KDE 4.7.3 Is Here WIth More Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE 4.7.3 Is Here WIth More Fixes

The KDE developers have put out KDE 4.7.3 today...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAxMDQ

[Maxim Levitsky]

Kudos to the team.
KDE 4.7 is finally a usable desktop.
Few days ago I updated my desktop and dumped Gnome from it as well.
Keep up the good work!

[hdas]

This is probably not the best place to rant about things, but AFAIK unfortunately KDE 4.7 has a severe taskmanager bug where entries from closed applications remain in the taskbar. While there are several variants of this problem, and unfortunately too many bug reports about it, I am primarily talking about bugs.kde.org # 275469. I would also refer to bug #'s 277010, 278869 and # 224447. I am although happy to see that this obvious bug is currently being looked at by developers.

What is unfortunate is that many distributions are shipping it right now in their stable releases, including Kubuntu, Sabayon etc. I tested Sabayon in a virtual machine and it had this bug of closed tasks remaining in task manager. Worst more, I saw a review of Ubuntu on Distrowatch the other day and these days the reviews are so shallow that they miss out on obvious bugs - so much that I think you can see it in their attached screenshot (if I am correct). (I should add that in a quick run of Kubuntu in a virtual machine today, I was not able to see that bug.) It looks that Linus's Law that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is not so true after all.

While this bug was the primary reason I have reverted back to KDE 4.6, there are numerous other stability issues. KDE crashing on logout is a usual happening. Also there are random Nepomuk crashes and messages -- worst, I do not care for it or need it and do not know why is it part of the main distribution. Apparently the Changelog in KDE 4.7.3 claims to have fixed some of the Nepomuk issues. However in my opinion, KDE 4.7 should be marked as not-ready for production and should not be used until many of these bugs are fixed. It would come as a disappointment to those who are using anything stable (even if something ancient like Windows XP perhaps where basic things work).

Overall, the stability of KDE as fallen dramatically since KDE 4.5. I found a few hard hitting bugs in KDE 4.6, but 4.7 has gone really low. I appreciate the immense hard work the KDE developers put in, especially that it is mostly all volunteer effort and I also understand that developers are free to work on whatever projects they are interested in. But I cannot help to see that they advertise all these fancy features like social integration, semantic desktop, composting effects and other random things nobody cares about, while standard features get neglected. I would add that last time I checked few months back, the kde networkmanager or knetworkmanager project is still not in a good shape - what good is all this social integration if you are not connected to the internet or you still have to use konsole to connect to internet to use a shiny interface for tweeting. Ironically, I am using nm-applet (from gnome) currently on my KDE 4.6 desktop.

<sarcasm>I am waiting for comments who will say I should use Gnome/TWM or update my graphics driver or change distribution or bug denial reports or a constructive but poor workaround, including not using the taskmanager at all.</sarcasm>

[hdas]

I would also add that I remember Kubuntu 11.10 was one of the distributions to at least acknowledge the occasional task manager problem in their release notes / known issues in their Beta 1 (https://wiki.kubuntu.org/OneiricOcelot/Beta1/Kubuntu), although there is no mention in the final release.

[kraftman]

<sarcasm>I am waiting for comments who will say I should use Gnome/TWM or update my graphics driver or change distribution or bug denial reports or a constructive but poor workaround, including not using the taskmanager at all.</sarcasm>

If you're waiting for comments that will recommend you to use Gnome then you're smoking too much.

[hdas]

If you're waiting for comments that will recommend you to use Gnome then you're smoking too much.

Let's smoke and wait . Btw, I had some hope from Gnome, until their 3.0 initiatives and all that shell stuff. Somebody tell them that the only desktop shell I need is Bash.

[Shining Arcanine]

This is probably not the best place to rant about things, but AFAIK unfortunately KDE 4.7 has a severe taskmanager bug where entries from closed applications remain in the taskbar. While there are several variants of this problem, and unfortunately too many bug reports about it, I am primarily talking about bugs.kde.org # 275469. I would also refer to bug #'s 277010, 278869 and # 224447. I am although happy to see that this obvious bug is currently being looked at by developers.

