KDE 4.2 Beta2 "Canaria" Testimony to the Bug Fixing Frenzy

Two days later than initially scheduled due to yours truly preparing for coming year's desktop summit on Gran Canaria, KDE's release team has made availabe KDE 4.1.85, a.k.a. KDE 4.2-Beta2 to testers and reviewers, codenamed "Canaria". KDE 4.1.85 is not suitable for production use but meant to invite feedback and bugreports from the community.
The KDE community is in massive bugfixing mode, showing a focus on stability and feature-completeness in the KDE 4.2 series. But behold, 4.1.85 is not a boring release. It brings many visible improvements to KDE 4.1, and will ultimately follow up the KDE 4.1 series as a stable release this coming January. So get your testing gear ready and help us squash those bugs for a 4.2.0 that makes Redmond see flying chairs all over. There's a changelog over at TechBase, and the brave and bored can go for the more detailed feature plan. As 4.1.85 is the last release before Christmas, we strongly recommend using Wade's Christmas wallpapers and the KWin compositing snow plugin while testing.

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Comments

by Anonymous Coward (not verified)

Oops. Instead of "adding a printer is as easy as it should be" is was supposed to be "adding a printer is not as easy as it should be". The 'not' went missing!

Mea culpa!

by Jeremy (not verified)

After just using it with OpenSuse inside of Vmware without grahpics drivers installed, I could say I was certainly impressed about the performance increases.

After messing around with it, and changing the themes, I ended up with my 7/8th of my desktop being gray(the background color of a desktop application, using the aya theme), and I couldn't find a way to get rid of it. I guess I might file a bug report later.

and after changing themes, the bottom bar at the bottom of the screen(Taskbar? Can't remember.) changed it's width, so I had to change it back.

Good job, especially on the performance, it's not there but its pretty close except for some major bugs I encountered.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

The background bug is known (see above in the comments), the "taskbar" is called "panel".

by Oscar (not verified)

Every time I login there's a crash from a printer applet. Is this a known issue?

by sebas (not verified)

Please check bugs.kde.org if it's a known issue, if not, report it.

I really appreciate the calls to use bugs.kde.org to file reports. It is the right place to do so.

But I recommend every KDE tester to use wrong (or "dummy") email addresses and wrong names. Reasons:

o There is no information on how data are used by bugs.kde.org, there is nothing I have to sign in order to allow bugs.kde.org how to deal with my data.
o Filing a bug report means:
(1) You (i.e. your email address and full name) may be included in some mailing lists. When filing a bug report it is not really clear, in which mailing lists you will be included and you can not file one if you do not want to become part of them.
(2) Most mailing lists, particularly lists.kde.org, have public archives. That means: Your email address and full name appear (forever?) in public html archives. No matter, if you were asked or allowed it.
(3) There is no way to remove you from these archives. There is no way to remove a user account on bugs.kde.org

I made the mistake to enter my real name and use my personal email address (I believed KDE is trustable). Googling for my address shows only entries by KDE. And now my email address has been disabled by a few providers since it is used in conjunction with my full name by a SPAM mailer. One even tried to order something on my name. Many thanks.

I contacted the sysadmins - but received only one email without any action.

Since KDE e.V. is registered in Germany I believe German law is applicable. I am no advocat, but to my understanding bugs.kde.org strongly violates German data protection act.

I really hope, that KDE modifies bugs.kde.org and mailinglists software in the very near future! At least the emailadress (and surname) should be invisible in public archives - Why can't it be like ion kde-forums where the email address is totally hidden and one can contact other users by their usernames only?

Sincerely

by Sebastian (not verified)

Though my harms are not necessarily related to my appearance in public forums, it is still a not very nice situation if one wants to hide as much publicly available information as possible.

by Alex (not verified)

AFAIK the email addresses don't appear plain, i.e. at lists.kde.org my address looks like: , in order to avoid spam.

About your name appearing in public: the bug tracker is readable by everyone, so if you enter something, of course your name will be visible by everybody.

Email addresses should be spam-protected, aren't they ?

Alex

by Sebastian (not verified)

I do not know about the capabilities of analyzers apps - but if I look in Google via [Removed by moderator at users request] Google seems to understand what () and ! stand for... I do not want to emphasize the SPAM topic here, however, since my I am concerned by the kind of data usage.

