Has Kubuntu become less stable?

[Alan Dacey Sr.]

On Saturday, December 25, 2010 05:31:44 pm Jeffrey Barish wrote:
> When I first started using Kubuntu a few years ago, I remember reading 
> complaints from people about how it had become less stable with 
> successive releases.  I was mystified by these complaints because I 
> found Kubuntu pleasant to use and reliable.  However, I was reminded of 
> the remarks when I upgraded to 10.04.  When 10.10 came out, I did a 
> clean installation hoping to eliminate any problems attributable to 
> kruft.  A few problems did vanish, but I am still amazed by the number 
> of problems I am experiencing.  I upgraded to KDE 4.5.4 hoping that the 
> latest code would solve the problems.  It did not.  I guess I am going 
> to hang on a little longer because there is so much that I like about 
> Kubuntu, but I'm wondering whether anyone else has had the same 
> experience.
> 
> Here's a sampling of some of the problems I am having.  The most 
> serious is that after running for 2-3 days, dbus-daemon starts 
> consuming 100% of CPU and the CPU temperature goes to 85 (it's normally 
> around 50).  I have to reboot regularly in an effort to forestall this 
> problem, but I still fear what could happen to my computer if I don't 
> catch the overheating quickly.
> 
> An especially annoying problem is that drop-down menus often do not 
> appear.  I get sort of a ghost of the menu, but no text is visible.  I 
> have to activate the drop-down over and over before eventually it does 
> appear.  I have had the X server lock several times.  Screen updates 
> often do not occur properly.  For example, half a window might scroll 
> while the other half does not.
> 
> KOffice tools are seriously broken.  KOffice used to be a joy: simple 
> to use and fast.  Now it's slow as a dog (I have one file that takes 
> about 5 minutes to open); it consumes screen space with a docker that I 
> don't use and can't remove.  It sometimes insists on scrolling whenever 
> I type anything so that the text is no longer visible.  Dates cannot be 
> formatted (meaning the formatting that I apply disappears when I reopen 
> the file).  KSpread seems unable to display the grid.  KNode was 
> missing some icons, but fortunately they have reappeared in the latest 
> upgrade.  On reboots, KDE still cannot keep track of which desktop some 
> programs were on.
> 
> And so on.  Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a deterioration 
> in stability?
> 

	I was of the same mind as you until a few weeks ago.  When Kubuntu swithced to KDE4 there were a lot of problems that have been talked to death.  We all know about that.  Soon after I upgraded to Lucid I got an intermittent flash problem where the video would loop and nothing worked.  Dolphin was also as slow as a glacier at times.  I don't really use Koffice much since it's not really useful to me as it is now.  Anyway, after months of this happening even after fresh installs I noticed that my windows disk mbr started to go away too.  One day it would be in grub and then when a new kernel came in it would be gone.  The Dolphin slowdown is due to it making too many pixmaps using the Nvidia driver.  Bug fixes did help that tremendously and there are more on the way.  I got a new 1.5TB drive, installed Kubuntu maverick on it and had the same problems.  Then even more things went bonkers.  It is a 6GB sata drive in a 3GB sata port.  Never do that if you have a motherboard with an Nvidia 780i chip.  It works fine as a data disk, just not an OS.
	So I figured out that the real problem was my hard disks.    They are only about 3-4 years old but when an OS is running on them they kill the experience.  After I switched my OS to a newer (3GB satat) drive, everything is going quite well.  None of the old problems.  The only thing I've noticed is that Ktorrent goes wacky when its running for a day or so and my VPN times out then reconnects.  I think that Kubuntu is actually getting better, along with KDE.  Maybe you should think about replacing some hardware and see if that fixes the problem.  You also didn't mention what video driver you use or hardware you have.  Mentioning that could also bring in some suggestions from people who have the same.

Alan