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KDE 4.1 is broken just like KDE 4.0 was

Updated: November 3, 2008August 6, 2008

When KDE 4.0 came out I passed on it. Being a long-time use of software in general, I've learned things that end in .0 are usually not all that great. Later I heard KDE 4.0 was indeed very broken and many were uninstalling it and going back to KDE 3.x. But when KDE 4.1 was announced recently, I decided to give it a try. I've used KDE quite a bit over the years and I really like how nice it looks and how many options there are to customize things.

I have a 2-year old Dell running Ubuntu 8.04. I've had success converting a regular Ubuntu system to become a Kubuntu system previously so I followed the instructions here:

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.1

The package downloading took forever with the connection speed puttering along at about 5-6K/sec on average. When I realized how long it was going to take I looked around for a KDE 4.1 mirror but found none. I found a few mirrors that had Mandriva and OpenSuse packages, but none for Ubuntu.

Once I got it installed I logged out of Gnome to switch over to it but it didn't appear in my GDM session options, nor was KDM running as the new login manager. I tried ctrl-alt-backspace but still got GDM, not KDM, even though I had been asked only moments early if I'd like to switch and I chose KDM! So I gave up and rebooted.

When the system came back up it looked sort-of odd, but it was finally running KDM. I guess the oddness I saw was because I was running dual monitors and the new KDM had no support for it.. things were trying to be centered but they weren't. The background image ran out before it got to the edge of my right monitor leaving black the rest of the way. But whatever.. I chose KDE4 from the session options and logged-in.

Once logged-in, things that I had set to auto-start from my Gnome session were running. In particular the screenlets app I use in Gnome was running over top of KDE and F9 no longer worked to hide it. I think it would have been nice if KDE would have asked me if I wanted all those auto-start entries migrated over, instead of just assuming I did.

I started poking around checking things out. I found pretty quickly the new menu system on the lower left was broken. When I hovered over the large tabs they flickered badly. Eventually I found I could sort-of trick it into letting me click on one if I moused down from the top instead of from the side. Finally I was able to get to Firefox to get it started. I tried dragging the menu's resize arrow thingy on the top right up and to the right a bit to make the menu larger, but it went crazy resizing the entire menu to span the entire height of my desktop. I was unable to resize it back down since the resize arrow thingy was off my screen. I was stuck at that point with a mostly unusable menu. I gave up and logged out to let the menu restart itself. When I logged out I got a kernel panic because of "conflicting interrupts" ?!?! Since when is desktop software allowed to kill the underlying OS?

Wait, did I install KDE4.1, or windoze?

Nothing to do when your kernel panics except hit reset. So I did.. and waited.

When my system came back up I logged in again. The menu was fixed but it was different. The large tabs that were on the bottom were now on the left side of the menu. Taking no chances, I didn't mess with the menu resize thingy.

Next I tried to figure out how to add some shortcut icons to the taskbar. I'd like to think I'm smart enough to figure something like this out, but I am sad to admit I was not. I found I could choose an item from the menu and tell it to appear on the taskbar, but I I had a number of apps I wanted shortcut icons for that did not appear in the new KDE menu system.

I found the control panel app that really lets you dig into customizing your KDE. Somehow, while using it, my "e" key became unusable. I found this out the hard way because my password has a "e" in it. For a while it made me think my sudo was broken. I couldn't figure out what was up so I tried logging out of KDE. Mistake! I forgot, I'm not allowed to logout of KDE, and my system promptly reminded me of this fact by freezing up and leaving me with two unresponsive black screens. I hit reset and went to take a piss.

When I logged back in I found my "e" key was working again.

Once KDE started back up I started exploring the "widgets" associated with the taskbar and the thingy in the upper right corner of my left monitor. Somehow I managed to make my taskbar die while trying various widgets. And since I couldn't get it restarted I had to restart KDE, again. But this time I was lucky. I had started a terminal so I typed `reboot` instead of letting the system lock up or kernel panic.

At this point I was becoming very scared of KDE 4.1. It had already locked up on me twice, and showed me massive instability otherwise. I wasn't about to try and do any real work with it. I logged back into Gnome, got rid of KDM and removed KDE4.1 from my system.

In short, KDE 4.1 is very broken, just like KDE 4.0 was.. and I only wasted half a day finding this out. Here's to hoping you don't bother with it.

Tags:

linux, kde, kernel

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