[clug] Kubuntu 8.10 first impressions

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Tue Nov 11 01:27:28 GMT 2008


"Paul C. Leopardi" <paul.leopardi at iinet.net.au> writes:

> Along with many others, I feel that it was too early for the Kubuntu
> packagers to remove KDE 3.5 and leave users to cope with 4.1.2 in
> Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

Users wanting a stable system were strongly advised to stay with 8.04,
a long term support release.  This was not a mistake, or untrue.

> I do have some specific issues which have to do with the way I work:
>
> 1. I simultaneously use multiple machines all the time, usually my
>    home PC and my office PC, or my laptop and my office PC, and
>    sometime other *nix boxes as well. My methods for using other
>    machines with KDE 3.5 are to use kssh, kio-fish and Konqueror. With
>    KDE 4 on my office PC this gets wrecked or at least slowed down for
>    a few reasons:
>
> 1.1 Compiz on my office PC kills X performance when I use ssh -Y from my home 
>    PC. At least I think it is Compiz that's doing it. All I really
>    know is that the interface is really sluggish.

Are you forwarding the entire interface, or just an individual
application?  Any particular application more than others?

In either case, you are slighly mistaken here, as far as I can tell: KDE
4 does not use Compiz, and I don't /think/ that the Ubuntu team have
changed that.

Instead, kwin implements a similar suite of functions using OpenGL or
RENDER based acceleration of the effects, which can fall back more
gracefully on older or less capable hardware.  (In theory. ;)


A high latency connection is /never/ going to do wonders in terms of
performance.  You almost certainly do want to keep compositing enabled,
though, since that will give you backing store, reducing redraw traffic
from the client.

> 1.2 Konqueror as a file manager has been de-emphahsised in favour of
>     Dolphin.  This makes it harder for me to side-by side use file:
>     and fish: which is what I do with Konqueror in KDE 3.5.

I agree with you here: this annoys the heck out of me. :)

[...]

> 2. Plasma has so far been harder to use than Kicker. Are thease bugs
>    or "features"?

Immaturity.  I am waiting for the Plasma taskbar to grow up so that it
stops being nothing but flash; each point release so far has helped, but
not quite enough to convince me to move -- and my demands are pretty
light-weight. :)

[...]

> All this has led me to take up too much time trying to get my panels
> to work "right" - i.e. the way they work in KDE 3.5.

This is why I still run 3.5, myself. ;)

> Maybe I'm just an old fogey? Maybe not. I see that people are already
> using a repository which tries to put KDE 3.5 back into Intrepid.
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=963695

I honestly cannot comprehend why people would bother with this rather
than stick with the supported, stable software -- it isn't like the
developers were trying to hide the fact that this isn't a suitable
release if you /do/ want "just works" or anything...

> So, do you think I should nuke my installation and go back to Kubuntu
> 8.04, try to shove KDE 3.5.10 into 8.10 or just tough it out?

I advise the first, since the second will make for trouble when it comes
to upgrades, and the third will just annoy you. :)

Regards,
        Daniel


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