Has Kubuntu become less stable?

[Jeffrey Barish]

Alan Dacey Sr. wrote:

> 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
> driv
>  e, 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

Interesting suggestion.  Well, KInfocenter tells me that the 3D accelerator 
is by Intel: "4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller".  The driver 
is by Tungsten Graphics and the renderer is "Mesa DRI Intel Q45/Q43 GEM 
20100330 Development [hmm...] x86/MMX/SSE2".  I run the OS from one WD HDD 
on SATA.  Processor is Intel E8400.

-- 
Jeffrey Barish