I'm currently use KDE 4.10.3 and have come across a vast number of bugs, but apart from the high latency of the run menu & task bar sometimes this has made it harder to work.

For some reason all my tasks at some point loose their positions and clickability and end up in an unorganized pile of layered tasks unequally separated.

Does anybody know what actions lead to this outcome? I've had this happen to me 3 times in 2 days and am not sure what exactly I did to cause this. It would help so I wouldn't have to close all the windows and reopen them again.

Thanks.

try these:
- with your KDE session not running clear your cache by removing folder /var/tmp/kdecache-user_name
- within kde run:

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kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental  2> /dev/null

when you say "task bar" do you mean task manage or the entire panel?

Could you detail some of these bugs please? If we aren't aware of them, it is not possible to assist in getting them addressed.

I've never seen the taskbar items become disorganised, but I have experienced the lack of clickability - this can usually be fixed temporarily by toggling a system tray application with a window such as Akregator or Amarok. The developers have done quite a bit of debugging on this and have been unable to find the cause unfortunately.

Please note that a new "Task Manager" applet will be shipping in KDE 4.11, based on QML which will hopefully improve on some aspects of the behaviour of the current applet.

google01103 wrote:try these:
- with your KDE session not running clear your cache by removing folder /var/tmp/kdecache-user_name
- within kde run:

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kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental  2> /dev/null

when you say "task bar" do you mean task manage or the entire panel?

I'll give that a go, it's a new installation which should be pretty clean.

By task bar I mean the entire pane down the bottom rather than the task manager.

bcooksley wrote:Could you detail some of these bugs please? If we aren't aware of them, it is not possible to assist in getting them addressed.

I've never seen the taskbar items become disorganised, but I have experienced the lack of clickability - this can usually be fixed temporarily by toggling a system tray application with a window such as Akregator or Amarok. The developers have done quite a bit of debugging on this and have been unable to find the cause unfortunately.

Please note that a new "Task Manager" applet will be shipping in KDE 4.11, based on QML which will hopefully improve on some aspects of the behaviour of the current applet.

The unresponsiveness of the run menu and lesser the task bar reached an extreme at one point where it would freeze every 2-3 seconds for 4-8 seconds, even if idle. Restarting seemed to fix that to some degree although the KDE button does have its moments. When it does a freeze it is possible it'll continuing covering all the other windows indefinitely.

With this taskbar I'm not sure what's causing this, although I do believe it happened before I let the taskbar items be movable. (Can't remember which menu let me do this) I can say that this arose under pretty mundane tasks. I'll try pay more attention to this. It's a little embarrassing showing my dad how cool Linux & KDE is.

As his Windows 8 laptop was not usable (slower than W7, sluggish, higher resource usage CPU/RAM, hideous design), under Windows 7 the drivers for wireless and ACPI have a massive bug which the manufacturer won't probably fix. This DE is a bloody big step up from the alternatives and hands down the best, until this it's always been about finding what you can't do with it, with KDE it's constantly finding out what you can achieve.

For the responsiveness / hangs issue: try checking which plugins are enabled in the KRunner settings (KRunner is accessible via Alt + F2).
You probably want to disable those you are not using.

For the task manager - how many rows of items are you using? Also, which grouping type do you have selected?

bcooksley wrote:For the responsiveness / hangs issue: try checking which plugins are enabled in the KRunner settings (KRunner is accessible via Alt + F2).
You probably want to disable those you are not using.

At the time there was that system information widget/plugin, I've removed that next boot. I had relabaled the drive in gparted and the partition wouldn't mount until restarted as the disk mounting daemon it said in Dolphin was unable to find it until a restart. So perhaps it was that, but there is something definitely wrong here.

bcooksley wrote:For the task manager - how many rows of items are you using? Also, which grouping type do you have selected?

Single row with the group together (default) setting. It works okay until something I'm not sure of at this point in time happens. Either the closing or opening of a window,

Okay - sounds like you're affected by the same issue that strikes me from time to time. Next time the Task Manager applet issue occurs, can you try my workaround (opening or closing a window) to see if that puts it back to normal again?

With regards to responsiveness - which plugins do you have enabled? Some plugins do take longer to return results than others. The applications runner is usually near instant for example.

bcooksley wrote:Okay - sounds like you're affected by the same issue that strikes me from time to time. Next time the Task Manager applet issue occurs, can you try my workaround (opening or closing a window) to see if that puts it back to normal again?

To clarify the task bar, manager reminds me of the task/system monitor. Unfortunately the only way for me to fix this is to close all the windows currently opened. Any new will be okay.

bcooksley wrote:With regards to responsiveness - which plugins do you have enabled? Some plugins do take longer to return results than others. The applications runner is usually near instant for example.

No additional plugins are in use, it's a little weird and I hope the problem is found.

Okay, that is quite unusual then - another thing you could try is changing the height and width of the panel - you may have a specific height / width combination which causes this layouting bug in certain circumstances.

For the sluggishness - how many seconds does it appear sluggish for? Other KRunner plugins you might want to disable are Activities, Nepomuk Desktop Search and Contacts.

bcooksley wrote:Okay, that is quite unusual then - another thing you could try is changing the height and width of the panel - you may have a specific height / width combination which causes this layouting bug in certain circumstances.

For the sluggishness - how many seconds does it appear sluggish for? Other KRunner plugins you might want to disable are Activities, Nepomuk Desktop Search and Contacts.

Well usually 1-2 seconds, but it can reach up to 10 seconds. While everything else remains perfectly accessible.

I wasn't aware that activities were always active or contacts. I'll disable all them.. Somehow, I'm not entire sure where to do this.

The Activities and Contacts runners will likely do nothing if their respective backends are disabled, but it will still take them time to realise this - which could explain the sluggish responses.