Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> posted gm2gv4$45...@ger.gmane.org, excerpted below, on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:48:34 +0200:
> Duncan wrote: >> But... while I have kde-4.2 merged now, I've not yet played with it Well, I did a marathon session of playing and configuration today... > I also was waiting for a "better" version when KDE 4.0 came out and was > sticking to KDE 3. Then KDE 4.1 came out but I still preferred 3. Two > days ago I tried KDE 4.2.0 and it seems that this is the version that > can replace KDE 3 for me. So far, I didn't login to KDE 3 again after I > had 4.2.0 running. KDE 4.2 is definitely better than 4.1, and I think after I get it customized it'll be actually usable, definitely the first time I've been able to say that on the 4.x cycle, but let's put it this way... I can't say that Linus was wrong switching away for awhile, as it's certainly not up to 3.5.10 yet and has a quite a way to go, and given that, on distributions like Fedora that aren't making it easy to continue to run 3.5, Gnome may unfortunately be one of the least-worst options. > The only feature I'm missing from KDE 3 is sticky > keyboard layout switching and HAL mount options. I'm still missing several. Speed for one. My video card is an older Radeon 9200SE as that was pretting much the best available with freedomare drivers for several years, and even still, full support on the newer cards isn't yet stable -- tho it's improving very fast and looks to be headed there by the end of the year. The problem is that the R2xx series chips (of which the Radeon 92xx is one of the last) only support upto 2048x2048 OpenGL acceleration, and at 1960x1200 stacked for 1960x2400, the bottom 352 pixels of my viewport aren't OpenGL accelerated. That means none of the fancy OpenGL stuff works reliably. On older versions it would crash. On 4.2, it simply doesn't enable them and I use XRender. The problem is that while it disables the effects themselves, there's little if any hint in the GUI what depends on OpenGL. I can checkmark them on and only by actually trying to invoke them and "nothing happens" do I see (rather, am left to /guess/) that said features require OpenGL. While "not crashing" in such cases is a VAST improvement over 4.1, "not crashing" really isn't good enough. They need at least a description saying they only work with OpenGL, and would in most traditional instances simply be disabled, since it won't let me enable OpenGL. And the features that work... without good OpenGL, are still relatively slow. Sure, they can be turned off, but there goes much of the reason one might otherwise find kde 4.x better, to date at least. Without OpenGL and with some of the composite effects turned off that actually work reasonably well in 3.5 because they're too slow in 4.2... yes, it's now at least functional, but there's really not all /that/ much left to justify the extreme hassle and tens of hours of work (I'm guessing it'll be roughly 40 hours here, a full-time work-week equivalent) recustomizing! > I also didn't have a single crash/segfault (yet) in KDE 4.2.0. Plasma > and KWin used to crashed like hell in 4.1.4. It's very stable on my > machine; running straight for about 20 hours now. I DID get a couple things to segfault, but I was pushing it pretty hard (BECAUSE I HAD TO GUESS BECAUSE THEY CAN'T DISABLE WHAT WON'T WORK ANYWAY). But I expect once I get thru customizing everything and have it configured (BY GUESSING AND TRIAL AND ERROR, SINCE THEY CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO DISABLE WHAT WON'T WORK!) more reasonably within the limits of my hardware, segfaults, etc, will be pretty rare. For a .2 release, that's... well, honestly, I'd expect MS to be pulling stuff like that, and from what I've read, they actually did, with Vista. Heh, at least I didn't pay good money for the privilege of getting crapped on, like all those "Vista Ready" folks did! But it's still nothing the FLOSS community can be proud of, especially for an X.2 release (where X > 0)! And it's nowhere near the smooth functioning of 3.5.10, and by X.2 of the next version, it should really be better. Really, the experience would have been /much/ better of they had just disabled in the GUI all the effects that weren't actually available since I couldn't enable OpenGL. That's something they obviously know, whether an effect requires OpenGL or not, and the infrastructure is already there, so why are they still forcing trial and error to find out what works and what doesn't, especially by X.2 (I could see it for x.98 betas, feature complete but rough aroudn the edges)? That makes no sense at all! > So far, it looks good. Make sure you have upgraded to > x11-libs/qt-gui-4.4.2-r2 though and then rebuild kdelibs and > plasma-workspace (to make sure)! It fixes crashes that > occur with 4.4.2-r1. I did! Meanwhile, khotkeys sort of works now... but the "extra" key I had most of my app-launchers stacked on (two-key sequence invocation), XF86WWW, works fine in 3.5.x and has since before 3.5, and it's detected on 4.2, but the message when I try to set it is, "Qt 4.x doesn't support the selected key." or something to that effect. WTF!? It can SEE the key and knows I pressed it in ordered to give me that message. It worked perfectly fine in 3.5 (and before)! What's this about not supported?! Same story, different page, and it's getting tiresome. It's that sort of stuff that should NOT still be happening in an X.2 version. ... And 4.2 was what they were billing as finally worth switching for! <shakes head> Well, It might finally be barely tolerable if that's the best option available, but it's frankly extremely disappointing. This would arguably be 4.0 material, but more accurately, I'd call it x.0-rc material. It's really a cryin' shame! And... I don't see any way yet to enable anything parallel to the ksysguard kicker applet, which was how I did most of my system monitoring. The various system monitor plasma applets sort of get there, but aren't very flexible and so far, seem way dark (or way bright, presumably, in a different scheme). ... As I expected, 4.2 does finally seem functional enough to actually run and bug report on, functional enough I can start configuring and hopefully keep it instead of blow it away as I did with the 4.1 config, to prevent bugs, etc. But it's still vastly disappointing. Hopefully when I upgrade video cards and get full OpenGL support, probably about the 4.3 timeframe, the combination of the two will finally be 3.5.x parity functional replacement, even improvement. But I wouldn't call this there yet. But, as I said, at least it's functional enough I can run it and not be filing bugs on essentially the entire thing, now! That's vast improvement from 4.0 and 4.1! So they're getting somewhere. It's just not really "there" yet, for me and my obviously way too extreme for them power user demands. But 3.5.10 could do it, and I remain hopeful for 4.3, and 4.4, and.... -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
