Re: [gentoo-user] KDE? Get me out of here!

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Mateusz Mierzwiński writes:

> I have KDE4. It work's perfect.

Whooo, now at least this sounds good!

> Try set "Custom-cxxflags" to off,
> maybe this will help. From my opinion KDE and QT 4 don't like
> customized C/CXX Flags, such as fomit-frame-pointer and similar.

I have:
CFLAGS="-march=k8-sse3 -mfpmath=sse -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

AFAIK -fomit-frame-pointer should be perfectly safe, at the only cost of 
making debugging harder. I already thought about removing it anyway, so my 
bug reports will make more sense. BTW, does anyone know _how_ _much_ this 
flag is suposed to seed things up, is it even noticeable?

And then I just loked at the Safe CFLAGS page [*], and it says:
  The flag -fomit-frame-pointer is enabled at -O1, -O2, -O3 and -Os on
  arches where it doesn't interfere with debugging, such as AMD64, but not
  x86. So if you're on x86 you should add it to your CFLAGS.

About -mfpmath=sse: I think I enabled it after a discussion about what -
march=native would do. Now the gcc documentation [2] says:
  For the i386 compiler, you need to use -march=cpu-type, -msse or -msse2
  switches to enable SSE extensions and make this option effective. For
  the x86-64 compiler, these extensions are enabled by default.

So I will turn off both -mfpmath=sse and -fomit-frame-pointer, but it 
would change nothing.

> Try to set correct USE flags

They should be okay I think...

> and first of all - add DBUS to default runlevel if Your "Welcome" screen
> don't work - it works for me.

I once had this problem, but now DBUS is in the default runlevel.

> You should also have Hald for X.org configuration. 

Do you mean I should configure X via the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ that will be 
obsolete soon? I have the hal USE flag set, but X is configured by 
xorg.conf only.

> BTW. I don't use any desktop mail client - I've chosen GroupOffice
> for web client with IMAP support and great tool for my work - safer
> because of laptop disk crashes or similar - data is stored external
> and it's delivered by OpenVPN with certificate nad data encryption. 

Uh, I just hate web clients. That's what I have a desktop environment for, 
with consistent looking applications, shortcuts, drag&drop and what else.
I am using kmail with IMAP over SSL.

> Chromium as major web browser,

I tried chromium once, about half a year ago, but it crashed instantly. 
Emerging it again. But I like Konqueror very much. It has problems with 
some web sites, for those I use Firefox. I am missing some of Firefox' 
plugins, and it works much better with the new flash, but over all I like 
Konqueror's behaviour better. Maybe I could change Firefox behaviour in 
the advanced settings, I did not look into this yet. And from time to time 
Friefox also gives me trouble, and I have to remove my profile directory 
to make it start again.

Chromium is built, and seems to work. Oh, it's fast. And uses few memory. 
And even has web shortcuts, that's great. And flash just works, while 
konquerro has major problems with it.

> Subversion integrated with KDE, Wicd
> as network configuration daemon. Also Kadu as IM, wine + winamp,
> OpenOffice. Not installed Compiz for now, but I have it on my plans. 

Here: CVS via command line, static network configuration, kopete, Amarok 
(which I find beautiful), occasionally OpenOffice.


> Login screen works great, loading is realy fast. Only one problem
> with Bluetooth but i think it's device fault - device USB connector
> broken. Everyday working with dual-head 2 monitors - KDE 4 detects
> when I connect another monitor, soundcard and Xine integration into
> phonon works with no glitches. Other tools like SSH/SFTP integrated
> into konqueror works great - konqueror itself also perfect!

Ah, so you DO like konqueror! Great. 

> It's good, it's fast, it's intuitive, it's "better desktop software",
> it's XXI century desktop environment, not such as Gnome and funny
> "icons trashroom" on desktop.

I mostly agree. If only there weren't all those little bugs. It still 
looks quite unfinished to me.
Ican somehow live with these bugs, but I am not sure if I should recommend 
KDE4 for others. At my institute we are also using KDE4 now, which makes 
some things convenient. But it is bad to have nice dolphin shortcuts to 
FTP locations, and dolphin cannot read remote files when they contain 
umlauts. And you you need to have another way of getting them. For the 
users, it might be easier to learn this second, reliable method only, 
instead of also learning to use the more convenient one which sometimes 
does not work.

> Why KDE? Because i like it. Don't say that this software SUCKS,
> _check_Your_config_. If You have problem try to remove .kde or .kde4
> folder in Your home directory and recreate profile.

I just did this some days ago and re-created most things from scratch, 
except for kmail. That was a lot of work BTW, I spent a couple of hours 
doing that. Some things are fixed indeed, but most problems persist.
BTW, I had made some screenshots of my desktops after this, when most 
things were set up again as I like them.
http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-06-19/

And I recently switched from ~x86 to ~amd64, without a change in KDE4's 
behaviour.

