I completely agree with SashFFM (the OP).
I also use Gentoo (7 years).
For people who don't know the difference between Gentoo and other distro's:
In Gentoo you compile software from source distributed by the makers of that software.AFAIK the only other distro that works that way is LSF.
I managed to compile KDE-4.7.3 w/o nepomuk akonadi etc.
And it runs fairly stable.Of course I don't use kmail and associated terrors.
In 4.7.1 I could use kscd,not any more,it either crashes on startup or with an audiocd in the drive it starts but refuses to play it.Vlc and audacious play it ok.
I hope the devs will stop inventing new bling and concentrate on fixing all the outstanding bugs instead.
But I am afraid I hope in vain.
Gerard.

gerard82 wrote:For people who don't know the difference between Gentoo and other distro's:
In Gentoo you compile software from source distributed by the makers of that software.AFAIK the only other distro that works that way is LSF.

Slackware is same kind and Arch Linux is with same idea but with precompiled packages if wanted.

So Slackware, Gentoo and Arch Linux are mainstream distributions what does not play with the software what upstream develop.

But none of other distribution either denies the possibility to compile everything from tarballs, it is just more time consuming.

I am talking of sourcebased ONLY.
Of course once you have a basic Linux setup with the tools needed you can compile anything you want from source.
My point is that Gentoo and LFS use the source w/o any modification.
So any problem is caused by flaky source.
I installed wacomtablet from kde-apps.org.It runs well for a while in Gimp-2.6.11,then it starts acting funny (unusable).
I don't think it's the wacomtablet program but the KDE infrastructure.
When I delete it and run the tablet with bash scripts to control pressure etc. thus bypassing KDE it never gives any problems.
Gerard.

gerard82 wrote:I am talking of sourcebased ONLY.
Of course once you have a basic Linux setup with the tools needed you can compile anything you want from source.
My point is that Gentoo and LFS use the source w/o any modification.
So any problem is caused by flaky source.

So does Arch Linux, just offers by default a binary packages for faster install but user can as well do source install from beginning without precompiled binary packages and as well, without any modifications.

Actually, every distribution is possible to install from source what upstream offers or with sources what distributor has modified.

Gentoo, Slackware and others just makes it much easier as the package manager helps alot on that.

When using LFS, you dont even have anything what would help you. And you definetely dont have any source coude modifications (what even Gentoo does have at some packages but so little that it is not worth to argue).

The distributions exist so users can get whole software system easily and even install it easily. Without them spending time to hunt every software and do very difficult basic installation to empty computer first compiling Linux operating system, then bootloader, installing bootloader, installing Linux, compiling GNU compiler and GNU libraries and installing them and so on.

Who would love to spend a week to get today a just Linux operating system working and another week to get GNU compiler, gettext, bash and other system softwares? No one....

Fri13,
Apparently you don't really know what you're talking about.

Who would love to spend a week to get today a just Linux operating system working and another week to get GNU compiler, gettext, bash and other system softwares? No one....

You can't install anything from source w/o FIRST installing compiler (gcc), gettext, bash etc.
And on a modern box with 2 cores and 2 or 3 GB of RAM one can install Gentoo including desktop in a day.
It pays!
OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) in Gentoo is available as source and precompiled.
I installed the precompiled to save time.Later I installed the one compiled from source.Man the difference in speed was unbelievable.
Gerard.

gerard82 wrote:Fri13,
Apparently you don't really know what you're talking about.

I jumped many parts as I do not want to write LFS document here.

You can't install anything from source w/o FIRST installing compiler (gcc), gettext, bash etc.

Yes, you need those to compile a source to binary. Thats why they are development tools. Thats why GNU/Linux does not mean Operating System but a development platform what use Linux operating system.

But you can have a working pre-compiled development platform where you compile source codes and then you transfer everything to empty HDD what you then boot and start working there.

And on a modern box with 2 cores and 2 or 3 GB of RAM one can install Gentoo including desktop in a day.
It pays!

I were not talking about computing speed. But the effor what the user need to do to search and find every software. Check every package, every version, every configuration and more likely, do a multiple re-compilations because mistakes. That would be the case if we would not have distributions in other words, if everyone should go LFD way. And it is more like that if user does not have package manager to help him to resolve depencies and so on.

OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) in Gentoo is available as source and precompiled.
I installed the precompiled to save time.Later I installed the one compiled from source.Man the difference in speed was unbelievable.
Gerard.

Not everyone want to compile everything from source. Not every software gain a speed when comparing own compiled to pre-compiled version.
Many Gentoo users have reported that they have more or less got 5% speed gain with most typica desktop applications.