> About your name appearing in public: the bug tracker is readable by everyone

o During registration I would like to be informed about this (it's a long time ago, I do not know this has changed)

o At least there should be an information page where I can be informed about this fact.

o Why does the public bugtracker need to show everything?

Showing a username is sufficient. If I want to contact anybody, I could send him a message using some form on bugs.kde.org which is then sent to his/her email address. Off course, at all time I would never see the real email address and the real name only in the case if the user allowed it.

by Sebastian (not verified)

Ups - my bad - hopefully this is moderated and someone can delete the email address I entered above - sorry!

"But I recommend every KDE tester to use wrong (or "dummy") email addresses and wrong names."

Those email addresses are used to send replies back to you from the developers, e.g. asking for more information, clarifiation, testing, etc. So if you're going to use some other email address, please at least make sure it's one you can actually check. Otherwise the mail will bounce nd the value of the bug goes way down since the developer<->reporter communication is broken.

If you have issues with your email address being in bugs.kde.org's database, don't use it. Very simple.

This is, btw, how other bugzilla's out there work as well.

"You (i.e. your email address and full name) may be included in some mailing lists."

yes, that's true. the development process involves email communication. the archives are reasonably protected, however.

"Most mailing lists, particularly lists.kde.org, have public archives. That means: Your email address and full name appear (forever?) in public html archives. No matter, if you were asked or allowed it."

it really sounds like you shouldn't be engaging in a public collaboration, then. that's what open source is. if you don't want to be publicly working with others, well ... being involved with open source is not for you.

"There is no way to remove you from these archives. There is no way to remove a user account on bugs.kde.org"

Since you seem rather ocerned about this, what would have helped, exactly? we (kde e.v. board) happen to be working on a kde-wide website policy right now, so now is a decent time to provide input.

"I am no advocat, but to my understanding bugs.kde.org strongly violates German data protection act."

I'm no lawyer, either, but publicly claiming someone is breaking the law carries with it some liability where I live. Yay for law.

Man, I didn't know people were actually *this* paranoid... _creepy_...

Also, my name and email (Which is quite like my name) are included... dun dun dun!!!

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

I am not paranoid but I do not like to get spam. I registered a new e-mail address recently because the old got very much spam. I planned not to publish that address on any website where it could be accessed without login (thus accessible to spam bots). Now I get some spam to the new address. I searched in Google for the new address, and the only hits were mailing list archives originating from bugs.kde.org. So it is very susicious that I get spam because of that.

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

"Since you seem rather ocerned about this, what would have helped, exactly?"

- At least a warning that the e-mail address might end up in public mailing list archives.
- (Optionally) forwarding bug reports to mailing lists with dummy sender address. Developers can get the address of the reporter through the bugs.kde.org interface.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

> Since KDE e.V. is registered in Germany I believe German law is applicable. I am no advocat, but to my understanding bugs.kde.org strongly violates German data protection act.

Ahem, you entered your email address in the registration form. And the registration form says: "Due to the open nature of Bugzilla, your email address will be seen by other bugzilla account holders. In addition, emails sent by this Bugzilla installation are archived on public mailing lists and via those archives will be disclosed to anyone reading those archives." This paragraph carries the bold title "PRIVACY NOTICE".

By confirming this form, KDE may assume that you accepted the clauses. This step happens in accordance with §4 of the Federal Data Protection Act. You are free to revoke this accordance (see §28), but KDE e.V. cannot revoke any publication on third-party websites, you will have to do this manually.

Ouch! I didn't notice this before, but whoever updated the b.k.o layout really tossed out all the "security by obscurity" steps taken by the old templates. I remember having gone through plenty of them for at least making plain email addresses not appear to visitors who are not logged in. This issue apparently wasn't considered by whoever did the new templates, and you are fully right to call KDE e.V. on this.

The update of the b.k.o templates regressed in plenty other areas as well (navigation and the likes). I wish I could get back into it, I don't really have much time for such these days.

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

Still lots of glitches. Reported bugs don't get fixed. Heck, this whole Plasma thing was a mistake - broken by design.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

I reported 3 crashes for Beta2 yesterday. Two were fixed within 8 hours, and 1 had been fixed before I even reported it. One of those was fixed within two hours. True, the issues I reported were corner cases, but the Plasma team has been doing excellent work bugfixing throughout the 4.2 cycle. In my experience I have found no evidence that would seem to confirm your assertion, and since you have given none of your own I will be forced to disagree with you.

