Kde 4.7 (y/n)?

gentooP4 · Apprentice Joined: 20 Sep 2010 Posts: 182 Location: NZ

Hi all,

Just wondering how people feel about KDE 4.7? The usual menus seem to be relocated to a drop down bar on the right of each window. That and a few other things I'm not too sure on. Is it easy to set my system so it stays on KDE 4.6?

I used to love KDE 3.5 and really loathed KDE 4 for a while (using SuSE back then) so wondering if KDE 4.7 will be a similar experience and just something I need to get used to?

Apologoes I'm thinking out loud a bit here. Would love to hear your views though.

Thanks

EDIT: Just an observation but my subject line was automatically changed from "KDE 4.7 (Y/N)?" to what you see now.

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ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1191 Location: Austria

I cannot complain about KDE 4.7 at all. It works and I am used to it by now. Since KDEPIM stuff is back with the releases, things aren't really painful anymore.

I'd miss quite a few things by now if I had to revert back to KDE 3
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sam_i_am · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Sep 2003 Posts: 131

Word of advice: Make a backup copy of $HOME/.kde4 directory before you do anything. That way, if something goes wrong, you can delete the .kde4 directory and try again.

I tried 4.7.0 on a machine at home. Everything went well except kmail. The migration was a mess. At first, migration script crashed. When I tried again, kmail
didn't have any of my imap email accounts. Luckily, I had a backup copy of .kde4. So, I copied that over and tried again, but no luck.

Now kmail always crashes on startup with "akonadi resource not found". I even tried the "skip migration and start new" option. But still the same. So, I've given it up for now and waiting to see if 4.7.1 would fix these issues. Funny thing is if I don't click "OK" on the crash dialog, I can actually use kmail to send and read email. I poked inside to see the settings and was horrified to see huge list of akonadi-resources. It looks like akonadi keeps one resource for each email folder. So, it was very difficult to find out the settings for the actual imap accounts.

Akonadi seems like the 50lb sledgehammer to kill a gnat. I really don't believe that the use-cases that justify such complexity are not applicable for 99% of users.

I'm keeping my work machine at 4.6 and play around at home since it is already broken and I can use XP (gasp) when I need to check email.
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codestation · Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2011 3:59 pm Post subject: Re: Kde 4.7 (y/n)?

Dorsai! · Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:36 pm Post subject:

The fine thing about KDE 4.X (as was with KDE-3.5 for that matter) is that everything is perfectly configurable. You don't like that menu, get rid of it. You liked the old one better, just use that one. Plasma Oxygen and Kwin really rock in that regard. Window Buttons, Task Bar, Toolbars, all configurable to the last detail.

My KDE 4.7 now runs better than 3.5 ever did. A few points though:

KDEPIM2/Akonadi: While it works now almost perfectly, it is slow as hell and uses tons of RAM and CPU for my six IMAP accounts. Starting with 4.7 I deactivated the "semantic-desktop" USEflag completely and got rid of KDEPIM. Not because its bad, but because the whole Akonadi Framework is just to heavy for just a mail client. I now use claws-mail which is a revelation both in speed and usability. If you actually use all the cool features Akonadi/Strigi/Nepomuk provide, it might be worth the load it puts on your system.

I'd suggest to keep your install to a minimum (kdebase-meta instead of kde-meta and with no global "semantic-desktop") and install apps based on your needs and preference.

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 432

Hi, I say Yes, just try it, I used gnome and xfce with openbox, and just openbox (and many others bla bla), now I use kde 4 with openbox and for now I really enjoy kde.
I never used kde 3, but I liked it (how integrated all those programs were), just it didn't feel right for me, tried many times to use it...
But right now, you can't find DE that is configurable?! Only choice is KDE, or to spend some time configuring some WM, so try it, I think many people don't like it because of kwin, but you have an OPTION (very rare these days) to choose which WM you want to use, and off course don't install semantic nonsense, claws-mail is very good old school mail app, oxygen-gtk is nice, often release new versions, start with kdebase-startkde and add what you want. You can get your classic desktop in no time (and some modern stuff if you want).

