oneline article: "Debian Alliance on The Horizon"

[Ed Cogburn]

John wrote:

> Ed Cogburn wrote:
> 
> Warty to Hoary. Possibly, installing KDE in the middle confounded
> things, but I think it _should_ have worked.


Trust me, when you're doing a dist-upgrade, *nothing* is assured.  :)


> Considering its parentage it works remarkably well. I do have regular
> problem with the desktop locking for a few seconds when I select text;
> that happened in Sarge too.
> 
> Also the mouse goes funny at times: I can move the cursor but clicks
> don't register and the cursor doesn't change. Ususlly, it comes good
> when I navigate around the screens and close some windows. That happened
> in Sarge too.


Never saw these two myself (I was using Sarge when it was still unstable)
but they both sound like some problem with your mouse or its driver.


> I think it's time for the KDE folk to settle down to some refinement,
> particularly of the core elements. It performs very poorly in 256 Mbytes
> of RAM, and not brilliantly in 512.


What concerns me is they aren't stopping at all.  3.5 will be the last
version of KDE as we know it, and 4.0 will reinvent several wheels all over
again (complete rewrite of desktop/panel/taskbar interaction called
"Plasma").  Ok, granted, they're using the switch to Qt4 as the excuse for
this, but still, it means lots of new code and lots of new bugs, on *top*
of the new bugs introduced by Qt4.  :(  Obviously, 3.4 works for most of
the devs, but unfortunately its never been quite stable for me (KControl
hasn't worked since 3.3, and Konqueror is now very fragile), and now the
devs are moving to KDE4.  Sigh.


> OTOH I used to use RHL 7.3 (KDE 2.2 I think) on a 128 Mb Pentium II and
> it was better than FC3 on a 1.3 Ghz Celeron with 256.


Ahh, the good ol'e days!  And you could have both GNOME and KDE installed
without them using 200MB of hard space, now they *each* take up more than
200MB or so, counting dependencies.

That SimpleKDE thing isn't what I thought it was.  Its based on KDE 3.4, but
I'm wondering if we really should go back to 3.1 or 3.2 (2.x?) before
featuritis hit with such a vengence and create a stripped-down KDE-Lite or
something.  What was the last version of KDE that you were completely happy
with?  Just curious.  Mine would have to be a late 2.x version, as I can
remember various minor problems plaguing almost all 3.x versions I've
tried.