Submitted by KDE 4.3.3 has been released. “KDE 4.3.3 has a number of improvements that will make your life just a little bit better. Some of KWin’s effects have been smoothed and freed of visual glitches, JuK should now be more stable, KDE PIM has seen its share of improvements while in the back-rooms of KDE, the developers are working hard on porting all applications to the new Akonadi storage and cache.”
I have to install OpenSuse in a spare partition and give this a try. I downloaded 10.2 beta the other day, but I will now wait for this to get in.
I have been running Kubuntu at home since recently, coming from Ubuntu, to check how KDE is doing, and so far I have hated it; seemingly Kubuntu is only the poor cousin of Ubuntu, and that shows. I hope OpenSuse with KDE will be better.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
I have two almost identical computers at work, one running Arch Linux and the other openSuse 11.0. Both have KDE 4.3 but the difference between the two is like night and day. While KDE on Arch is very fast and smooth, for some reason it is amazingly sluggish on openSuse, to the point that I’ve almost given up on it.
Perhaps the comparison isn’t fair, since Arch only runs the background processes that you tell it to, whereas openSuse comes with a bunch that are enabled by default. But this is fairly new hardware that I’m talking about so I don’t think it should make that much of a difference…
do you know how old 11.0 is? better to try it with 11.2 which is out in a few days.
Yes, I do actually. Unfortunately I’m stuck with this old version because I have to rely on a proprietary GPIB kernel module which doesn’t run on any later versions.
But I don’t think the age of this version completely explains why it is so slow…
I had installed Kubuntu 9.04 in my box until the last week and I agree with you: Kubuntu seems to be a second-class citizen; so I wanted to give one more change to Kubuntu and tried to update it to Kubuntu 9.10 and had a lot of problems while updating…
So I took a Gentoo minimal CD copy, installed it from the scratch, it took me several days but right now I have a beautiful KDE 4.3.2 environment in my box… I simply love it…
I do not know if KDE 4.2 was the problem or Kubuntu was, but its user experience is quite poor.
On the other hand, Gentoo is not the leader of desktop systems but this KDE version on my Gentoo box is working perfectly.
Anything is better than Kubuntu. Mandriva’s just out, they always had excellent KDE support. OpenSuse’s also fine, although I liked Mandriva better (no particular reason, just a personal preference).
If you’re adventurous, or simply want to learn more about linux, try Arch. KDE 4.3.3 was in the repos a day before the announcment was made on kde.org
Not for long, I imagine:
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/timelord
Well, we’ll see. They had more than two years to notice that something’s wrong (the downhill spiral started with Gutsy), and all I can see now is a big proclamation and a fancy name (actually, I AM a big fan of Doctor Who
And looking at those point, fixing bug is only one of the five major goals. I couldn’t care less for “Concrete strategies for publicity, vision, marketing and software branding will be hammered out.” Well, actually I care, or rather, I’m concerned… This is the last thing KDE needs – more publicity and marketing for a distro that gives it such a bad reputation.
Makes more sense than it being two of the major goals, don’t you think?
Now, the bug reports will be forwarded directly to kde upstream, which allows kde to fix more bugs. That’s good news for everyone that cares.
I agree that Kubuntu somewhat dropped the ball on Karmic. Sound is totally broken in Kubuntu side. I’d like Kubuntu to take a “pulseaudio or bust” sound strategy, that is, an application that didn’t work with pulseaudio would remove kubuntu-desktop metapackage (or have sound output disabled completely by a patch).
If that is what they are going to do. I’d rather say the opposite, it will make the situation even worse.
It will increase the amount of useless Kubuntu specific bugs in the upstream bugtracker, draining resources from KDE developers and bugsquad. Currently there are already to many of those bugs in the KDE bugzilla.
Edited 2009-11-05 22:22 UTC
You really think the few developers Kubuntu has have got the time to break all those packages? As the “Timelord” plan indicates, almost all the Kubuntu bugs are in KDE upstream, and now they need to get them there faster.
Unfortunately, it is precisely the ‘few developers’ that Kubuntu has that is its main problem.
There is no other way to explain this once you compare Kubuntu to vanilla KDE on ‘vanilla’ Debian (which Ubuntu is based on).
The Kubuntu devs are basically trying to take a Gnome-specific distro and make KDE work on it seamlessly, and that is simply very hard to do. This is why the KDE experience is generally reported to be better on DE-agnostic distros (nevermind the KDE-centric ones) like Debian, Arch, Gentoo, etc, because the devs working on KDE for those distros aren’t having to fight with their own distro’s Gnome-specific characteristics.
I wish the Kubuntu devs well, and hope they succeed, but they’ve chosen a much harder path to take since Ubuntu is effectively a hostile environment for any major non-Gnome DE.
I don’t know what it is but there is always something terribly broken as far as KDE is concerned in Kubuntu. Debian’s KDE is almost vanilla and that is, I think, the reason that it works so well so I can relate to those that commented above using it on Arch, Gentoo, etc.
My biggest complaint with Debian as far as KDE goes is that the packagers simply refuse to package all the dependencies required for Strigi to work correctly and the workaround to make it work is not for the faint of heart. Admittedly, their position is understandable given that the Sesame2 backend’s dependencies do look like something hard to maintain but the net result for the end user is a Nepomuk daemon that will work with manually tagged data but that will not use the amazing search capabilities that Strigi offers. Unfortunately, seems like the Debian developers decided to wait until the Virtuoso backend for Strigi is ready for prime time but that may take a little while.
Other than that, my KDE experience with Sid has been top notch and I have no complaints. Whereas everytime that I try to Kubuntu, I somehow manage to find major issues within hours.
The fact that Kubuntu is related to Ubuntu is very unfortunate as its high visibility within the community, specially for newcomers, certainly contribute to this image that KDE is unstable being spread in certain circles.
People looking for a good KDE experience should try to get as close as possible to the source like the packages maintained by most community distros or resort to distros whose developers actually care about a good KDE experience such as Mandriva and OpenSUSE. I intend to give another shot with the later two really soon to see if I like them better than Sid on my laptop.
Edited 2009-11-05 18:13 UTC