Submitted by The first pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is now available. This alpha concentrates on updating to the major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2 Beta 2, GNOME 2.25.2, Xfce 4.6 Beta 2, X.org server 1.5, and kernel 2.6.28 rc8. It is also the first distribution to introduce the major new Tcl/Tk release, 8.6. The alpha is available only in the DVD Free edition with a traditional installer and no proprietary applications; future pre-releases will add the live CD One edition with proprietary drivers. Please help test this first pre-release and report bugs to Mandriva.
I allowed 2009.0 to download on my main machine when the original notification came through, and it installed flawlessly and worked first time. But I didn’t keep it, and eventually reinstalled 2008.1. The reason: KDE 4.x.
KDE 4 actually worked quite well on my older system (desktop). I had also installed it under 2008.1 on my laptop but 2009.0 KDE 4 would not work on this newer machine at all, and I still have no idea why. All I got was a blank screen, and this was bizarre because it was working on that machine under 2008.1.
But what made me uninstall, more than anything else, was that it seemed difficult to find information about how to configure it. There was (and still is, even now) constant intrusion by apps which are transitioning from Qt3 to Qt4. The whole menu was full of apps with double entries (one for KDE3, one for KDE4). In the end I just gave up in exasperation.
So I hope that full implementation and suport for KDE 3 will remain in 2009.1 as KDE 4 has not impressed me except with regard to the trouble it has caused. I still think I will have to start using a different DE with Mandriva in the end, as KDE4 in 2009.0 drove me nuts.
KDE 3 will be dropped from 2009 Spring. Some packages remain so we can build important KDE 3 apps that have not yet been ported to KDE 4, but you will not be able to use a KDE 3 desktop.
Many more apps are now available in KDE 4 / Qt 4 versions, and KDE 4.2 is a substantial improvement on 4.1. We’d really like it for people like to you test the 2009 Spring pre-releases and report problems; it’s the only way the KDE 4 experience will come to meet and exceed the KDE 3 experience in all areas. If people just give up and go to old releases or other desktops, it will never happen.
Well then, I guess it’s time for a new DE. KDE 4 is just not what I am looking for; I prefer KDE 3.
I’m running KDE3 under Mandriva 2009.0 on one of my two main machines, and finally have almost everything running right (problems with sound remain).
I never could manage to configure mouse buttons under KDE4, and wasted lots of time trying to get it to work. In particular, I never could get mouse-buttons-in-root-window to work correctly: ever since OL(V)WM on a SPARC2 fifteen years ago, I’ve expected to be able to get application-menu and windowlist-menu by clicking on the root window. Frankly, KDE3 has had the most friendly/configurable menu setup I’ve encountered anywhere, but I can’t figure out how to get this to work under 2009.0’s KDE4.
And this is a showstopper for me: I do highly detailed graphics work, and usually use virtual 3200×2560 on a physical 1920×1200 monitor, and having to find the “MENU” button somewhere in a corner is painful.
What will be the status of mouse-buttons-in-root-window for 2009.1?
While I must say my first experience with KDE4 on Mandriva 2009 was a bit of a bumpy ride, I am used to it and really like it by now. I do not want to go back to KDE 3.5.
I don’t know if you also did the rather massive update after installing Mandriva 2009. It upgrades KDE 4.1.2 to KDE 1.2.3. The latter is far more polished than the original version.
Also – I think a lot of problems you experienced stem from the fact you installed KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1.2 at the same time. While I must admit I still use some KDE 3.5 applications (Kommander, Kedit etc.) that are not (yet?) ported to KDE4, I only have some needed libraries installed, but no KDE 3.5. I do not have double menu entries and all that stuff.
Yes – KDE4 has still some rough edges, but no showstoppers as far as I concern. And yes, it takes some time to get used to KDE4, but if you use it on a regular day-to-day base this does not take a very long time. I am really looking forward to Mandriva 2009.1 where KDE 4.2 will be used.
