.5). I'm not sure. Gonna start expermenting. Can't get any worse than kde 4.X.

KWin using 127 MB? Sounds to me like something's wrong with your system. You sure you're not using debug builds or something?

(I'll give you that KDE4 can get pretty slow at times, but on my laptop KWin uses about 25 MB. Which is still huge for a window manager, but five times less than what you're reporting.)

your memory amounts all seem off (way off & way high) compared to what I see

where are you getting you memory readings?

what is the result of free? how much ram is on your system? when was last time you booted?

this is my memory reading by app http://simplest-image-hosting.net/png-0 ... 108-193620

maybe your memory problem is that you're using top (or htop) and aren't understanding what the numbers actually represent, see this Gentoo thread http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/gent ... #200359251

I was using top, but the kde system monitor reports similar values.
I got 16GB of RAM + 16 GB of swap.
free reports something like 5 GB used 11 GB free, ~ 3.6 GB cached and few hundred MB shared. No swap used.
My last reboot was about 5 minutes before the calculation.
Currently my computer is doing what it supposed to do (work) so my biggest
memory users are my apps.
I don't have debug build enabled, binaries and libs are compiled with -march=core2 -O2 and stripped.
Straight via the normal gentoo repository.
I'm using the nvidia closed-source X driver, but I doubt that would make any difference.
I have rougly the same memory usage on my laptop with an onboard intel gfx card. Except that it only has 3 GB. where 1GB for desktop is more critical.
But there, the constant activity of some kde apps hurts the most. HDD drive won't go to sleep and battery is drained.

edit: after a while, amarok need even more memory 429 MB by now.
but thats probably just the buggy app.
kwin and the biggest other apps stay roughly the same +- 1 or 2 MB.

Another edit:
just for the fun, I checked kcalc with valgrind. just start/stop leaks 899,785 bytes. Every button press increased the leak. Just try for yourself.

I agree with SashFFM, sure for Akonadi invasion (see my post viewtopic.php?f=15&t=97447 if you would)
I became to think I'm loosing control on my system, on my filesystem too. This isn't Linux-style.
Also, contribution to the open source and to the community becomes very hard. All we can do is open an issue to the KDE bugtracker. No more config files, no more chance to understand what was wrong (not solve it, of course ), no chance to help others in solving basic issues, no chance to get help from others.
I become to feel myself "out of the community". Just an isolated user.
But pay attention: users wants everything is working perfectly. No bugs, no data loss, no minor release incompatibilities (as kpim ... ).
Btw, long life to KDE
g

Umm wait a minute SashFFM, you're using Gentoo... What optimization flags are you using? What USE flags?

I think there may be one of these two things going on here:

- You did some aggressive optimization, and KDE did not take kindly to it

Or

- You compiled KDE with some nonstandard options, and accidentally uncovered a major bug

So it would be good to know more about the way your system is set up.

I agree with Gullible Jones that the problems you are encountering must be related to your setup. I have never seen such figures in all the time I have used KDE (since 1.1 in 2000).

As written above, I'm using -march=core2 -O2 for everything.
This happened on 3 computers, slight difference, but all consume way too much memory.
I have: Pentium4 (compiling with -march=pentium4), a dual core and quad core Intel CPU.
The P4 is 32 Bit, the others are 64 Bit.
All need insane amounts of memory.
And all of them leak like crazy.
I can only test on the dualcore machine, the others have their KDE stuff already removed.
I've uploaded an http://www.linuxhowtos.org/emerge.txt emerge --info txt on my last KDE enabled computer and a valgrind output of start and stopping kcalc http://www.linuxhowtos.org/kcalc.txt, maybe it helps.

But the memory usage is not my biggest issue. It's the stability.
I need a working and reliable desktop. KDE does not offer this feature anymore.
But at least one problem is fixed with 4.7.3: the misbehaving taskbar:
The plasma app is crashing every hour or so, the taskbar has no time to misbehave.
So after a few days testing and hating kde 4.7.3 I uninstalled it for good.
I just look like the KDE developers are no longer interested in providing bug free(or rare) releases, but concentrate on eyecandy.
Sure looks nice on screenshots, but does not work reliable.
My biggest showstoppers that need to be fixed so that I try KDE again:
* Get rid of the akonadi, nepomuk and virtuoso database stuff, store it in files again.
* Improve stability (a lot).
* Fix memory leaks.
* Make the user home dir shareabale via NFS again (implies getting rid of the dbs) This worked before.
* Make the KDE config dir backupable while system is running (again, implies getting rid of the dbs). Or provide working tools, not those current toys.
IF you fix all of those points, I would consider recommending KDE again for office and private use. I did that before KDE 4.6.
But I'm nobody so you don't have to listen to me and I'm to lazy to recommend the avoiding of kde on my website. Got more important things to do there.
But if someone wants to hire me to find and kill KDE bugs, msg me and I would reinstall it