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> In my experience I have found no evidence that would seem to confirm your assertion

Sorry, I'm not that kind of religious KDE user. Nice to see that you haven't seen any evidences...

I try to find out whether KDE 4 keeps its promises, and in fact, it doesn't. It doesn't provide more usability, it doesn't provide better (intelligent) features. New ideas are good, but the way KDE realizes them, makes everything even more complicated! You may steal ideas from Mac OS as much as you want, but the KDE devs didn't get the point. I'm too lazy to explain what I mean, it's already said more than once. Just open your eyes, dude. Lots of people are crying, not just me, and nobody wants to hear them. All they get is a "f*** off and use Gnome, MacOS or Windows".

All KDE provides is a bunch of buggy, shiny new stuff that can't improve the whole experience in a manner of usability. Hey, it's already 4.2, it's time for a change! Stop telling "wait for 4.[latest_rc]+1"!

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

"them. All they get is a "f*** off and use Gnome, MacOS or Windows"

Or KDE 3 until 4 matures.

4.2 is feature-complete and buggy, perfect beta. (I.e. not feature-complete should be alpha, only-a-few-known-bugs should be rc, no bugs should be stable release.)

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> Or KDE 3 until 4 matures.

Perfect answer, thank you. That's exactly what I was waiting for.

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

Well, it's still way better than Gnome, Windows or OS X.

by blabla (not verified)

rofl.. if KDE 4 reaches the stability of gnome and it's newer design it's *bang* the best it happened to WM in linux.. if not well.. gnome > than kde 3.5

Well don't expect much from GNOME. The current development is driven by one person. Only Vincent Untz seem to be contributing to all type of core GNOME libraries.

by mayhem (not verified)

As with all things Linux-related... repeating it doesn't make it true.

by txf (not verified)

If you're too lazy to explain what you mean, then you really should f**k off.

Seriously, the only people who are crying are those so wrapped up in self importance that they demand that their every whim be accounted for. I doubt the GNOME devs would be happy to have such people as their users and as I still quite like gnome so I wouldn't wish that kind of misfortune upon them.

Frankly people like that should really just stop trying to communicate because they obviously suck at it. I used to have to deal with those kinds of people and frankly it just got too tiring to try to acknowledge even the sensible comments in the sea of their trash.

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

Most people are used very often to treat people with complaints like you did. But, just a moment... either those people keep complaining louder and loader, or they turn away from you.

Imagine yourself on the road to hell: A lot of people are shouting at you, "stop it, please! Think of what you're doing!"

Guess who you are...?

by Long H. (not verified)

Imagine yourself in the road to hell: A lot of people are shouting at you, "Do some contructive criticism! Think in which situation are"

Guess who will turn away from whom?...

Do you think developers deliberately don't care about users? They will because of people like you though.

by sebas (not verified)

> Most people are used very often to treat people with complaints like
> you did. But, just a moment... either those people keep complaining
> louder and loader, or they turn away from you.

Which is fine. People that are only complaining louder and louder void of useful information are merely a liability to us, those that vent their complaints in a way that's useful for us (i.e. instead of general statements such as yours reporting bugs.kde.org, showing certain workflows we should support and do not yet, ...) actually improve on things.

So, if you're not into working with us, the better choice is to silently sit and wait. At least that way you don't keep people from doing their work -- which would be in everyone's interest.

Spreading bullshit doesn't make it any less bullshit by increasing the volume ...

by Karl Günter Wünsch (not verified)

> those that vent their complaints in a way that's useful for us (i.e. instead of
> general statements such as yours reporting bugs.kde.org, showing certain
> workflows we should support and do not yet, ...) actually improve on things.
This is simply not true, at least not until the developers in question manage to accept that there are different views on things they care about. For example the plasma developers see plasma and plasmoids as self serving and without context. Looking at them in the context of the desktop as a productivity environment should be higher on the agenda. Otherwise things like the broken design of the cashew wouldn't happen (let me explain):
- On one hand there is the view that the cashew and it's functionality is so important as to enforce it's visibility without regard for those users that don't want it (or can't - my display botches contrast calibration if the corners and edges aren't black).
- On the other hand there is the menu that is shown when you click on the cashew but that menu is shown underneath any regular window - although I had chosen to interact with the menu, I can't!
So it is so important that every desktop has to have this bloody thing displayed but if I want to use it, it becomes so unimportant that the menu displays in the background!
I reported this as a bug but it was closed because the developer can't fathom the criticism... Do you think you'd have much incentive to report detailed bugs again if this happens to you?