While it is possible to jump to another distro that is still using KDE 3.5, I think it is just a matter of time before they will drop KDE3 too. Do not forget a lot of major distro’s (Fedora, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu etc.) are allready jumping on the KDE4 bandwagon (altough I must admit Kubuntu does a lousy job on it). It is just a matter of time KDE 3.5 is something of the past.
I would say – just use KDE4. Help to improve KDE4 by requesting new features and submit bug reports if something goes wrong. If you keep standing on the sideline, just shouting you don’t like it it will never improve the way you want it. Do not forget it is not possible to please everyone, but it is completely impossible to please someone who does not participate and does not say what he/she/it wants.
I don’t know; every time I’ve tried KDE4, it just wasn’t there yet. Buggy, incomplete, a memory hog, and just not very pleasant. While those “big distros” try to gain users by being on the bleeding edge with the latest-and-not-so-greatest software, I’ll stick with the more conservative distros when it comes to KDE. I’ll take KDE3 any day over KDE4, and I don’t see that *ever* changing on a machine with around 256 megs of RAM or so. It’s unsuitable and runs *horrible* on such systems. Maybe sometime in the future KDE4 will be nice on a more modern system, but last time I checked it left a lot to be desired.
KDE 1.2.3? 🙂
At least openSUSE still offers KDE 3.5. While it’s unlikely that KDE 3.5 will still be included on the openSUSE 11.2 DVD, it’s very likely that it will be in the repos.
I’m not sure if KDE 3 will be part of SUSE Linux Enterprise (to be released in January), but if it will, then Novell has the obligation to its customers to maintain KDE 3.5 for another 7 years.
True. There’s so many outdated stuff in there (aRTs for example).
Also true. It’s not that much work to simulate KDE 3 with KDE 4 technologies.
This is especially so with KDE 4.2. However, even with KDE 4.1.3, it is possible to emulate a KDE 3 desktop fairly well. It is a mistake to install both KDE 3 and KDE 4 at the same time, because of confusing duplicate menu entries that doing this causes. If a KDE 3 application does not have a KDE 4 port at this time, most distributions will re-compile the KDE 3 version against KDE 4 libraries and emulated-kde3-compatibility-libraries such as libao2 (which is an audio output library on KDE4 which supports ALSA, aRts, ESD, OSS, Pulse and several others). This means that if one installs KDE3 and KDE4 at the same time, one will have quite a few programs which have a KDE3 version, sometimes a KDE3-but-complied-for-KDE4 version, and sometimes a new version for KDE4 only of the same program on one’s menus.
This is bound to cause confusion if it was not what one was expecting.
The only thing that I found to be essential for a quick transition form KDE3 to KDE4 was to remove the Kickoff menu from the panel and install the Lancelot menu instead.
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
This should be available for installation via the package manager if it is not included by default.
Also recommended, but not essential, is to change the default theme to something like Glassified or Aya.
There was until very recently a bug in the nvidia binary driver for Linux that caused dramatically horrible performance, and instability on many systems. If you have a nvidia graphics card, then in order for KDE 4 to be useable you must install the latest nvidia beta driver. The versions shown on this page:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
are not recent enough, as these versions still contain the bug. As this thread shows:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=8885a0b51b794ca159…
you need a nvidia driver of version 180.06 or later in order to avoid this bug.
Please don’t confuse any poor performance resulting from this bug with performance of KDE4. There is a great deal of dismissing of KDE 4 that has been done because of this nvidia bug.
Also recommended on older systems is to turn off the desktop effects.
After few tweaks like these the KDE 4 experience easily surpasses the KDE 3 experience.
KDE 4 is, after all, the ONLY desktop environment for Linux that makes use of the system’s GPU to accelerate graphics rendering of the desktop. As a consequence, it out-performs any other Linux desktop, even the “lightweight” ones such as fluxbox and openbox, on any system that has even a modest (but working) GPU.
Edited 2008-12-26 00:30 UTC
Nice spin, lemur. MS’s and Apple’s reps would be hard pressed to do better. But to rephrase in clearer terms, KDE4 is the ONLY desktop environment that requires you to beta test proprietary video drivers, or have certain specific video hardware that has very specific feature support in FOSS drivers to be usable.