TheSash

SashFFM wrote:As written above, I'm using -march=core2 -O2 for everything.
This happened on 3 computers, slight difference, but all consume way too much memory.
I have: Pentium4 (compiling with -march=pentium4), a dual core and quad core Intel CPU.
The P4 is 32 Bit, the others are 64 Bit.
All need insane amounts of memory.
And all of them leak like crazy.
I can only test on the dualcore machine, the others have their KDE stuff already removed.
I've uploaded an http://www.linuxhowtos.org/emerge.txt emerge --info txt on my last KDE enabled computer and a valgrind output of start and stopping kcalc http://www.linuxhowtos.org/kcalc.txt, maybe it helps.

But the memory usage is not my biggest issue. It's the stability.
I need a working and reliable desktop. KDE does not offer this feature anymore.
But at least one problem is fixed with 4.7.3: the misbehaving taskbar:
The plasma app is crashing every hour or so, the taskbar has no time to misbehave.

This really sounds like a gentoo-specific problem. I have run KDE on many systems and have never seen the behavior you are describing. You should really ask at the gentoo forums. Either that or you are using an unstable plasmoid, do you use any non-default widgets?

SashFFM wrote:I just look like the KDE developers are no longer interested in providing bug free(or rare) releases, but concentrate on eyecandy.

If you followed the mailing lists, planet KDE, or even read the release announcements you would know this could not be further from the truth. Did you check if there might be a problem with your installation at the gentoo forums? Did you submit bug reports? (hint: developers cannot fix bugs they don't know about) You don't even know if the problems are KDE's fault, and if they are you apparently didn't tell them about the bugs, yet you use them to conclude that the entire KDE development community doesn't care about bugs.

SashFFM wrote:* Get rid of the akonadi, nepomuk and virtuoso database stuff, store it in files again.

The akonadi database only stores metadata about your emails and such, but the emails themselves are stored in ordinary mbox files. Previous versions of KDE pim applications like kmail used databases as well for much of the same thing kdepim2 uses them for, it is just that kdepim2 uses a single database while previous version used a bunch of them. The new type of database has more capabilities, allowing them to fix some of the oldest and most-hated bugs in all of KDE but were simply infeasible or even impossible to fix in previous versions of kdepim.

With a properly-updated KDE 4.7.3 and soprona 2.7.3, the nepomuk performance impact is negligible. Getting rid of it is not going to happen, it provides too much added functionality. But developers are working really hard on improving it and making it much faster, and they have succeeded big time over the last couple months. There are still reports of performance problems with KDE 4.7.3, either in nepomuk or akonadi, but when you dig deeper all the ones I have seen (and I have seen a lot) are due to people using older versions of soprano.

But if you really don't like nepomuk, just turn it off, it is not that hard. If you don't like akonadi, just install KDE without it, if you are using gentoo that is trivial.

SashFFM wrote:* Improve stability (a lot).
* Fix memory leaks.

Assuming that the stability and memory leaks are due to KDE and not your setup.

SashFFM wrote:* Make the user home dir shareabale via NFS again (implies getting rid of the dbs) This worked before.
* Make the KDE config dir backupable while system is running (again, implies getting rid of the dbs). Or provide working tools, not those current toys.

First, KDE has always used databases, they are just more centralized now. Second, they have a backup system built-in now, which they never did before, so backups are easier now than before.

I don't know about RAM usage (my figures are much more reasonable)
but for the rest I fully agree with SashFFM.

I too have been using KDE for more than a decade, and witnessed so many regressions.

kontact (esp. kmail, but also kaddressbook) is the biggest problem for me.

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.

I have the feeling that each time a product seems to be mature enough to be really professional, another revolution comes (like kde4, kmail2, etc.) and everything starts again from scratch.

For us, users, we always have something "on the edge", unstable, unreliable.
(but, I agree, beautiful )

In short: something that we cannot recommend to colleagues.

(I'm using kubuntu 11.10)

Sanette wrote:..............

For us, users, we always have something "on the edge", unstable, unreliable.
(but, I agree, beautiful )

In short: something that we cannot recommend to colleagues.

(I'm using kubuntu 11.10)

For us? But not for me!!!

For me KDE is stabilizing it's great version 4 ever since they made this direction into evolution.
I went through all the process from the first 4-release, and have always been able working on my machines. Of course there were a lot of things that had to be taken care of, and there still are, but be honest about what is reached since.
Have also seen many different KDE-experiences on different distributions.
The best experiences for me were in combination with Mandriva, until version 2010, and Mageia1, and Fedora16 right now.

KDE please don't stop your revolutionary and visionary approach, problems will also remain if development would been brought to some standstill.

