[gentoo-amd64] Re: upgrading kdebase-startkde

[Duncan]

Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.de> posted gm2gv4$45g$1@×××××××××.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