Kubuntu 8.04 / KDE4

Just upgraded tonight. What a disappointment - looks lovely, but unstable and incomplete. Eye-candy doesn't stretch to KDE3 apps. There is no easy way to disable all sounds(there was a checkbutton in KDE3 which made it a breeze). There is no main mixer control(I know... PulseAudio and all that).

Adding widgets makes it crash. Resizing the taskbar makes it crash. All the fonts are the wrong size - it's not taken any hints from my KDE3 configuration at all. Not even the Konqueror bookmarks...

I know it's just initial teething troubles, and that it'd likely be more stable had I done a fresh install, but this isn't what K/Ubuntu is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be reliable, a doddle for newbies and even easier for someone with a few years under their belt.

Whoever signed this off into the main repositories needs a couple of minutes in a locked room with me. This isn't what it's supposed to be like, I deliberately stay away from the beta releases these days, because I don't need the aggravation.

Not terribly impressed, in all honesty.

ETA - upgrade to 8.04 was a doddle, and had no obvious issues whatsoever.

 

I know, I tried the Beta out, it was horrible

 

To be fair, K/Ubuntu beta releases have always been pretty good to me. With 7.04, I didn't upgrade until the release candidates, same with 7.10. This time round, I waited for the release, hoping everything would be sweet. Very disappointed with the KDE4 packages made available in the main repositories...

hmm... I should take a look at my repositories - I may have added KDE4 somewhere down the line. But if I haven't, then I'm very disappointed for them to be made available in their present state.

 

I know, KDE 3 is solid, and I like it very much.

 

I tried out KDE4 a while back, and I had the same impression. It has nothing to do with the Kubuntu team though - it's just that KDE 4.0 was released when it was not yet in a functional state. It'll be only once 4.1 or 4.2 is released that KDE4 becomes usable. It's for this reason that the main Kubuntu Hardy release uses KDE3.

 

I loved the first releases of KDE. KDE2 became a bit sluggish, bloated, and not as fluent to use. KDE3 was far better in all respects.

I'm wondering if we're headed for the same release-cycle as MS-DOS. Version 3 was pretty good, on the whole - version 4 wasn't. Version 5 was great, version 6 had a rush of last-minute changes and fixes, and each minor-release was incompatible with the earlier ones - anyone remember DiskSpace and DriveSpace?

I'll give the laptop a fresh-install with the KDE4-based install media, just to see if things are any better. But I'm not holding my breath...

 

Hey... I have the copy of Vista that shipped with my machine. Maybe I should just install that...!

Also... does anyone else think the new taskbar menu system is bloody awful? It's fat and slow, and doesn't feel like it's making any sense to me...

I'm also fat and slow, and don't make much sense, so I can't complain too much!

 

The KDE team explicitly said that KDE 4. 0 would not be your traditional ".0" release. They released it so early in an effort to spread info about KDE.

I had the same complaints about KDE 4.0 when I tried it out. Just wait; it will definitely get better.

 

Yep, KDE 4 is not ready for general consumption. Like srunni said, the KDE team said that 4.0 was some sort of release for developers and early adopters but not something people would want to use for day to day work.

My take on this is "fair enough" but I think the KDE team made a mistake in calling what they released 4.0. It should have been called 4.0-dev or something like that so that people would clearly know that it is a developer's version. The problem with the version number they used is that there is no indication in the version number itself that it is a developer's version. So a good deal of people, when they hear about KDE 4.0, don't know the caveat that goes with it.

 

Should have made a play on the name then... made it obvious. Alph4.0 could have looked good, I think...

 

^^ I agree with Lemur. I tried Kubuntu Hardy with KDE4 and the GUI is unstable.

 

gotta love gnome

 

I switched from Gnome to KDE 3.5 just last week. I'm not particularly fond of how Gnome is slowly getting infested with technologies encumbered by MS-owned patents (e.g. C#). Years ago, I ditched KDE and went with Gnome because the licensing on Qt was not acceptable. The principles which drove me to do that then are still good today.

 

Remember to wear a leather belt into that locked room....lol. Yes, it's not ready for the repo's, it should still have a beta designation I think.

 

Well, call me crazy but I've returned to KDE4. (4.0.3) I've decided to really try it out.

 

Kubuntu was too shiny for my purposes when i tried it out, is there any way to tone that down a bit? If there is I'd definitely like Kubuntu over Ubuntu. I like the look but it overdoes it.

 

Yeah, go into KMenu -> System Settings. KDE is highly configurable, so you definitely don't have to stick to the default settings for most anything. If you go to http://www.kde-look.org/ , you can find more themes, iconsets, etc.

 

I doubt it will work on your old machine Calvin, KDE is kind of large....

 

I'm using it on my Vista machine, even though i wasn't able to customize the visuals down and got fed up with it and got rid of it. I like shiny things but there's a limit, Kubuntu was way too shiny for my purposes. =\

 

Cool, So are you going to Dual boot your Vista machine? You can download the Vista disk or ask for them from HP.

 

Nope, keeping Vista. Was just trying out Kubuntu LiveCD.

 

Cool......