Hi everyone.

I just wanted to give my feedback to KDE before switching to Gnome. It's been 3 years now that I'm following KDE because I love the possibilty to do what I want rather than an intuitive GUI. I can't be sure my problems depends on KDE, I may will switch to ubuntu if I gnome doesn't solve them. Be sure that this is just a feedback, I hope one day I'll will be able to use KDE again. Here's why I can't use KDE :

- First I get an harware compatibility problem with my LAN (3 years ago) I'm not qure if it's solve or not, if it's KDE dependent or not but surely the configuration and stuff is higly non intuitive. I'm just saying that first because it was the first problem I encountered.

- Hard drive's management is a mess (imho): I needed long hours of forums and thinking and many awfull other stuffs to simply be able to read the other partitions of my computer (my data in FAT32 and windows in NTFS). The solution I came up with is just a root dolphin shortcut to be able to mount the rives without too much things to do....

- NVIDIA's driver : I don't get it, okay it's working but the performances are VERY low and I get artifacts on my screen at each startup (at login, like the video buffers were not cleared before first display). This is not KDE dependent but as there are drivers and it's workingn there's maybe some improvement to do about how KDE use the GPU (or not). Also it's sad that the official NVIDIA drivers can't be used (That's about debian, I know).

- Finaly : I can't do anything with my CPU going over 80% for anything, as I'm wrintig this my CPU is at 70% 24/7 cos' I did dare to open iceweasel, watch a video then close it. At starting the CPU is good but anything just throw it away... I hope I'll find a stable efficient OS to use (I tried xfce but it bugged hard when I installed something to cop the multimedia buttons... my bad now ininstall the packages doesn't change anything, I'm stuck, no answer from any forum).

The worst is about having 80% CPU usage and unable to see why because proccess list just give :
dbus-daemon -> 4%
xorg -> 4%
ksysguard -> 2%
and some 2 or 3 more 1% processes

My configuration (laptop) :
CPU : Intel core 2 duo T7300
GPU : NVIDIA 8600M GT
RAM : DDR2 2Go


I hope this will be usefull to give some problems, I know all of this might not be due to KDE. I'll try gnome and if it's not better will be forced to use ubuntu.

PS : I know that I can have both KDE and Gnome but switching is a pain and I just hate having lots of garbages in my HD. I want a clean HD with just what I need (not any useless package).

None of the above is due to KDE apart from the CPU issue which is probably virtuoso.

Maybe your issues are Debian:
- lan, no idea because you don't really describe your lan or your issues and even you seem to feel it is not a KDE problem
- the access to fat32 and ntfs filesystems is the responsibility of the distro not the de, they are handled in /etc/fstab so either the distro did not set them up correctly at install or you didn't when you added them at a later time. This is a minor edit to a file.
- Nvidia drivers, again not the responsibility of the de, don't know what Debian uses but I compile my own and you should too (it is not hard) and if the drivers they provide are problematic you should consider compiling or changing distro's
- cpu usage, no idea again you don't provide much info, the 80% and other %'s are provided by what? If this is just videos and IceWeasal neither of which are KDE apps.

You do realize that if you posted your problems and a more detailed description of your setup you might have received help that fixed your problems because your hardware should in no way be hampering your experience.

Try switching to a different distro!
I run Fedora which seems to be the best out their as far as I'm concerned and is fairly trouble free, easy to install and multiple choices of desk tops.
I always used the Fedora KDE live install to install Fedora with no problems!

My only peeve with KDE right now is what they have done with Kmail and Kwallet. Disabling kwallet will not allow you to save your email password as in the past!

Now if that's a problem for you then try something else which I am seriously considering myself unless some one has a solution to the password problem!

Good Luck

Debian is a fine distro but it doesn't do _everything_ (although most things) for you. The OP only has to get into it. But then again, LinuxMint is also very good AND they have a rolling release version based on Debian.

The high CPU for me is from nepomuk taking forever/rescanning my NFS shares. I just disable desktop search because IDGRA about indexing on my desktop.

Hey "fellow"

- Hard drive's management is a mess (imho): I needed long hours of forums and thinking and many awfull other stuffs to simply be able to read the other partitions of my computer (my data in FAT32 and windows in NTFS). The solution I came up with is just a root dolphin shortcut to be able to mount the rives without too much things to do....

You're killing me!!
I thought I was the only crazy person in this world who does (or did) this "dolphin as root first" thing. Yes there was a very ugly bug (apparently fixed in the newer versions) that ALWAYS denied you the permission to mount certain drives under your regular user ID. "Certain" means not all of them, but e. g. those running off certain external controller cards. (like in my case)
So I had to launch a "sudo dolphin", mount all the missing partitions, close it again and then switch to my actual work. Argh!

Well, I also like Debian because KNOPPIX and Debian are *very* alike. And since I often have to use KNOPPIX off a live CD to fix some stuff (and to avoid my HDD-based OS to get hampered somehow) it's very nice to run pre-installed stuff off my HDD directly when booting the live CD. Same libs (roughly), same base system, same thing. Likeable.

And, to close this, I really LOVE it whenever I have to boot old KNOPPIX 5.1 (Reason: fantastic burning software K3b which has been replaced by this piece of dog poop called Brasero for no obvious reason (GRR :-@)) and I still have my Krusader where I can just say "Mount all HDDs" in the expert (LOL) settings. Lovely!
Can't seem to understand why the newer versions got rid of Krusader. It was a fine piece of software.
And if you wanted to remember per-folder settings for viewing mode, it definitely did NOT clutter up ALL folders in your harddrive with these extremely nuisant ".directory" files.

kajika wrote: I hope this will be usefull to give some problems, I know all of this might not be due to KDE. I'll try gnome and if it's not better will be forced to use ubuntu.

Most, if not all of the problems you're facing, will be there in Ubuntu and all other Debian derivatives too . (especially if you use Debian Testing)
If you're using Debian Stable, the problems are probably due to the extremely outdated software.
Try the live CD s of various distros to see what agrees with you.