OpenOffice.org (the name is OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice or Open Office) is huge and messy. It is slow by default when comparing to other office suites. No matter how much you want to compile it itself. You can not improve the code without touching the code.

I have seen many differences with pre-compiled and "compiled by the user" OpenOffice.org versions. Some distributors are doing a great job that there really ain't need to compile it itself as it is not worth of it.

Gentoo is mostly for geeks. And they have own believe that Gentoo is just so damn great and awesome that it wins every other distribution hands down. I can agree with some specific software but not with the whole software system. The speed gain is not usually anything special, unless comparing to distribution what does some special own optimizations or does not do those to target architecture and speed.

I've split this topic 'cos the two of you got into a private conversation which had nothing to do with KDE. Well, off you go

@Fri13,
Please tell us what distro you use.
Distrowatch doesn't list "Other".
Gerard.

afaik there are not too many source based distros around: Arch, Gentoo, Sourcerer, Lunar-Linux and Source Mage. For a very basic comparison check this wiki entry.

Yes.
But what makes Gentoo the best IMO is it's package manager "portage" which has endless possibilities.
No two Gentoo installs are the same even on the same hardware.
You create your own distro so to speak.
Then there is the documentation and the forum which are probably the best of all Linux distro's.
Gerard.

Consider yourself very happy indeed on your excellent choice but respect others' opinions and distro of choice.

toad wrote:Consider yourself very happy indeed on your excellent choice but respect others' opinions and distro of choice.

I think you should reread all the posts.
I never said Gentoo was the best or anything like that.
My point was that Gentoo doesn't modify the source like some binary distro's do,so any bugs are caused by upstream.
I have read complaints in these forums about Kubuntu caused by rewritten kde source.
And let's face it kde4 still is very buggy.
Two and a half years ago I installed kde-3.5.10 on my wife's lappy.
Still working fine,the only thing I do regularly is make backups in case of HD failure.~/.xsession-errors is ~100 bytes!
In kde4 it's useless.

But when someone starts spouting complete nonsense about source based installs I can't but react.
Gerard.

And let's face it kde4 still is very buggy.

Can you please qualify this? What kind of bugs are we talking about here?
Please do remember that every system is different - and so is people's workflows.
Therefore you may be hitting a bug which does not affect anyone else.

Well there's kscd.
Used to work fine,now it crashes upon startup with the cd drive empty.
With a cda in the drive it doesn't crash on startup but it doesn't play.
So I installed audacious,though it's more than I need.Works fine.

Then there's kdePIM and kmail which I do not need fortunately but others do.

In the taskbar you have the open files/programs that are active.Sometimes two different ones overwrite each other.When you click it you don't know which one will open.So I click the desktop it's on instead.

~/.xsession-errors is full of useless messages,some repeated over and over.
In kde-3.5 it was the place to find info on misbehaving programs.
At the moment of this writing it's 33KB large.
On my wife's lappy which still runs 3.5 it's ~100Bytes!

I have tried other DE's but I have used KDE so long, it may be bloated and buggy but I still prefer it over others.

Gerard.

gerard82 wrote:Yes.
But what makes Gentoo the best IMO is it's package manager "portage" which has endless possibilities.
No two Gentoo installs are the same even on the same hardware.
You create your own distro so to speak.

But that is also a problem. It makes it hard to nail down the source of a problem. Are the problems you are seeing actually in KDE, or did you do something wrong when compiling, or is there something in the software stack that KDE uses that has a problem? So yes, it is much more customizable, but there is also a lot more room for errors by the user and it is a lot harder figuring out where the errors lie once they are found.

For instance you complain about kscd, but kscd depends on a bunch of other things, such as the hardware stack, multimedia stack, web stack, and so on. So how do you figure out if the problem is really in kscd and not in, say, udev, pulseaudio, phonon, alsa, gstreamer, etc? It is far from trivial.

For instance, if you are using the default settings, you are using gstreamer for multimedia with KDE (through the phonon-gstreamer backend). But audacious doesn't use gstreamer, which means your problem may actually be in gnome rather than KDE and you would never know it. You may have a problem in pulseaudio, and have audicious set not to use pulseaudio. There are any number of sources of problems besides KDE itself. And they may not be the fault of the software, but rather how you compiled it or how you you configured your system at a low level.

Source-base distributions provide a lot more freedom, but they also demand a lot more care and responsibility. "It stopped working for me" doesn't tell us much, there are probably dozens of potential problems unrelated to KDE that you would not have see in KDE 3.5 because the underlying linux software stack has changed a lot since then and that you would not see on audacious because it uses different parts of that stack.