KDE4: Some General Comments

[Kevin Kofler]

Kelly Miller <lightsolphoenix <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Well, I've been running KDE4 in various forms over the last few months, and I
> have some comments about the current state of the KDE4 entry in Rawhide

Thank you for your feedback!

> (which is likely going to be the one in Fedora 9)...

Right.

> 1)  Um, with the exception of Fedora, every version of KDE4 I've seen now has
> an option for Plasma Theme in Configure Desktop.  Would it be too much work
> to port it here?

As far as I know, this is a KDE 4.1 feature. Some distributions are backporting 
significant parts of Plasma from KDE 4.1. Fedora's Plasma is mostly vanilla 
4.0.3 with only two small 4.1 backports related to the simple (classic) menu.

The plan is to have KDE 4.1 in an update when it's ready (unless it fails 
testing spectacularly, of course), until then our feeling is that the version 
of Plasma which upstream is actually releasing as stable is going to serve most 
of our users better.

> 2)  Interestingly, Fedora's version of KDE4 seems to be the only one where
> the size option of the panels seems to actually be respected; even in KDE's
> own repository, this didn't seem to be the case until recently. That makes me
> very happy, as I'm a stickler for small details like this, but that's a small
> opinion...

Our Plasma is from KDE 4.0.3 (as all of our KDE 4 packages), that's almost the 
latest from the 4.0 branch. So the bugfixes and features which upstream is 
backporting to 4.0.x are all in Fedora 9, only the ones which are 4.1-only 
aren't.

The other distributions will most likely eventually end up with this fix too 
unless the issue you're seeing is a regression in 4.1.

> 3)  XSettings-KDE.  Is there going to be any work on getting this to work
> with KDE4?  I do notice that KDE3 apps listen to it (at least, that's my
> feeling), but GTK apps don't seem to do the same...

KDE doesn't use xsettings at all, the KDE 3 apps are looking directly at the 
configuration settings (we're using shared configuration directories for KDE 3 
and 4), not listening to xsettings-kde.

> 4)  Is there a reason Nepomuk is left out?  Just asking.

Nepomuk should be there! I've worked a lot on getting the dependencies 
packaged. Is anything missing?

> 5)  I'm going to have to suggest, after a couple of months, that it might be
> an idea to switch the window manager to something other than KWin
> temporarily.

Sorry, this is not going to happen. Especially now that KWin supports 
compositing and desktop effects, which means we don't have to ship Compiz by 
default on the KDE Live spin anymore. (Compiz is available as an option though, 
yum install compiz-kde and run "Compiz Switcher".)

> KWin is horribly unstable as-is, and I believe it also leaks memory
> periodically (I've had cases where KWin steals 80+% of the system resources
> and no other program can get at them at all).

Interesting, this is the first time we receive such a complaint. Any bugs 
filed? (The best place is probably upstream bugs.kde.org.) Did you enable 
effects/compositing in systemsettings? (If so, try disabling it, that feature 
isn't fully tested yet.)

> Personally, I stopped using it and adjusted KDE's windows to use Metacity
> instead, just for now.

It's good that this works for you, but Metacity is not really an option as the 
default WM in KDE, it doesn't really integrate.

        Kevin Kofler