I’m sure you’ll have a host of links to throw back that have little to do with the topic at hand.
Edited 2008-12-26 00:33 UTC
Excuse me? What is this rant all about?
How on earth is it the fault of KDE development team that the current version nvidia proprietary driver for Linux has a long-standing (apparently over two years) performance bug that drastically affects the Xrender API, which in turn affects only a few Linux desktop applications such as: Firefox 3 (specifically scrolling), OpenOffice and especially KDE4?
http://forum.kde.org/openoffice-plasma-new-nvidia-beta-180-08-t-150…
You most certainly do not need exotic hardware to run KDE 4 and to get the best-perfoming Linux desktop out of it:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/09/on-kde4-performance.html
Well, it turns out that what gives is that certain models of nvidia cards have abysmal Xrender performance using the current nvidia proprietary driver, or any version from the last two years.
Anything else works fine. Intel graphics, ATI, Via, any number of others, and even older nvidia cards … all fine. And nvidia cards using the nvidia proprietary driver of version 180.06 or later … also fine.
It requires only 2D accelerated graphics, which is not at all an “exotic feature”. It should be working almost everywhere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xrender
Xrender was written in 2000.
Apparently, if Xrender doesn’t work properly, you can now opt to use OpenGL for the KDE4 desktop instead.
If you have a nvidia card that suffers this bug in the driver, and you want to run KDE4, and you do not want to run a beta driver … then run the nouveau driver, which works for 2D acceleration but not 3D.
So how many systems still running would there be that do not have a GPU, and hence be unsuitable targets for KDE4? well, there would of course be some, but it can’t be any more than a few percent, if that. The GPU has been a part of PCs now for over 12 years, surely. I’m sure that I once had a 3D-accelerated PC game called Tomb Raider – running under MSDOS.
Edited 2008-12-26 06:10 UTC
I have two comments.
1. Concision is obviously not your forte:
steve@firefly:~$ wc -c lemur2_responses.txt
4555 lemur2_responses.txt
steve@firefly:~$ wc -w lemur2_responses.txt
762 lemur2_responses.txt
2. You seem really worked up over this issue. Perhaps because the Linux graphics platform of choice is Nvidia hardware with Nvidia’s drivers. From the OSNews story above: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13284
I should say that performing like crap on the most popular Linux graphics platform in 2008, as you spend so many words admitting that KDE4 does, is a problem.
Edited 2008-12-26 17:07 UTC
It is indeed a problem because many people, yourself included apparently, have apparently totally got the wrong end of the stick here.
It is not KDE4 that performs horribly, it is rather (and most unfortunately) “the Linux graphics platform of choice, Nvidia hardware with Nvidia’s drivers” that performs horribly.
Benchmarks show that Nvidia hardware with Nvidia’s (current) drivers as a graphics platform on Linux performs slower than software rendering.
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11044
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=793&num=1
(3D performance is fine, it is only the 2D performance of Nvidia’s current binary drivers that suffer this bug).
The problem does not only affect KDE4, it also affects some other modern desktop applications such as Firefox 3 and OpenOffice, because they too utilise the GPU (on systems where one is identified) to speed up rendering operations. Unfortunately, Nvidia hardware with Nvidia’s (current) drivers actually slows it down.
From the first link I gave above:
Fortunately this point is about to become moot. Nvidia will no doubt soon release their current beta drivers, and the performance bug will go away.
When it finally does so, the Linux graphics platform of choice will finally correctly support KDE4, Firefox 3 and OpenOffice, and other programs that utilise the Xrender functionality (as it should have done all along), and this will finally reveal to the majority of Linux users that KDE4 is actually easily the fastest desktop platform available for Linux.
No. I have the right end of the stick. That’s why you have to type, and type, and type so many paragraphs to “prove” me wrong. And I can just point to the obvious truth.
KDE4 jumped on the wrong boat with this particular design decision… despite any spin that you or Aseigo care to put on it after the fact. It was, perhaps, based upon a reasonable guess about the future of commonly available, hardware accelerated Xrender support at the time the decision was made. But it was based upon a *wrong* guess.