by Karl Günter Wünsch (not verified)

> Seriously, the only people who are crying are those so wrapped up in self
> importance that they demand that their every whim be accounted for.
Well if you took the time to report no less than 20+ bugs over the past weeks with some simply ignored or even closed at the behest of the original developer who happens to not like that you are trying to make KDE work as a desktop... For example the bug that the default setup of the GIMP is resulting in an unworkable mess of windows not being picked up by the diverse window switching ways - some pick up only the image windows some only pick up (with luck, not always - you have to start the GIMP without any images to get to this state) the utility windows as well. If you forget to start the GIMP without an image then the image window will be missing if your image happens to be large (say a full size image from a current DSLR). This mess needs clearing up, not ignoring and dismissing the bug report as "works for me" - which for me is an insult as it clearly doesn't work for me (or anyone else using the GIMP default install, the code clearly says so)!
Or having a bug report closed as being upstream (i.e. Qt bug) without attaching the necessary information to track this bug in the Qt bug database - if they are aware of the issue. The latter part I now doubt as I regularly scan the bugs reports for some areas there as a Qt professional seat holder - amongst which the area where this bug is supposed to be located...
So it's not that people like me want to have our whims accounted for, we want to be able to use KDE4 in a productivity area. As someone else already said - and everything some people like Aaron say makes me believe he is spot on: Many developers are limiting their exposure to the area in which they are developing in, they lack the ability to understand that users need certain functionality to have a working desktop.
In all honesty: I would take away the ability of the main developer to close or dismiss a bug report without peer review! I currently have numerous bugs that plague my use of plasma but since the developer of that area is so self serving and full of himself that he can't see beyond his own agenda there is no sense in wasting my resources of ever posting anything in that area again - at least until the peer review of the bug reports is implemented!

by dkite (not verified)

I'm curious. What distribution are you using?

The reason I ask is that my setup with a built from svn every day or three is remarkably stable, but the distribution setup that is necessarily a few weeks old isn't.

Derek

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

I'm using Debian, both KDE 4.1.3 and 4.2 SVN are installed on my system. They're separated from each other (installation in a virtual machine exists also). I have one SVN installation linked against Qt from the experimental branch and one SVN linked against qt-copy. I'm doing SVN builds every now and then, trying to get "good snapshots" (when no big changes are in progress, I'm fully aware of the SVN difficulty).

The point is: as long as I "touch nothing", everything works quite good. And hell, yes, it looks good! The designers are doing a great job!

...but then: I start to test in a systematic way.

Connect a new monitor. Try to change some deskop related options. Well, actually I try to use some of them. Change themes, effects, options, install plasmoids. Resize this one, remove that one, add another one. Restart, look what has changed. What happens when I disconnect my external monitor (between reboots, I'm not SUCH a bad guy) and use my laptop's native monitor? Plasmoids get messed up, disappear, maybe suddenly are rescaled. Change the digital clock to analog clock. Then change plasma theme. Change order of plasmoids in the tray. Resize the tray again. And so on. Not good, really not! Still SO MUCH side effects, and nothing's going on there. It looks like nobody as a clue how to fix those issues. This is what me makes a sad KDE user.

Try yourself to turture KDE4 just a *little* bit. Maybe compare to 4.1.x and look yourself whether specific things have improved.

Bug reports are written, there is one for EACH bug; just take a look at bugzilla. No one can complain like "you aren't constructive" at me. I really, really tried hard to do so.

by Bobby (not verified)

My Bball is gone again but what the heck, it will come back tomorrow :)
I have to confirm what you said. The Plasma team is very industrious and alert. I am still having issues with KDE 4 (like my digital camera that it doesn't recognize) but not so much with Plasma. It would be great if all KDE team members could make overtime like the Plasma guys do ;)

by Gareth (not verified)

I was wondering where all the trolls had gone, but look one came back. awwww

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> I was wondering where all the trolls had gone

Yes, I'm a troll. Congratulations you've noticed that. And know what? I'm watching almost every commit (honestly!) made since somewhere around KDE 4.0. And what I see is not good: There are really big problems concerning Plasma. Each attempt to fix one issue creates at least 2 new ones. My conclusion is: KDE is on a bad way. Sorry for rubbing salt into the open wound. Broken by design.

by Gareth (not verified)

Care to give examples of this brokenness?

