KDE 4.3 sucks, too
It’s been a while since I ranted that KDE 4.2 sucks, so I figured it was a time to give an update, just in case someone is still wondering whether 4.3 sucks, too.
Window titlebar while KDE 4.3 is throwing a tantrum with random buffers all around
It does. A lot. I’ve just been too depressed over it to really blog about it. But I guess I’ll have to. Just a bit, to feel better.
Ditto, for the tray.
KDE 4.3 is actually a bit of an improvement over 4.2. Mostly because the bugs are more… random, and thus more amusing. Sometimes. The performance and speed of it breaking apart is also up a notch. It’s like an easter egg, you never know what you’ll see when you wake up and unlock your workstation. Just that the surprise is almost never pleasant. The taskbar is one thing that seems to be always acting up in a different way. When it’s not duplicating entries, it’s making blank buttons, and so forth.
Did I mention the flickering? Yes, sometimes plasma goes on a “let’s throw image buffers all around and flicker a lot” spin. It doesn’t end well, but I’ve miraculously managed to get some screenshots of it.
Browsing becomes more interesting on KDE 4.3
I swear, this whole KDE 4.x (and Amarok 2) deal has to be a bloody conspiracy. Steve Ballmer couldn’t have done it better even if he had his way with it & some chairs. Does Aaron Seigo secretly work undercover for Microsoft or what? I think it would actually restore my faith to humanity. Otherwise this is just really really depressing.
Anyway, if you came here wondering whether to try KDE 4.3, by all means, do. If you have too much time on your hands and enjoy seeing something… different. But I really hope you don’t work in the IT industry, or you might lose something precious.
Seriously, none of them is KDE fault. It is either a graphic driver problem or hardware problem. I had X with a lot of similar artifacts with intel open source driver, and recently they fixed it. If you’re too stupid to analyze the problem properly, don’t even bother to publish it to the web.
Oh yes, you are most likely true. Problem with X or nvidia drivers, which just coincidentally started occurring after KDE 4.2/4.3… actually, I believe that
The reason I included those screenshots is because they were more fun than the day-to-day bugs I run into (having stale entries of now-gone windows in taskbar at the moment, for example). Hard to take screenshots of plasma crashes, too.
I’m sorry my blog doesn’t support the HTML5 sarcasm tag yet…
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/5350/w3ctwitter7998492.png
On the bright side, KDE 4.x fixed bug #490186 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=490186 because it no longer was possible to make such bindings (or I was too damn stupid to figure out how).
The reason why it occurs in KDE 4.2/4.3 is because Qt 4 uses more advanced features than Qt3 / GTK+. Remember, KDE 4.2/4.3 uses Qt 4 which is a new generation toolkit that exploits many advanced X features compared to the old GTK+ or Qt 3, and your driver is possibly buggy in supporting those advanced features.
Why the heck you blame KDE? KDE never paints to the display directly (if it does painting, the painting is done by Qt, the underlying tookit), meaning that it is impossible for KDE to introduce such bug. So it must be the underlying system, not KDE itself.
You can see this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/338669 similar problem, and solved by upgrading the driver.
@bdgman: Very informative.
Okay, let me underline this again: these rants are by no means meant to be informative. They are emotional rants, and since my sarcasm comment was somehow missed earlier, let me put it this way: If you came here looking for factually correct information, you are in the wrong place. Keep looking. But I guess if you googled for “kde 4.3 sucks” to come here, I doubt you were looking for anything else than a thread to vent your frustration in
(and btw, I think it’s polite to use the same nickname within the same post at least, makes it more easier for people to follow who is saying what)
Having said that, I think 4.3 is actually good enough so that people can start reporting the bugs they run into regularly… so maybe this is the last “kde sucks” rant I post
I love the way people come on here and try to say “none of it is KDE’s fault”. Well, you’re right, it’s not a piece of software’s fault that it was not written to work properly. The problem with KDE comes down to the developers. I’ve been reporting and confirming bugs in KDE every so often since the early 2000s, and their bug database is full of easy-to-reproduce bugs and serious and obvious breakage labelled UNCONFIRMED. Systematically, serious bugs are ignored for years by developers in favor of wishlist items and eye candy.
The KDE team obviously can’t write a good piece of software. Now I’ve heard some blame it on C++, that it’s just a bad language for writing stable software. But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is that KDE stinks, plain and simple. It has for years and it will probably continue to as long as I’m alive because it’s developed and maintained by morons.
It does suck.
It incorrect to blame it on the graphics drivers. I have both laptop with NVIDIA and one with ATI and both show graphics corruptions (although not as bad as shown here).
I wonder if the KDE developers actually use KDE themselves. THere are so many small annoyances and bugs. I have stopped reporting them now, because the team simply does not act on the bug reports.
have you guys seen the youtube of the new CairoDock 2.1, its an openGL dock that uses 0% cpu, its totally animated. I just run compiz + cairodock + thunar file manager (i don’t even use nautilus). compiz is fast, i don’t run gnome desktop just the window manager and the dock.. but i run both KDE and gtk apps. i don’t know why anyone would run KDE4 its a mess, neither would i run gnome desktop. i like the roll your own approach and love the dock (i hate start bars). a lot of the good software is GTK based (Firefox, Inkscape, Gimp) but I do want to try out krita (id use both that and the gimp), and the kexi database front end. Let them make their desktops, there always will be people like me who just run compiz and a dock and ignore the gnome3.x and kde4x. I love the eye candy in compiz, but to build a desktop around ‘plasma’ is a nightmare idea. oh well. remain desktop agnostic.
+1.
Yes, i got so frustrated with the total piece of shit that is kde4 is that i search for “kde sucks” and found this post.
Aaaah. i feel so much better now.