KDE 4.9 Released With Many Enhancements

[Awesomeness]

[*] Some windows minimize towards the center of the desktop rather than towards the task bar. Qt Creator and tvtime always trigger that bug here.

This is a known bug – actually a combination of bugs. Some of the bugs are already fixed (according to the main bug report the issue was worse in the past) but the remaining bug(s) are very hard to locate. Considering that this is a minor visual glitch, it has relatively low priority.

[*] KMix lacks some mixer sliders offered to me by alsamixer. Namely the "front", "rear", "center", "woofer" and "side" sliders. Only "master" is offered. This is with an Asus Xonar D1 card.

KMix is practically unmaintained. It’s a shame that a central piece of software can end up this way. For PulseAudio users VeroMix is probably the better tool.

[*] The "back" and "forward" buttons of my mice (all of them) don't work. No going back/forward with them in stuff like Konqueror, Dolphin or file dialogs.

That's no KDE bug. It’s a Qt bug which actually can’t be solved without breaking the ABI. Qt 4.x can’t include a bugfix for this reason. In Qt 5 the bug is fixed since a long time.

[LenS]

Great, I'll be trying it out soon. It sounds like the bugs won't even effect me. I haven't minimized a window in years. Why click twice? I don't have forward and back buttons on my mouse either. It is one of those rare left handed mice. Works great.

[RealNC]

I just updated to 4.9 (it hit the Gentoo Linux repo yesterday.) KWin is a bit of a disaster :-| Too much lag. Moving a window around means the mouse cursor moves first, and only later does the window catch up to where you moved the mouse. Disabling VSync doesn't help (both in System Settings as well as in NVidia Settings.) It was perfectly fast and snappy in 4.8. My theory of KDE accumulating more and more bugs turns out to be true, at here here.

[ChrisXY]

I just updated to 4.9 (it hit the Gentoo Linux repo yesterday.) KWin is a bit of a disaster :-| Too much lag. Moving a window around means the mouse cursor moves first, and only later does the window catch up to where you moved the mouse. Disabling VSync doesn't help (both in System Settings as well as in NVidia Settings.) It was perfectly fast and snappy in 4.8. My theory of KDE accumulating more and more bugs turns out to be true, at here here.

I have the opposite. I use a HD 6550M mostly in low/mid power mode and up to 4.8 it had that behaviour with OpenGL effects so I had to use the xrender compositing. But now with 4.9 the OpenGL effects are very smooth. It even seems to work fastly with the OpenGL 2 shaders activated. I'm using the raster graphics system by the way.

[mgraesslin]

KWin is a bit of a disaster :-| Too much lag. Moving a window around means the mouse cursor moves first, and only later does the window catch up to where you moved the mouse.

This is a bug in Aurorae which got spotted last weekend, while the patch is already finished it was too late for 4.9.0. Switching to any non Aurorae theme will fix this issue.

I just want to point out that the regression was introduced in January or February. It seems to be very easy to spot when you use this functionality. Anybody complaining about this being in the release should ask himself why he did not spend some time to test the betas and release candidates. With the Project Neon KVM image that's easy enough to do.

Now before someone asks: no I don't move windows through the titlebar. I use the window content area or alt+lmb, so no I did not spot this issue.

[kraftman]

And none of the bugs fixed, probably. And new bugs introduced. Most stuff in KDE has been on a downwards slope the last year.

Let's hope 4.9 is an exception. KDE has more bugs than MS-DOS, Windows 95 and Windows Me put together. Amarok and Phonon have even gotten to a point where it's not possible to play your music anymore.

So, you don't know yet and you comment? Except it's usable unlike dos and windoze. Amarok and Phonon works great, but I'm using Kubuntu where packages aren't upgraded when just new release arrives.

[kraftman]

KWin is very slow and choppy with low power GPU modes (50Mhz graphics / 135Mhz mem / 101Mhz proc). So I have to force a higher performance level.

This is a graphic driver problem. It occurs with Open Source radeon drivers and power profile method. With fglrx it works fine.

Icons "jump" around when hovering the mouse over them (Desktop as well as in Dolphin). Doesn't always happen. Whether it happens or not seems to be fixed at login time.

That's something new.

KDM stopped remembering the user name of the last logged in user after 4.6.

This works fine and was never broken for me. I recommend to try some not rolling distros sometimes, because they make additional fixes.

[Teho]

KDM stopped remembering the user name of the last logged in user after 4.6.

Have you checked your options on the last page of login manager settings? There's option for changing that.

[TheBlackCat]

Many thanks go to TheBlackCat who, if I understand correctly, did a huge part of the job, offering the packages for openSUSE! (Currently still RC2 but that one works great here.)

Thanks. Unfortunately obs is having some problems right now, but the x86_64 packages for openSUSE 12.1 at least should be available.

[Awesomeness]

Nearly. Rick Stockton is working on this and it's aimed for Qt 5.1 IF he gets it done. Might even be 5.2. And yes, it is a Qt limitation. Qt - as it stands right now - only allows shortcuts to be set based on keyboard keys. So CTRL + Mouse click is not possible yet.

What does Ctrl+Click have to do with Back and Forward in Dolphin, etc. which is only a single click on Mouse4/Mouse5? IIRC Qt 4.x uses a really weird data format for mouse buttons which limits it to 3 buttons but according to http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/10970 the fix to support up to 31 mouse buttons was committed to Qt 5 last November.