Kubuntu 8.10 woes

gomer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:15:51 +0000

Great. Now, post-upgrade, firefox crashes on me regularly. I can’t work like this. I hate to say it, but the Gnome flavor of Ubuntu is looking more and more apealing. Hopefully, some of the application problems I’m having w/ non-KDE apps are still KDE related and will be remediated by a switch to another environment.

KDE 4 woes

gomer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:17:43 +0000

So, I’ve been running Kubuntu on my work laptop since like my second week here (can you believe it’s been almost 8 months, now?). I gotta tell you, I loved KDE 3, and I was running Kubuntu 8.04. I was in love. The only things that did not work on the laptop were the bluetooth and the soft modem, neither of which was a big deal for me.

So people kept telling me to upgrade to 8.10, and how much nicer 8.10 was, etc. Also, I was having some annoyances with Lotus Notes 8.5 because it was designed to be run under gnome, and not KDE.

So, last weekend, I decided to upgrade my laptop to 8.10, expecting all kinds of bliss. Yah, well, that’s not so much what happened. So, in Kubuntu 8.10, canonical decided that KDE 4 was going to be the default DE. Fine. I was curious to see what KDE 4 was all about … Well, as it turns out, there were tons and tons and tons (and so on) of new features added to KDE 4. However, none of these new features were of any interest to me. In fact, most of the stuff I had gotten used to and liked about KDE 3.5 were taken away and replaced with a new, very Vista-ish environment. There is so much feature bloat that the whole environment is almost unusable (extremely slow, too). So, Kubuntu 8.10 is shipping with KDE 4.1. I read somewhere that KDE 4.2 might re-add some of the features I lost, so I decided it couldn’t get any worse, and I installed a “beta” version of KDE 4.2. Well, it got worse. Now, not only is it less like KDE 3.5, but some of the tweaks and fixes I applied in 4.1 are not even options in 4.2. As far as I’m concerned, KDE 4 should not be considered prime time, and should not be the default environment in ANY distro. As if canonical’s decision to make KDE 4 the default DE wasn’t bad enough, they’ve completely removed 3.5 from the repositories. So, there’s no easy way for me to roll back. Not that it would have done much good, anyway, because apparently the geniuses at KDE completely overhauled a lot of the architecture in moving to 4 and changed a lot in the way KDE is configured, so it would have been painful to roll back (though I did keep a back-up of my home directory prior to the upgrade). So, in addition to all the normal annoyances that come with a major upgrade (broken sound, re-enabling of daemons I don’t want running by default, etc.), I am stuck with a user interface I don’t like, and am faced with a no-win decision to make: I can try to make the best of this bad situation; I can switch back to gnome, which I left for a lot of the reasons that KDE is pissing me off about now, or I can just try a whole new DE like XFCE or Fluxbox (why not? I’m already missing some of the features I liked).

So the only good thing that came out of the upgrade so far is that Lotus Notes 8.5 works better because some of mechanisms it relied on in gnome work the same way in KDE 4, now. boy oh boy.

Of course, I have friends trying to get me to change distro’s again, too. While I might be willing to try a new distro on a box at home, I kind of need something that “just works” on my work laptop. The last thing my boss is going to put up with is me being unable to work because I need to recompile half the OS because of a library update, or me spending half my day fixing a driver issue, etc.

*le sigh* Maybe I can get my laptop “life cycled” out soon. Then I can hang onto the old one for a week or so while I get *some thing* running on the new one.

we’ll see …. and … Thanks sooo much KDE team and Canonical.

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Kubuntu 8.10 woes

KDE 4 woes