Just to address some of the Feedback:

TheBlackCat wrote:

SashFFM wrote:* Get rid of the akonadi, nepomuk and virtuoso database stuff, store it in files again.

The akonadi database only stores metadata about your emails and such, but the emails themselves are stored in ordinary mbox files. Previous versions of KDE pim applications like kmail used databases as well for much of the same thing kdepim2 uses them for, it is just that kdepim2 uses a single database while previous version used a bunch of them. The new type of database has more capabilities, allowing them to fix some of the oldest and most-hated bugs in all of KDE but were simply infeasible or even impossible to fix in previous versions of kdepim.

This may be partially true, but the email files themself were stored where they supposed to be. The configured directory structure.
Next to this were the metadata, just some smallish files.
If removed or damaged, they were regenerated by folder.
But what if big the akonadi db fails? Hours of waiting to reindex several thousand files in hundred dirs. Improvement? No.

TheBlackCat wrote:With a properly-updated KDE 4.7.3 and soprona 2.7.3, the nepomuk performance impact is negligible. Getting rid of it is not going to happen, it provides too much added functionality. But developers are working really hard on improving it and making it much faster, and they have succeeded big time over the last couple months.

Sure they still sometimes use 100% CPU over hours, but they may do that faster now.
There are a lot of issues repoting this. I had this even with a empty new user with 4.7.3, no upgrade.

TheBlackCat wrote:But if you really don't like nepomuk, just turn it off, it is not that hard. If you don't like akonadi, just install KDE without it, if you are using gentoo that is trivial.

Ever tried to run the most important part of kde: kontact without akonadi?
Nepomuk was disabled, but was running anyway. Set to 50MB ram usage, used a couple of hundred.
And if I renamed the binary, every now and then knotify popped up "nepomuk agent are not running".
And another "few" bugs, already reported by others.
KDE is more than the window manager, its the apps as well. This one fails horribly, as many others.

TheBlackCat wrote:

SashFFM wrote:* Improve stability (a lot).
* Fix memory leaks.

Assuming that the stability and memory leaks are due to KDE and not your setup.

If they are caused by my setup (possible, but unlikely) its a kde bug anyway. No setup, no matter how strange, should cause memory leaks. If something is bogus, at least report it and try to work around that.
But if its my or gentoo's fault: why only there, do other distros patch the broken stuff?
And what could I've done wrong if a kcalc, a kmix or some other app leaks memory? Even with an empty config file?

TheBlackCat wrote:

SashFFM wrote:* Make the user home dir shareabale via NFS again (implies getting rid of the dbs) This worked before.
* Make the KDE config dir backupable while system is running (again, implies getting rid of the dbs). Or provide working tools, not those current toys.

First, KDE has always used databases, they are just more centralized now. Second, they have a backup system built-in now, which they never did before, so backups are easier now than before.

This what I think is the biggest problem. You create single point of failures. Every sysadmin can tell you: bad idea.

But now after we have this single point of failure, how do I backup them from a remote machine or cronjob while the apps are running?
How do I do incremental backups of my several GB sized maildirs / maildb files the "kde way"?

And why does the kde project leaders (or whoever makes the design choices) even think we need or want the databases at all? Fine, they might speed somethings up, but make them optional, please.

Just to make some comparrisions: My imap server with a php frontend is able to handle >20k mails per directory way faster than my local kmail/akonadi. My local akonadi uses db, my server plain files. So what are the advantages of using a db again?
Server backup: plain rsync with some commandline options => incremental backup with snapshots
KDE backup: rsync, several obscure commands and even then not everything on backup. Some things incremental, most full files, waste of space.

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?

But thats arguing about some single points, the problem I wanted to make user or developers aware of, is bigger. A huge loss of quality. To a point where even longtime users are leaving and switching to uglier, but more stable DEs and apps.

SashFFM

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.

isadora wrote:For me KDE is stabilizing it's great version 4 ever since they made this direction into evolution.
I went through all the process from the first 4-release, and have always been able working on my machines. Of course there were a lot of things that had to be taken care of, and there still are, but be honest about what is reached since.
Have also seen many different KDE-experiences on different distributions.
The best experiences for me were in combination with Mandriva, until version 2010, and Mageia1, and Fedora16 right now.

KDE please don't stop your revolutionary and visionary approach, problems will also remain if development would been brought to some standstill.

Concerning distros, maybe you're right, kubuntu is probably not the best distro for KDE.

I have also witnessed the change to KDE 4 (I've beenn using KDE since KDE2)
First it was really beta software. I agree things are stabilizing now, and there are many features that I really like. But every new release also brings new things and new instabilities. kmail2 is the best (worst) example.

I'm trying to report bugs, but usually new versions appear before the bug is considered, and new versions of course change the bugs: some disappear, some other reappear elsewhere. So it is very difficult to help.