frustrations w/ KDE 4.4

[Tomasz Czapiewski]

> On Mon, 11 Jan 2010, Jonathan Jesse wrote:
> 
>> Good evening,
>> 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...
>> 
> 
I'm having some of these issues on Kubuntu 9.10 + KDE 4.4rc1, too.

The crashes are mostly on i386 configuration. I don't have many plasma applets 
(additional: processor load monitoring, temp monitor, rssnow, calculator).
I've disabled: kpackagekit/update-manager-kde, network manager, printer applet, 
since I don't need them).
I've tried to remove ~/.kde directory on beta but it didn't help there.
I use Oxygen theme.

> 
>> 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 didn't found this issue, plasma-desktop starts without problems here (I'm 
testing KDE 4.4rc1 on few machines, i386 and amd64, too).
> 
>> 
>> 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.
> 
Yes, I experience the same (mostly on i386). IMO on beta it didn't crash so 
often althrough it's been crashing, too. The advantage in rc1 is that it starts 
again after crash and I can still work on my system.
> 
>> 
>> 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
> 
On beta I couldn't use krunner after crash of plasma-desktop (keyboard 
shortcuts and mouse "clicks" didn't work after plasma-desktop crash). Since in 
rc1 it starts after crash I don't have problem for this.
Now in rc1 krunner sometimes crashes but not too often.

> 
>> 
>> 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...
>> 
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 
>> BTW Lucid looks a lot better
>> 
>> 
>

I've been trying to post on this list few times in last days (I'm 
a member of kubuntu-testers group and I receive kubuntu-devel mailing list 
mails but unfortunately I couldn't post there as I've not been subscribed 
to that list) and I've gave up.

Now I've decided to post here as I have found too many bugs in 
Kontact/Kmail and Akonadi as it's mostly unusable to me:
1) Akonadi couldn't upgrade MySQL (5.x standalone database server on my 
computer) database from schema version 12 to 13/14 
- in logs it looks like problem of case sensitivity at table names 
(big/small letters) in SQL upgrade scripts. Bacause of this errors 
Kontact/Kmail crashes or freezes all the time.
I've dumped and dropped the database and created new - Akonadi created 
properly new tables and I could run Kontact/Kmail.
2) My contacts address book was dropped in KDE 4.4beta/rc1 (they exist in 
~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf but Kontact didn't have any address book 
(althrough I could choose my contacts in Kmail module when compositing 
mail). I've added "Standard KDE address book" and it looked OK but...
Contact groups were broken - they had nonexistent contacts and contacts 
from groups existed between other contacts but without names.
I've tried to create new contact group but...
I could do this and it looked ok for the first time but after I've exited 
from Kontact and run it again there were no contacts I've just wrote in 
group (I've not enabled 'Read only' option in address book and I've had 
proper permissions to files and folders).
3) When I try to insert attachment to mail which has two spaces near in 
the name of file Kmail can't insert it as it interpretes one of the spaces 
as %20 and it can't find file.
4) I get many plasma-desktop crashes connected with Kontact operations (I 
don't know how to debug them - I'll look more closely at this problem).
5) Address book menu option in compositing mail does not do anything (I 
can choose it from menu but address book window does not appear.
6) I don't remember any more bugs for now... and sorry to mention that 
but bugs that I'm experiencing are making KDE 4.4_RC1_ look like alpha 
quality :(

Are these bugs already known or I'm the only one who experiences such a 
problems?

With Regards,
Tom