frustrations w/ KDE 4.4

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Jonathan,

On Tuesday 12 January 2010 04:48:32 Jonathan Jesse wrote:
> I am currently running the KDE 4.4 RC packages and would like to report
> some of the frustrations that I am having with my system...

Frustrations? Is that because you're running a test release and expect production 
quality? Your email sounds a bit like that.

> 1.  plasma-desktop does not start automatically:  Every time I
> login/restart my computer I am forced to manually start plasma-desktop. 
> I've noticed that Lucid does not have this problem.  The problem started
> w/ KDE 4.4 Beta 2 and continues in the RC

I recall some left-over from plasma-netbook in one of the autostart folders causing 
this. I'll check what it was and get back to you. Is it possible that you ran a tech 
preview of plasma-netbook? That could've left traces in your homedir that cause this 
problem.

> 2.  plasma-desktop crashes continuously:  I don't know exactly what is
> going on here but it seems no matter what I am doing plasma-desktop
> crashes and I get a friendly notification.  I've noticed this can happen
> when I am not doing anything or when I using it pretty heavily.

Please install debug packages and supply a backtrace. Without it's just hand-waving, 
with backtrace, we can confirm what's wrong. There has been a bug in Qt (will be 
fixed with 4.6.1) that made the taskmanager crash heavily, quite likely you're 
hitting that one.

> 3.  krunner crashes:  krunner (alt+f2) crashes every other time I launch
> the application... it often crashes when I'm trying to launch
> plasma-desktop to get started

KRunner has been very crashy due to a problem in libc. It's been fixed in newer libc 
versions, not sure which one you're running. I recall that we'll likely ship a 
workaround for this one in 4.4.0

Also, please install debug packages and supply a backtrace when reporting crashes.

> 4.  notifications: For some reason after a restart today my notifications
> are taking up almost the entire bottom third of my screen.  for example
> when i receive a notification from quassel it takes up the entire taskbar
> area...

I haven't seen this one. Did you check bugs.kde.org if it's known?

> While it seems like quite the improvement, layout wise, usability, etc
> there is too much going wrong that a large part of me wishes I could go
> back to KDE 4.3 and a fresh install of Kubuntu.

The whole point of a beta (and -rc) is testing, right? The KDE announcement says, in 
bold letters, that you shouldn't use it as production system, so don't assume it's 
ready for that.

> BTW Lucid looks a lot better

Newer Qt, updated libc, maybe? :)
-- 
sebas

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