Linspire and KDE

[Daniel Pittman]

Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> writes:
> Bry Paula Melvin wrote:
>
>> I have seen Kubuntu as less polished than Ubuntu, I  think this just might
>> lead to more balance between Ubuntu and Kubuntu.
>
> LOL.  There's nothing less polished about Kubuntu - the non-desktop
> stuff is identical, and the KDE desktop is imo more polished than
> gnome.

Actually, I agree with Bry here.  The KDE desktop is nicer but much less
well integrated than GNOME -- KUbuntu is definitely less polished.

The killer problem for me is:

Install KUbuntu and Ubuntu, out of the box.  Then do these things:

1.  Enable universe and multiverse.
2.  Install 'sun-java5-jre'

The effect is a little different on the two platforms.

On Ubuntu you get a nice GNOME pop-up asking you to accept the Sun DLJ
license.

On KUbuntu you get ... a text based dialog prompt, visible only in the
"details" area, and which many people cannot interact with at all.

Worse, if you finally get bored of staring at the hung installer, or if
you discover the prompt and that you cannot interact with it, your
*only* option is to uncleanly shut down the process.

That leaves you with the dpkg database locked; recovery is only possible
on the command line.


Worse, if you actually go ahead and manually install libqt-perl,
reconfigure debconf at the command line to use it, then try the same
install under KUbuntu...

...you discover that the DISPLAY is not correctly exported to the
package installation process, resulting in a fall-back to the dialog
based prompting.

Ouch.


There have been a few similar issues, too.  Amarok uses the Xine engine
by default, for example, which means that you can add remote files over
the 'fish://' KDE-VFS protocol to the playlist ... and that the engine
cannot play them.


Anyway, I certainly agree that the KUbuntu side of things has a bit less
polish.  I can't complain too much, though -- it isn't like I am
actually working on finding and fixing those bugs myself.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
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