Here's a list of my current KDE bugs. There are many, fortunately most of 
them are really minor issues.

ANNOYING:

Plasma:

- The add plasmoids menu that opens above the panel is hard to access as 
it closes most often when I move the mouse into it.

- Moving a plasmoid from the panel onto the desktop is probably supposed 
to work (why else would the drag operation start at all?), but it makes 
plasma crash. Fortunately, it restarts automatically and things are as 
before, except for a minimized 'JavaEmbeddedFrame' application which I 
cannot restore or close. Whatever.

- The comic plasmoid refuses to show an increasing number of comics, and 
currently after login does not show any at all. And does not keep the size 
I give it.

- Moving and resizing plasmoids does not always work, they just plop back 
into their last position and size. After some tries, it finally works, but 
at the next login they are back to where they were sometimes.

Kontact:

- Sometimes complains at system startup that it is already running.

- Sometimes segfaults when closing, and does not start again until I kill 
it process manually.

- When adding a new contact, I sometimes cannot select an address book to 
store as the dialog shows none. Restarting kontact helps, but I have to 
fill out everything again.

- Probably related: all contacts sometimes all have the same information 
in them.

- Akonadi sometimes complains about missing resource agents when logging 
into KDE.

Kopete:

- Shows me as online, but is not. Probably related to hibernating, going 
offline and online again fixes this.

- Pressing the back / Forward button repeatedly and fast gives a message 
that I just received a message from that contact, and asks whether the 
chat sould really be cleared. Okay, I just pause a little (1/2 second) 
between each press, so it's no problem. But these things look to me as the 
authors of kopete did not try such things theirselves, or else they would 
have fixed them.

Kmail:

- Allows for multiple tabs, but then in these tabs new messages are not 
shown (only in the folder list). So, they added a nice feature, but to 
actually see new mails I have to close the tabs and select the folder 
again.

- I can not open a new tab when mails for an account are fetched.

- Attachements are sometimes saved with a size of 0. Bad if you do not 
check and realize this much later. has not happened for a while, it#s 
probably fixed, but I still check just in case.

- The 'g' key sometimes does nothing.

- Sometimes the mouse is not shown inside kmail.

- Sometimes checks IMAP folders but never stops, aborting doe snot help, 
needs to be restarted.

- Once showed a mail on gentoo-user with my address, but I was not the 
author of this message.

- Going offline while some move operation is still pending makes it hang.

- When searching large folders, a message appears telling me that first 
all messages of folder X have to be downloaded, and this will take some 
time. It appears for every folder (I surely had MANY of them), and the 'do 
not ask again' checkbox does not prevent this. So I spent a while 
accepting t

- kmail used to save messages I was composing, and the auto-save interbval 
is still set. But when it crashes, or even if I quit it regularly, it has 
forgotten about mails I was currently composing.

Konqueror:

- Also somtimes has no mouse cursor inside its window.

- Bookmark editor still crashes sometimes

- Sometimes shows a weird scrolling problem when scolling a page down 
works, but when dragging the slider only updates a few lines of pixels at 
the top. Opening the page in a new tab and closing the old one helps.

- When scrolling with the mouse wheel, it sometimes srolls to the right, 
too.

- Seldomly when scrolling a page down, it scrolls down and down until at 
the end of the page.

- Crashes fairly often, for example when scrolling in the shoutbox of a 
phpbb forum. I did not find such a forum with open access so I could not 
report this bug.

- In new tabs, the first click on a link sometimes does nothing.

- The saved session sometimes misses a window.

- The saved sessino sometimes shows tabs with old content, even older than 
when the session was saved.

- At session startup, I get the crash recovery dialog for some of the 
konquerors which were open when I logged out last time.

Dolphin:

- Sometimes shows artifats that look like the shape of the preview window, 
but show other parts of the desktop.

- Needs double logins for FTP .

- Sometimes does not update the display after uploading files via FTP.

- Does not allow to download files with umlauts via FTP (I have to do this 
regularly)

- Once sorted files like this: Foo-1.srt, Foo-2.avi, Foo-1.avi, Foo-2.srt

Krunner (this Alt-F2 thing):

- Is really slow sometimes

- Currently crashes when I enter someting.

Misc:

- Knode once forgot all old messages.

- knotes shows the scrollbar only when the mouse is inside it, and changes 
the layout becausethe scrollbar needs additional space. Okay, really not a 
bad bug, but still it's a little annoying as things I want to mark move 
around when I enter the window.

- Konsole lets me select other profiles only after I enable them first in 
the profile dialog.

- kalgebra once did wrong calculations with large numbers. Fixed long ago, 
but these ar ethe kind of bugs I do not want to have. What use is a 
calculator, when I have do double check with another one just in case it 
is wrong again?

