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

[Alex Schuster]

Kevin O'Gorman writes:

> As the OP, I'd like to know if anybody else has noticed how far OT this
> thread has gone?
> Somebody please give it a meaningful title, and maybe the right people
> will notice your thread....

But I think the title is just perfect! Well, not really, because, despite 
my constant ranting and endless KDE4 problems, for which the only sane and 
obvious solution would of course be to dump this whole crap, I would 
really really hate to do so.

KDE got me addicted. I refused to use it for a long time, and had some 
crazy enlightenment setup which I was happy with, until it stopped 
working, and I gave KDE 3.something a try. I feared that the complexity 
would make showstopping bugs happen more often, but on the other hand it 
is of course nice to have an integrated system, with things like the same 
file dialog for most applications. And so I got hooked. There were some 
problems, but most of the time it worked well. But with time I experienced 
some bitrot.

Then I got a new PC, and gave KDE4.2 a try. Many many bugs, but most of 
them not really bad ones, but some nice new features instead. Like, 
konqueror still crashing often, but with recovery function. Kmail crashed 
even less - well, this was not hard. And I thought these little annoying 
bugs would be fixed soon.

But this bugfixing progress was slower than expected. Some things never 
really worked. And big showstoppers happened, just as I feared before I 
began this whole KDE adventure. For example, when KDE4's password dialog 
stopped working. Suddenly I had no access to the KDE wallet [*], could not 
read or write e-mail, or access my shares. I realized how dependent I had 
become of all this. Well, not totally, there are lots of other e-mail 
clients, and I can do most things in a plain text shell, but this meant 
some work, mostly because I had a hard time getting my passwords back.

On the other hand, I like my KDE setup. 8 desktops, each customized to the 
activity I am doing there. Convenient shortcuts to the things I do, to the 
locations I access. Geeky stuff. Nice software, like kontact. I really 
really like this - if it works. When not, I think about dumping all.

Why am I writing all this? I don't know. Kevin, despite me considering 
your thread as mine now, I will open a new one about specific problems.


[*] And a similar thing just happned yesterday. I wanted to go to bed, but 
I had to write an important e-mail first. I started it, and after some 
lines whole kontact froze. I killed it, started again, and the same 
happened. I killed it, wrote an e-mail to myself, which worked. I started 
the mail I had to write again, kontact froze after a little while. I 
killed it, wrote the mail in knotes first, pasted it into the composing 
window, added a CC, pushed the send button... kontact froze. Tried again, 
same result. Then I used thunderbird.
I looked what I had emerged this day, but nothing had to do much with 
kontact. I logged out and in again - and got dozends of notification 
windows telling me that kwalletmanager just crashed. I'm still not sure 
what had happened with kontact, I guess it wanted to access the wallet 
when sending the mail, maybe also when making an automatic backup. 
Whatever. I restored a backup of my .kde4 directory that I had made one 
day ago, still no wallet. But with the next backup, 5 days old, I could 
log in. I finally found out I had to exchange the 
.kde4/share/apps/kwallet/kdewallet.kwl file, and all was back to normal. 
And I could finally go to bed.

	Wonko