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

systray rendering
printer configuration
khtml rendering
wlan/network configuration
plasma
...

Enough? No, probably not.

by Gareth (not verified)

Ok

Systray icons) - The only icon that still renders badly for me is the kmix one. Compared to earlier 4.x releases that a vast improvement, and from what i understand its not KDE's fault but an X problem (or something like that).

Printer Configuration) - Works fine for me.

khtml) don't use it, couldn't comment

wlan/network ) - isn't included in 4.2 because it just missed the deadline for new features. Im sure all distros will include it by default and you can always install youself.

plasma ) - I like how you listed that as an actual example of brokenness when the question was for further clarification of why you think plasma is broken

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> Systray icons) - The only icon that still renders badly for me is the kmix one.

In your case, perhaps. But it surely isn't a kmix issue, isn't it? In my case, all icons are rendered badly. Whenever I expand the systray, it overlaps the clock. Sometimes this "expander" thingy isn't shown at all. Sometimes I can't click on any icon because of that. Sometimes it looks simply... ugly. Strange systray look SINCE KDE 4 EXISTS. Broken by design.

> Compared to earlier 4.x releases that a vast improvement, and from what i understand its not KDE's fault but an X problem (or something like that).

Maybe it's not KDE's fault. Maybe not... and maybe KDE relies on some functionality which can't provide a good systray rendering for KDE/Plasma. It looks like it can't get fixed. Bug reports about graphical issues are open SINCE KDE 4 EXISTS. Broken by design.

> Printer Configuration) - Works fine for me.

Good for you. I still can't get my printer configured without the CUPS web user interface. Sorry, I'm just a stupid user.

> plasma ) - I like how you listed that as an actual example of brokenness

Try to enlarge your panel "a little bit" too much; background wallpaper disappears, or at least, it turns grey. Either that or the panel's background color changes, or maybe disappears, too. Attached Plasmoids beave suddenly strange. Try to move your panel from the bottom to the top, resize it a bit. Desktop background wallpaper turns grey, needs to restart Plasma. Widget positions aren't saved sometimes, or scaled to small. Or rendered completly wrong. And so on... doesn't seem to get fixed. Same strange things are going on SINCE KDE 4 EXISTS. Broken by design.

> wlan/network ) - isn't included in 4.2 because it just missed the deadline

...same as using systemsettings with root permissions, isn't it? So much for "wait until 4.x"

by Gareth (not verified)

The using system settings with root permissions is a bad idea. Aaron explains this in some other posts above.

Sure moving my panel to the top edge causes its colour to change, thats because my wallpaper is a different colour at the the top and the panel gets tinted based on the colour of the wallpaper behind it. If you don't like that feature you can change the panel .svg in the system settings.

Expanding my panels height above half the height of the screen does indeed cause the wallpaper to screw up. But hey its a beta, this is why we have betas, and its hardly the worlds most annoying bug.

As far as the systray thing goes, i'd hardly call refusing to include dirty hacks to get around upstream deficiencies "broken by design" infact i'd call it the exact opposite.

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> The using system settings with root permissions is a bad idea. Aaron explains this in some other posts above.

Okay, I'm eagerly waiting for another way to configure the login screen (and network shares). So this configuration obviously won't take place in system settings(?) ...very interesting, thought that system settings will be the central place for configuration activities. I wonder why the administrator button is still shown on the roadmap to 4.2.

> Sure moving my panel to the top edge causes its colour to change, ...

...it also changes its color when you only resize the panel, without moving it from bottom to top or vice versa. It simply forgets the panel background under some circumstances, gets completely transparent. Sometimes it suddenly uses the opague background SVGZ despite of active desktop effects. The Plasmoid's (default) look don't respect the system's color scheme in any way. Finally, change the Plasma theme and nothing looks like it is expected to look.