What is unfortunate is that many distributions are shipping it right now in their stable releases, including Kubuntu, Sabayon etc. I tested Sabayon in a virtual machine and it had this bug of closed tasks remaining in task manager. Worst more, I saw a review of Ubuntu on Distrowatch the other day and these days the reviews are so shallow that they miss out on obvious bugs - so much that I think you can see it in their attached screenshot (if I am correct). (I should add that in a quick run of Kubuntu in a virtual machine today, I was not able to see that bug.) It looks that Linus's Law that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is not so true after all.

While this bug was the primary reason I have reverted back to KDE 4.6, there are numerous other stability issues. KDE crashing on logout is a usual happening. Also there are random Nepomuk crashes and messages -- worst, I do not care for it or need it and do not know why is it part of the main distribution. Apparently the Changelog in KDE 4.7.3 claims to have fixed some of the Nepomuk issues. However in my opinion, KDE 4.7 should be marked as not-ready for production and should not be used until many of these bugs are fixed. It would come as a disappointment to those who are using anything stable (even if something ancient like Windows XP perhaps where basic things work).

Overall, the stability of KDE as fallen dramatically since KDE 4.5. I found a few hard hitting bugs in KDE 4.6, but 4.7 has gone really low. I appreciate the immense hard work the KDE developers put in, especially that it is mostly all volunteer effort and I also understand that developers are free to work on whatever projects they are interested in. But I cannot help to see that they advertise all these fancy features like social integration, semantic desktop, composting effects and other random things nobody cares about, while standard features get neglected. I would add that last time I checked few months back, the kde networkmanager or knetworkmanager project is still not in a good shape - what good is all this social integration if you are not connected to the internet or you still have to use konsole to connect to internet to use a shiny interface for tweeting. Ironically, I am using nm-applet (from gnome) currently on my KDE 4.6 desktop.

<sarcasm>I am waiting for comments who will say I should use Gnome/TWM or update my graphics driver or change distribution or bug denial reports or a constructive but poor workaround, including not using the taskmanager at all.</sarcasm>

I have issues with crashes on logout too. I assumed that it was due to a bug in the Intel graphics drivers, because I have a system with an Nvidia graphics card that does not suffer from that problem. There is also an issue where the system disables compositing at every login and I must manually enable it through Alt+Shft+F12. It is rather annoying, but it only happens on the system with Sandy Bridge graphics, so I assume that the graphics driver is at fault.

The stability might be due to bugs in the graphics driver, which isn't KDE's fault and the reason newer versions of KDE suffer from them could be that they are more reliant on properly written graphics drivers because they offload more things.

[hdas]

I have issues with crashes on logout too. I assumed that it was due to a bug in the Intel graphics drivers, because I have a system with an Nvidia graphics card that does not suffer from that problem. There is also an issue where the system disables compositing at every login and I must manually enable it through Alt+Shft+F12. It is rather annoying, but it only happens on the system with Sandy Bridge graphics, so I assume that the graphics driver is at fault.

The stability might be due to bugs in the graphics driver, which isn't KDE's fault and the reason newer versions of KDE suffer from them could be that they are more reliant on properly written graphics drivers because they offload more things.

Incidentally, I have Nvidia graphics (GTX 460M and 275.28) and the logout crashes I have are random. For sometime, I thought it had something to do with power management since it was easier to reproduce when I used to plug out the adapter from my notebook, then plug it back in, and then when I tried to log out or shutdown, the usual kde crash.

On that note, why do they need to offload more drawing things to the graphics processor - I understand it is more efficient, faster and all that, but CPU's are already fast enough and extremely stable at doing such stuff. (I can imagine even a lowly netbook CPU like Atom or Fusion will do just fine on such drawing operations.) So why release some untested crap and break things.

[DarkCloud]

Why is there a release with only about 20 bug fixes. Maybe there are more bugs fixed then reported. I Hope so, as it seems a overkill to have a release with so ffew bug fixes. I love KDE, but like others I am a sorry to see it get more unstable with time. Why is this? perhaps KDE developers are adding to many fringe features and focusing to much attention on tablets.

[hdas]

Why is there a release with only about 20 bug fixes. Maybe there are more bugs fixed then reported. I Hope so, as it seems a overkill to have a release with so ffew bug fixes. I love KDE, but like others I am a sorry to see it get more unstable with time. Why is this? perhaps KDE developers are adding to many fringe features and focusing to much attention on tablets.

Those are only the main bugs, there are tons of other stuff which the release note directs to detailed changelogs, the links for which are conveniently broken . If you really have to see them, you have to be hardcore and check the git/svn commits.