KDE 4.9.3 November Update Fixes 86 Bugs

[Akka]

That's the common lies coming from KDE. Even recently, i had to remove KDE from lots of user computers I administrate. I used to spend time "fixing" their KDE by removing everything related to nepomuk+strigi+plasma, which usually is enough to bring it back to a usable state, but i got fed up of this too.
Those were the typical kubuntu, centos, debian stuff, updated, so nothing like the even uglier early kde4.
It seems so common to say this, but KDE is such a bloatware nowadays. Which we used to say about windows or gnome by the time. (yes, "we", i used to be quite a big KDE fan).

....lol...

[droste]

That's the common lies coming from KDE. Even recently, i had to remove KDE from lots of user computers I administrate. I used to spend time "fixing" their KDE by removing everything related to nepomuk+strigi+plasma, which usually is enough to bring it back to a usable state, but i got fed up of this too.
Those were the typical kubuntu, centos, debian stuff, updated, so nothing like the even uglier early kde4.
It seems so common to say this, but KDE is such a bloatware nowadays. Which we used to say about windows or gnome by the time. (yes, "we", i used to be quite a big KDE fan).

Well it is not a lie, it is my experience. I have openSUSE 12.2 (KDE) installed on a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 1012 (very low end), a desktop with intel Core2Quad (2ghz), 4GB RAM, ati radeon 4770 (mid-range) and another desktop with intel i5 (2,8ghz), 16GB RAM, ati radeon 5770 (higher-mid-range :-D). It works very good on all of them with a standard installation (nothing removed, opengl compositing activated and just some additional applications installed).

I'm not saying it works everywhere, but I haven't found a system where it doesn't work. I'm also not saying you are a liar and you haven't had/have these problems. I'm just sharing my view on this ;-).

[orzel]

Well it is not a lie, it is my experience. I have openSUSE 12.2 (KDE) installed on a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 1012 (very low end), a desktop with intel Core2Quad (2ghz), 4GB RAM, ati radeon 4770 (mid-range) and another desktop with intel i5 (2,8ghz), 16GB RAM, ati radeon 5770 (higher-mid-range :-D). It works very good on all of them with a standard installation (nothing removed, opengl compositing activated and just some additional applications installed).

Several GHz and several Gigabytes ? See..... it's exactly my point. I dont want such high requirements for a desktop environment. Even OpenGL shouldn't be mandatory.

None of the computers (mostly laptops) i was speaking about have that much and they are few years old, not two decades old.
Even on my main computer (amd quad-core@2.6GHz, 12G of ram), KDE is slow, takes insane amount of ram, and i had to disable the usual crapware for the desktop just to be usable. 6 months ago. i have to admit i dont try every point release. The changelogs are empty, and most packages doesn't have even a line of difference with the previous version...

[Iksf]

I hop between KDE and other desktops pretty regularly, never had any real problems since 4.5 odd

[Thaodan]

True. I had a quick look at the latest KDE commit digest and compared it to last year. KDE have 50 contributors during one year. So you can expect less developers giving a shit about your bugs. They will bitrot.

KDE lost its place to Unity. What a nice death lol.

Never laughed so good.

[ElderSnake]

Unity is slower and buggier to me than KDE still.

HOWEVER, I do only use KDE on Arch Linux, where I just install the base KDE packages and only use what I need, which always seems to work quite well.

Some distros would do well to strip/customize KDE a bit. The entire KDE package can be a bit bloated and you really dont NEED to have all of it. Heck I dont use widgets on the desktop or nepomuk or any of that stuff. But the rest of KDE for me is one of the few remaining sane "traditional" desktops.

[droste]

Several GHz and several Gigabytes ? See..... it's exactly my point.

Dell Inspiron Mini 10 has neither several GHz nor several GiB...

Even OpenGL shouldn't be mandatory.

It isn't! But I like it and that's why I keep it enabled.

Even on my main computer (amd quad-core@2.6GHz, 12G of ram), KDE is slow, takes insane amount of ram, and i had to disable the usual crapware for the desktop just to be usable.

I simply can't believe this, see my previous post. And what is an "insane amount of ram"? How do you measure what is used by the DE?

[orzel]

I simply can't believe this, see my previous post. And what is an "insane amount of ram"? How do you measure what is used by the DE?

Check available free ram between a freshly started session with KDE and with any lightweight DE (last kid: razorqt), using the same applications/widgets.

[droste]

This is not a good way to measure this (buffers/caches, preloaded stuff, shared libraries, etc.). Also simply "more than a lightweight DE" doesn't count as "insane amount of ram" :-P.

[Panix]

I wish this site would do a comprehensive DE comparison. It might be more useful and practical than some of the other benchmark/tests I see on here.

There is so many different and various statements and assertions regarding memory usage and utility of the main DEs, it's difficult to decide which ones are accurate.

From my most recent experience, KDE is a mess. I get constant crashes regardless of distro and often, Iceweasel seems to perform much worse with KDE. I don't like the features and tools of XFCE as much but at least there's way less crashes with XFCE.

It's easy to see why Torvalds would be laughing at what KDE offers with the widget stuff. They seem to have made a lot of changes that makes one roll their eyes and scratch their head.

Still, Gnome 3 does the same. However, I don't recall as many crashes but I only used it briefly. Too many features were annoying or required way too many tweaks. It's counter-productive, imho, if the default settings are so cumbersome and poor that you have to tweak it so much just so you can use it without cursing.