Hard Choice
A few weeks ago I thought I would take the plunge, and installed KDE 4.1 on my Kubuntu 8.4 laptop. With the recent announcement of Intrepid being launched, I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4 as the default environment. I figured that I should get an early look at the direction KDE is going. Sadly it would appear to be the wrong direction.
The first daft thing I noticed is the logout method. Click on the K Menu, then Leave, then Logout. It takes you to same menu that you get for shutting down. Complete with all the same options available. What’s the point in the extra menu options and complexity for new users? I use KDE4 at work on OpenSUSE 11, and it doesn’t suffer from this multiplicity.
Maybe the above can be attributed to a bug in Kubuntu, so let’s just carry on using it. Hopefully…
Before the system had even finished logging on, it was as slow as treacle. My poorly laptop had a loadavg of 7,5,5 just to log in. It’s not exactly spritely, but as a 2.33GHz Core2 with 2GB RAM and a GeForce Go 7400, I expected more. A minute or so passed as the system wound itself down, and Plasma graces the screen. Slowly.
Everything is just so slow. It’s unbearable. I worked at it for about a week, and everything KDE related was sloooooow. Kontact crashed with predictable regularity. Amarok hung randomly, Konqueror bailed out whenever the wind blew the wrong way, and kwin would have a fit when you looked away from the monitor. The bugs were supposed to be ironed out during 4.0. This is 4.1, and supposed to be stable enough to ship as a default WM in a release of Kubuntu. I tried everything, from disabling all effects in kwin, to purging ~/.kde/ and ~/.kde4/. All to no avail. I even formatted and reinstalled a new instance of Kubuntu ‘just in case’. Sadly that didn’t resolve it either.
The situation would appear to be the same on my reasonably powerful desktop PC at home. Kubuntu 8.10 is unbearably slow and prone to crashing. Admittedly I’ve not tried the absolute most recent version on the desktop, as I managed to embed a hard drive in the LCD panel. Long story, but it involves KDE4…
Kubuntu 8.10 ships with KDE4 and no option to use KDE3.5. It’s with a heavy heart I move to Ubuntu and Gnome. Initial impressions would indicate that it’s far swifter and less prone to random crashing. Maybe I’ll move to KDE 4.5 when Gnome releases 3.0…
It took me a few days to get used to Gnome as I haven’t really used it much for a few years, but I’m now comfortable albeit missing some of KDE’s features and key command dominance. It’s far from perfect, but it’s now cleaner, faster and lets me do my work .. I don’t really want another Vista-like environment where the desktop is more important than the applications.
Meh.
Take care.