- KDE 3.5 had a nice print preview, but it seems there is none in KDE 4?

- Nepomuk once used several gigabytes for its database. Does no longer 
happen, but then this may be because it crashes before. When logging in to 
KD, strigi starts indexing, crashes after a minute, indexes the same 
folders again, crashes again, until it stops completely after some more 
crashes. At least now it crashes after a minute, with my old setup when I 
let it index my MP3s, it ran for days. So I have strigi desactivated.

- Saving a session often does not work correctly, so I never ever do this 
without making a backup of my .kde4 directory.

- The 'explosion' desktop effect when closing windows is nice, but also 
happens for the little display of current size and position that appears 
when moving a window around, and as such gets on my nerves. Yeees, this is 
really no big deal, but it's on my list of bugs anyway, and I think it 
shows that the KDE guys do not test or use these things much, or do not 
care much about it.

- I have the Windows key as modifier wor window stuff, instead of Alt. I 
can select Meta-Shift-Tab in order to switch backwards though windows, but 
it does not work. So I'm using Meta-Caps-Tab isntead for this.

- Some dialog windows of a specific application always open in the 
background, behind other windows. I checked the window settings, they are 
empty.

- After playing Quake3, the panel has black areas. Switching Composite off 
and on again (Alt-Shift-F12) usually fixes this. For other OpenGL 
applications like Nexuiz, I have to open another window manager on another 
X server, as this sometimes has the weirdest effecs to the KDE desktop.

- Amarok: Did not play streams, showed a corrupted collection for several 
times, sometimes just did not play, refused drag&drop, lost tags I had 
set, killed .ogg files when editing tags, took 7 minutes for startup... 
but these seem all to fixed.

- Automatic spell checking in applications like kmail or konqueror does 
not happen in KDE 4.4.4. You will find lots of typos in this mail that I 
would have corrected else. When still working, it had trouble with 
abbreviations which were always shown as errors, and it sometimes refused 
to add words to the custom dictionary.

- KsCD once did not find my CD-ROM. When I just wanted to test this again, 
Amarok starts checking the CD, and is very busy with that, for several 
minutes now. The information thingy in the tray shows 0/11 tasks, all with 
empty progress bars and no further information. Using the desktop got 
really slow, some mouse clicks took 20 seconds to take place, I 
accidentally removed the system tray while clicking around, and the system 
was so slow it took me a while to add the tray again, even after I ejected 
the CD. This is a good example of what I experience often: I do some 
something new, like inserting a CD, and weird things start to happen. But 
at least KsCD seems to work now. Oh, even though I closed KsCD and removed 
the CD, and I do not seem it in the system tray, it still eats up 10 % of 
my CPU power.

- Occasionally, the phonon sound system does not work. I get a message 
about this during login. Next login, all is fine again.

- And why is it not possible to save multiple marked files via drag&drop 
in ark?

REALLY ANNOYING:

- kontact crashes when started for a second time, which sometimes 
accidentally happens to me. Mails I was composing are lost.

- For two times, plasmoids were on the wrong desktop. As moving them 
around to other desktops / activities does not seem to be possible, I edit 
.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc directly to make them appear 
on their usual places.

- About once a day, only parts of the last active applications reacts to 
the mouse. Seems to happen in konqueror only. I can click links, but the 
menus do not work. When I kill it, the next allication which gets the 
input focus gets partially responsive to the mouse. I have to log out, 
which is possible only via Ctrl-Alt-Del and waiting for 30 seconds, I 
cannot even confirm the logout requester. Okay, there's also Ctrl-Alt-
Shift-Del, whcih I just found out about. I thought this might be related 
to javascript, as it only happens in konqueror, so I turned it off, and it 
did not happen for two days, but then it did. Oh, and then it just 
happened again, while composing this mail. At least I can switch to this 
window and save this as draft. But this time Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work, I 
have to restart KDM.

- Back again. What happened some days ago was a corrupted KDE wallet, 
which made kwalletmanager not start. I got dozends of dialog windows from 
various applications like kmail or kopete, and additionaly lots of 
kwalletmanager crash windows.

- Longer ago I experienced a bug even worse. When the KDE password dialog 
was set to show three bullets per character, it did not work. I had no 
access to my wallet, could not use kmail, or access FTP locations with 
dolphin. Took me quite a while until I finally found out myself what 
setting was responsible for that. A total show stopper. The bug was fixed 
two months after it had been reported, which I find is quite a long time 
for such a serious bug.

That's most of it. I did not yet report too many of them yet, mostly 
because I thought the developers also use KDE and already know many, but 
then maybe they happen to few people only.

	Wonko
 

[1] http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Safe_Cflags

[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.0/gcc/i386-and-x86_002d64-
Options.html#i386-and-x86_002d64-Options