Edit: And yes, I don't even notice updates, I use it for some time and I don't care about updates really, it can't possibly mess with my config which is simple...

acarstoiu · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 197

I have just upgraded from 4.6.5 to 4.7.1. First impression is not good, but not very bad either.
The calendar attached to the panel digital clock is now accompanied by a panel reserved for holiday display and there's not enough room.

What discontents me most is that desktop and window focus switch (via mouse movement - I've enabled the"focus follows mouse" policy) is painfully slow. Disabling Oxygen animations for window decorations does not help. All the other effects work just fine.
My video card is an integrated Intel "4 series".

Changing solely the window decorations makes everything responsive again, so the culprit must be the Oxygen window decorations - they're as slow as a replay...

Joseph K. · Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 11:14 am Post subject:

What happened to kde-base/kdepim-l10n for 4.7.1?

acarstoiu · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 197

You could post a bug related to the missing version bump (4.7.0 -> 4.7.1).

Unrelated to this, does nobody else experience slowness with Oxygen or Aurorae based window decorations? Is it my video driver's fault (intel on AMD64)?

Joseph K. · Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:24 am Post subject:

Yamakuzure · Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 1:23 pm Post subject:

Oxygen _always_ had speed issues. No surprise here.

It can't be said too many times: When upgrading to 4.7+ from <4.7, back up your ~/.kde4 and start from scratch. At least akonadi, kmail and nepomuk go haywire otherwise. Best thing for kmail when updating to kmail2: Copy your mail folder somewhere else, update, recreate your account(s), add the backup folder(s) as a (read only) folder(s) resource and copy your mail back. Otherwise you might get tons of destroyed or duplicate emails. It can go alright with the update, but why risk it?
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acarstoiu · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 197

Uncle_Psychosis · Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 387

Honestly, I'm getting really annoyed with the (seemingly) endless kde updates. It seems like every time I upgrade/update my desktop kde wants to change major version numbers and I'm beginning to get more than a bit fed up of it.

I'm going to give 4.7.1 a try but it would be really, really, really nice if they stayed at 4.7 for a while..... :twisted:

Spidey · Apprentice Joined: 07 Sep 2006 Posts: 269

Well, they are now at 4.7.4, and 4.8 is being still way ahead of us.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9263

Wait, where did you get kde 4.7.4 already?

Kollin · Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2011 8:15 pm Post subject:

Joseph K. · Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2011 11:39 pm Post subject:

acarstoiu · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 197

Thanks, I've already played with the "Display events" toggle button - it has no effect here... Resizing works, at least

Uncle_Psychosis · Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 387

Erm...

4.7.1 is totally broken on my machine. If I resize a window then my screen gets totally corrupted---its hard to explain what it looks like, but it gets really horribly pixelated and looks a bit like a TV signal thats not tuned properly---you can kind of see whats going on but its too fuzzy and blurry. Moving windows about makes it worse.

Restarting the x-server didn't seem to fix it (seems to affect kdm as well?)

how the hell do I go back to 4.6?

toralf · Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2011 6:10 pm Post subject:

Uncle_Psychosis · Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 387

Based on my experiences from the last day or so I'd say---if you have a working kde install and you want to keep it that way then don't upgrade.

In order to get anywhere near a usable system I had to disable all the desktop effects, change themes, and totally nuke the .kde4 folder. Downgrading to 4.6 is nearly impossible because of the crazy number of apps and weird dependency issues.

Totally not worth all the hassle. Add in all the unnecessary semantic-desktop crap (whats the point in having it as a useflag if setting "USE=-semantic-desktop" just gives you a massive block list) and I'm seriously considering leaving kde. :cry:

rickvernam · Guru Joined: 09 Jul 2004 Posts: 313