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

[Alex Schuster]

Oh my. Trying again. I already started a reply months ago, but kontact 
crashed, and I lost it. I started again, ranted about KDE4, tried to open 
systemsettings in order to check Mick's suggestions, but I misclicked and 
hit kontact, which is directly below in my favorite list. Of course, 
starting kontact under KDE4 does not open a 2nd instance of the program, 
or gives a warning that I am about to start another instance which I 
should not do, no, it just makes the running kontact crash. 
And again, the mail is gone. BTW, in the past that was no problem, kmail 
saved the drafts every two minutes (this is still configured that way in 
its settings), but this does not work. Even if I close if the regular way, 
unfinished mails are gone.
So I started for the third time, this time in thunderbird on a Windows 
mchine. And from time to time I marked the text and put it into the 
clipboard. I'm doing this with every longer mail now. I saved the mail as 
draft, and went to my Linxu machine where I resumed the edit. I wanted to 
try something and went into the import menu: Crash! Good thing 
the Windows Clipboard still had it.

Mick wrote:

> On Tuesday 09 March 2010 20:12:09 Alex Schuster wrote:

>> - Kontact. The old address book I had imported fro KDE 3.5 half a
>> year ago showed one "address book" and many std.vcf (or similar) files,
>> with my data scattered on them. I moved all stuff into the "address
>> book", and did not use it for a while
>> Now I wanted to do so, but it did not run due to an error with akonadi.
>
> Did you try to create a local resource using your systemsettings and
> point it to the local KDE3.5 contacts file?  If you restart the address
> book, then akonadi will kick in a carry out the migration - if it does
> not succeed it will tell you so.  In that case you may need to fix
> things manually (I've posted how in an older thread of mine, where I
> managed to make akonadi to succeed in its migration from a local
> resource file using sqlite - I don't have mysql in this box.  Let me
> know if you can't find it.)

I just tried that. I first added a dir-resource, as there are several .vcf 
files in my .kde3.5/share/appes/kabc directory. BTW, I had to copy that 
directory, as the file chooser did not show directories starting with a 
dot.
Nothing happened when I restarted kontact. I did the same with a file-
resource, when I noticed that all the .vcf files were identical. Again, 
nothing happened.

But: There are errors when akonadi is starting up during login. I think it 
did not do this when I wrote the last mail, but probably this is the 
problem now for the migration does not work. I attached the error parts of 
the log.

And I looked for your posting, and searched all of my gentoo-user archive, 
but somehow I did not find it. If you think it would help in my case, and 
if you still have it at hand, it would be nice if you could direct me to 
it (the subject would be enough).

>> I tried to figure out what this was, and how to get the error message
>> in English, but then I found out that I only have to restart kontact.
>> Fine, now I want to add a contact. First, when I want to edit the
>> location, the country is set to Afghanistan, I always have to change
>> this to Germany.
>> Annoying, why is this so, who would want this behaviour, except for
>> Afghans perhaps.
>
> Have you tried to set up your locale in systemsettings to Germany?

Yes, it's set like that.


>> - Dolphin can do FTP, but I have to repeat the login process several
>> times until I see the destination files.
>
> I've also noticed an error when I try to connect with ftp saying that
> the connection failed, but then if I click on reload it connects fine.

Works sometimes, and sometimes not. Also, sometimes the content is not 
updated when I dragged files via FTP.
Other current dolphin problems:
- Opens maximized horizontally every time, except at session startup.
- The sorting is strange sometimes: Foo-1.srt, Foo-2.avi, 
Foo-1.avi, Foo-2.srt
- When the KDE session comes up, all dolphins have the same view. I'd like 
one of them to have a different view, but when I do this, next time the 
session comes up all dolphins will have this view, too. There is an option 
to remember every folder's view, but every time I open a new folder, it 
opens in symbol view first, not in the current view of the upper folder.


>> - Of course, Amarok keeps doing weird things. At least I can play music
>> from my collection. But playing a stream sometimes crashes it. And
>> dragging files into Amarok always leads to a crash. Yeah, I know,
>> Amarok is not KDE.
>
> Given up on that long ago (and sadly have not found a nice replacement
> which won't pull in the whole of Gnome or worse)

It's getting better. It's more stable, and startup time is now 30 seconds 
instead of 7 minutes.
Have you tried clementine? It has the look of Amarok.


>> But at least one bug was fixed, I got a mail from bugzilla about this
>> today. It's the bug that makes password dialogs not work if the
>> password is to be displayed as three bullets. Wow, nearly two months
>> after it had been reported, this serious bug was at least confirmed to
>> exist and is fixed now. Maybe this bug happens seldomly, but when it
>> happens, much of KDE4 is unusable, as you have no kmail, no kwallet,
>> nothing that needs a password works.
>>
> Hmm ... no such problem over here.

Had you set the password dialog to show 3 bullets for each key pressed?

Another pretty bad thing that happened: Once when I started kontact, it 
showed me a birthday I had forgotten, two days AFTER the birthday 
It did not bother to remind me the days before when kontact was runing all 
the time. Now, what's the purpose of an organizer when you cannot trust it 
to show appointments? Good thing I don't use it much.


>> Dale, you brave, brave man, are you really using KDE4 now?

Still thinking about dumping it. The current most annoying bug is that 
about once a day the mouse stops working. I can move it, xeyes keeps 
watching it, and sometimes I can still use it inside a part of klast 
active window. But for nothing else. So I have to log out and back in 
again.
I'm not sure what the problem is, it happened after I updated to 
kde-4.4.3, xorg-1.7 and ati-drivers 10.4. Downgrading ati-drivers did not 
help, downgrading xorg did not succeed, I got compilation errors and gave 
up, as I suspect that it's KDE itself. But a downgrade to 4.4.2 would take 
a while, and I'd expect that alll hell might breake loose if I let this 
older version mess with my current .kde4 directory.
I hoped that a reinstall (because switching to a 64 bit OS) would 
magically solve this, but it didn't. I tried to kill and restart kwin and 
plasma-desktop, this did not help.

Current list of other, but not so bad problems:
- Konquerer used to ask if I really want to close it, or just the current 
tab. Not since 4.4.4.
- Ark cannot save all selected files via drag&drop, only one. And then it 
opens the home folder with dolphin, not the destination folder.
- Automatic spell checking no longer happens in kmail or konqueror.
- Session saving sometimes fails. I always back up my .kde4 before I dare 
this.
- Once my activities were on the wrong desktops, it took me a while until 
I had thinsg back as they should be.
- Konqueror crashes a lot.
- And every login the dialog comes up telling me that konqueror crashed, 
unless I quit every running instance before logging out of KDE.
- Konsole profiles show up in the menu only after I activated them in the 
profile dialog. Some of the things I have to repeat after every login into 
KDE.
- Strigi indexes some directory over and over again and again and again 
and again. And again and again. Then it crashes, and when I re-activate 
it, it indexes the folder again and again and again. And so on.

	Wonko

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