5 years of support..!!??

[Bruce Bales]

On 03/02/2012 03:42 AM, Mark Greenwood wrote:
>
> On 2 Mar 2012, at 09:26, Alex Gabriel wrote:
>>
>>
>> Indicating that quality has decreased is a subjective statement.
>
> Well yes and no. Let's compare where I am with Kubuntu today to where 
> I was when I had Kubuntu with KDE 3.5 on it, which must be 3 years ago 
> now.
>
> Back then, the laptop power management options worked. Today the 'shut 
> down after x minutes of inactivity' is broken, the 'sleep when I close 
> the lid' is broken, and even if it does sleep I have no networking 
> when it wakes.
>
> Back then I had an email client that worked. Today I have one that, 
> with a great amount of annoying fiddling, will retrieve my email but 
> not without using 75% of my CPU for about two hours. (Honestly, I'm 
> not making that up, that is really what happens when I start KMail, 
> every time. And I know I'm not alone.)
>
> I could go on but it would turn into a rant and that's not the point. 
> The point is that Kubutnu - or rather KDE - today is less functional 
> than it was 3 years ago. That's not a subjective statement - it's a fact.
>
> The developers will no doubt say that "Oh you only need to do x and y 
> and z and spin round 3 times while chanting 'i hate windows'". That is 
> not the point. Back then, I didn't have to do those things. This is 
> not progress however pretty and shiny you make it look.
>
> Which brings me back to my original point. While I am glad that we 
> have a long term support commitment from Canonical, it would be a real 
> shame if the 5 year supported release of Kubuntu was stuck with KDE 
> 4.8 for 5 years - you'd hope that KDE would eventually start working 
> properly again at some point before 2017 and what I want to know is 
> will the LTS be upgraded to new versions of KDE as they come out or 
> will it remain stuck with the unfinished, malfunctional KDE 4.8?
>
> Mark
I can really sympathize with you, Mark.  I've been very happy with Linux 
for over ten years
trying red hat, debian, caldera, Mandrake and several others before 
settling on Kubuntu in about
2005.  We have four Kubuntu machines.  My wife still uses 6.06 and I 
have 8.04, 9.04 and
10.04 on the others.

 From the beginning I saw that a bit more skill was required to use 
Linux and I thought I
could handle it.  And I could until support on 8.04 was running out.  I 
downloaded a 10.4
disk and tried to install it.  It wouldn't install, reporting thousands 
of times that
"Serial 8250. too much work for irq17."  I did get it to sort of install 
once, but the machine
locked up repeatedly.  The help I got from the list was that someone had 
heard that happens
to Dell Computers.

So I acquired another computer and successfully installed Kubuntu 10.4.  
Unfortunately 10.4
is a mess.
How did it happen that kmail, a perfectly great email client, was 
deliberately made totally unusable?
What was wrong with having two panels across the bottom of the screen to 
show the active
programs?
Why can't I pick my own icon to represent gedit in the panel on the left?
Why doesn't Thunderbird have a wordwrap?
How could an LTS release of Kubuntu not work on some Dell computers?

I have a feeling that 95% of the people on this list could solve most of 
my problems easily,
but I'm just a computer user not a developer.  I thought I could get by 
with an ocasional
sudo apt-get update   sudo apt-get upgrade.   I guess I thought wrong.

bruce
bruce

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