> ...But hey its a beta, this is why we have betas, and its

This one existed a long time. From earlier-than-4.1 to 4.1 beta to latest 4.1.x, from SVN to 4.2 beta1 up to 4.2 beta2. I BET this one will still exist in the so called "final release" - remember my words. And when it does, someone will say, "this is a x.0 release, and this is why we have x.0 releases". The important thing is: It's not just the background wallpaper, there are a lot of thing who are treated EXACTLY the same way.

by Gareth (not verified)

SystemSettings > Advanced > LoginManager

To setup a share you right click on the folder and under properties you select share.

Im tired, my bed is more appealing than carrying this one,

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> SystemSettings > Advanced > LoginManager

Requires root privileges (*administrator button), only possible using "...kdesu systemsettings" which is some kind of hack.

> To setup a share you right click on the folder and under properties you select share.

Okay. This is a good one. I surrender.

> Im tired, my bed is more appealing than carrying this one,

I finally agree with you.

by txf (not verified)

>Strange systray
If I recall the AWN people (Avant Window Navigator: the composited osx like dock for gnome) complained about the systray spec long before even kde 4.0 was close to being released. They didn't include the systray by default because it looked and worked too badly (I remember trying to use it...urgh)

>printers
me, I use yast for printers...seems to work fine. And apparently you managed to get it working too.

> wlan/network
whats wrong with network manager? or maybe you could just install wicd? Besides it only missed the feature freeze, and it will be released independently but during the 4.2 timeframe and as a result most distro's will probably include it. And seeing as you're a "stupid user" then you'll be waiting for a distro use 4.2 right?

>plasma issues
consider writing helpful bug reports to maybe help in fixing a personal bugbear of yours?

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

> They didn't include the systray by default because it looked and worked too badly

Thank you, this is a very interesting piece of information.

> consider writing helpful bug reports

Belive me, I'm doing this since... a long time... IIRC my first installation was a 1.x release. Not quite sure about that. And I'll keep on doing this.

I'll investigate the network manager thing tomorrow. But nevertheless, I already tried hard to configure WLAN+OpenVPN using a native KDE 4 tool, you know. This is not exotic.

Good night.

by sebas (not verified)

Don't hold your breath about networkmanager in KDE4. It's not ready yet, not even basically usable. We're trying to make it work in time for spring distros to include it.

Otherwise, it's hardly a real problem, as both, knetworkmanager from KDE3 and GNOME's nm-applet work just fine.

Exotic or not, it needs implementation, which needs time, and also some patience on the user's side. As many KDE developers put in countless hours, it's reasonable to expect the same from people like you.

Being Christmas and all, I do wonder what makes you so sad. The list of changes is huge, still you complain about things that aren't done yet. That's normal, software won't ever be perfect. It's disappointing to see people not acknowledging the progress made though.

Be happy :)

by Sad KDE user (not verified)

Well, thank you very much, everyone appreciates it to be informed what's going on, respectively why some things are not going on. I hope the network manager thing will make it at least into the 4.2.1 release. I wonder how the login stuff is going to be solved, without raised privileges, you know.

Asides my "I behave like an a**hole rants", I'm going to tell you a little anecdote. This one is exactly happened to me as described.

In my faculty were exactly 2 people using KDE. My KDE fellow was using 3.5.9 on an OpenSuSE installation, and me running KDE 4.1.2 (at that time) on Debian. There were really lots of people using Ubuntu (this eeePC thing is very popular), there was another "Debianist" somewhere around me (I smelled him) and I saw an Arch Linux and a Gentoo guy, both sitting in the middle of the first row of course.

Know what? From about 50-60 Linux people (~160 people in total) exactly TWO were unable to get their wirless/openVPN network connection configured using GUI only. Now, guess who they were!

I ended up with hacking myself through wpa_supplicant (knetworkmanager was not able to handle our specific openVPN settings, and before I'm going to install this Gnome stuff I'll buy a Mac, I swear). ...and my KDE colleague finally gave up, after 2 or 3 months or so, and installed Vista. Couldn't help him with his WLAN, all I could do was providing a gateway over my Laptop using a cross linked network cable. No joke.

Now I'm the last one holding up the KDE flag, but..... the times are getting harder and harder.

by Morty (not verified)

Why do you insist that KNetwork manager should be part of the main KDE packages in the KDE 4 series. It has never been before, for KDE 3 it also was a 3rd party package(extragear), so nothing has changed there.

And I don't even think it makes very much sense to make it a part of the main KDE packages, as it will have several major drawbacks. It need to conform to KDEs rather long feature freeze/release cycles. Making new features come slow to the end user. This will most likely lead to distributions to ship backports/prereleases rather than the stable versions. The ability to ship feature increased releases and bug fixes at a faster pace than the main of KDE, are a very good thing for fast evolving applications. This is shown clearly by successfull applications using this strategy, like KTorrent, Amarok and K3b.

And one more important factor making this a bad idea for KNetworkmanger, are the thing that makes it tick in the first place, the Networkmanger backend. And it is not synced with KDE releases in any way. Giving a situation where new features in Networkmanger will not be availble to KDE users until the next major KDE release, with the current scheduling of KDE the the worst case will be up to seven months delay. Where as if they keep it a 3rd party applications, the delay will only depend on how fast the developers work.

by Gopa (not verified)

I was a convinced KDE user and never used GNOME more than an a few minutes ; this makes me sad but I'm certainly going to use GNOME from now on... Sad because I found the ideas and concept of KDE4 very promising, and even started to dev in C++ using kdelibs but I can't use KDE4 since 4.0, this is not changing I'm loosing hope this is going to change.
Of cours there were features missing, lots of crashed, bugs, glitches and it was pretty slow. Now I must admit that I recovered every KDE3.5 features I used and I only have a few bugs and crashes on kde4.2 beta but one thing hasn't change at all since the beginning : painting performance, glitches and the lack of fluidity. Of course oxygen looks beautiful, when you see a screenshot.
But damn, painting is so slow, it flickers from everywhere, some actions provoke sudden slowdowns that makes kde4 look very lag-ish. I'm not speaking of KDE4 in general, because applications run very fast, I'm only speaking of drawing and painting performances. This doesn't look like a final product at all.
Maybe this is because I've got a Nvidia 8400M GT, but I tested different versions of KDE4 on 5 to 10 different configurations on different PCs, with different graphic cards, and the persons who watched the result weren't convinced at all, like me.
I mean, even without composite, displaying dolphin window when minimized take fractions of second (up to 2 sec) to display its content. In fact, something must be painted, I can see a white or grey zone before something is displayed. This can be very fast (but even here, it looks VERY bad : imagine when ou maximise konqueror and see a fullscreen grey zone before everything it displays), or take up to 2 sec! (rare but it happens).
Showing menus in applications, displaying different tabs in applications etc. is globally slow. Not slow like 2 sec are needed for everything to be displayed, but slow like you can't feel any fluidity while you're working... Basically, every action that needs things do be repainted takes time.
The worst part is when you resize windows ! It seems that kde users are accustomed to this and don't even notice, but when I show it to Windows or Mac users, it strikes them (and still strikes me!) : it is slow as hell, there are grey and black rectangles where the different elements of the window are moved, and it is very choppy.
Same example when you move the "sub-windows" of dolphin, there is a sudden slowdown when you detach it or when you replace it somewhere and the different parts of the window move (I assume for the same reasons of resizing windows slowdowns).
Oh I forgot, the blur effect while logging in is very choppy as well.
Not to mention KDE's general flickering, for example when you move "sub-windows" of dolphin, again : when you replace it, it alternatively displays it and the blue rectangle behind. It also occurs when you resize windows,you can see window decorations and icons flickering... If you try to be observant for a while, you'll notice that KDE flickers a lot and you can see things being redisplayed when this isn't needed. (Like the systray which is redisplayed when you switch desktop).
To summarize a bit, KDE4 doesn't look fluid at all because of painting slowdowns and flickering, maybe you can't see it because it's a matter of habit, but use mac or gnome for a bit and you'll see the difference.
I'm telling this because I'm installing a new system for someone and had to choose a desktop environment, therefore I gave a try to gnome, and I rediscovered what fluidity means.
Generally speaking I prefer KDE to GNOME, but I can't bear lag-ish environments anymore, so I'm installing GNOME at the moment I'm typing.
Seriously, kde devs put efforts in what they're doing and it's a shame that this is all ruined because more than 50% of users can't use it because they don't have hardware that fit kde or qt's needs and makes KDE almost unusable.
This is so frustrating.
Now that KDE4 doesn't lack big features anymore, the priority is to make kde usable and fluid for everybody, like Gnome, if you don't want to lose your userbase because of the kde3->kde4 transition.
This is sad but KDE4 didn't work good "out of the box" on the 8 machines I tested it, and it was the same for most people around me, while gnome was flying.