Edited 2008-12-27 02:30 UTC
How was the KDE team supposed to know that Nvidia would introduce a severe performance bug into their binary driver (for Linux only) and then refuse to fix it (or even acknowledge it) for over two years?
You seem to think that this functionality wasn’t available when the KDE4 team was making design decisions. You seem to assume that the KDE4 team bet the house on something that was supposed to appear in the future. That is an entirely incorrect assumption on your part. This bug appeared in the nvidia binary driver for Linux only AFTER KDE4 was designed, and was approaching a first release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kde_4#KDE_4.0
That dates the design decisions for KDE 4 at about the late 2005 timeframe. The Nvidia driver bug has been present, for 8000 and 9000 series cards only, for about two years … since late 2006 timeframe. At first it wasn’t that severe, and it seemed to affect only the rendering of anti-aliased fonts.
The bug doesn’t affect nvidia cards earlier than the 8000 series, for example. They work fine with KDE4, and perform far better than the 8000 or 9000 series cards that are affected by the bug.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia#Market_history
So, the KDE4 design wasn’t at all “based upon a reasonable guess about the future of commonly available, hardware accelerated Xrender support at the time the decision was made”. Rather, it was based on what actually worked at the time. Xrender itself has been around since 2000, as I previously pointed out, and at the time KDE4 was designed it worked on all accelerated graphics hardware that was commonly available, representing almost all of the hardware still running.
I think you still have entirely the wrong player down as the one who gummed up the process here.
Edited 2008-12-27 04:25 UTC
Lemur2, it’s not about what they could or could not have known. It is about what *is*. None of the paragraphs you have written change today’s reality.
You keep implying that I claim that the KDE guys made a stupid decision during the KDE4 design process. And maybe they did make some. But I am not claiming that this is one of them. This was simply a *wrong* decision that has had, and continues to have substantial negative consequences for them. It doesn’t matter whether they could have predicted it. It’s like in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane”:
Blanche: If only I weren’t in this wheelchair!
Jane: Butcha are Blanche! Ya are in that wheelchair!
Correct. The only thing that will change the reality is when Nvidia finally release the version of their driver that fixes nvidia’s bug.
I’m not implying that all. I’m not even infering that you thought it.
Here, I’ll quote you directly:
Sorry, but that was dead wrong. Complete bollocks. Hardware accelerated Xrender support required by KDE4 was present at the time the decision was made, and the decision to use it was not at all based on a guess of any kind.
Name one.
Edited 2008-12-27 04:43 UTC
Wow. You seem very touchy on that particular point, which doesn’t seem all that important to me. You seem keen to point fingers and allocate blame. Why does this corner of reality upset you so much?
Well, let’s clear it up, then:
The KDE guys made a decision, based upon whatever info they had at the time, which was probably not stupid, based upon the extant info of the time, but which has turned out to be a wrong one. Consequently, KDE4 is very slow on the majority of Linux desktops out there today, and will continue to be for an unpredictable amount of time which is completely outside the KDE team’s control.
Are we in agreement now? Note that I was careful not to lay any fault on Aaron and the gang.
Almost. The only thing I’d note in addition is this: Nvidia had a similar problem with their drivers (in another area) that made Vista (upon its first release) a complete no-go on systems with Nvidia cards installed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070206-8784.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-vista-capable-lawsuit…
Was all that a wrong “decision” by Microsoft? Or was it perhaps just a bug?
Remember this … FOSS developers are very keen to help nvidia to get a working driver for Linux, but nvidia won’t let them. FOSS developers go so far as to try to write their own drivers (eg. nouveau).
Microsoft, OTOH, insist that Nvidia write the drivers, and then suffer when drivers are buggy.
The KDE4 developers started a design based on what was already working, but nvidia broke their driver in the interim.
Microsoft already had drivers from nvidia that worked with their OS, but they changed their OS driver model and had no working driver at release as a consequence. Vista developers effectively broke the nvidia driver for Windows.
This entire problem is due to the OS authors not having source code of the nvidia drivers. This is the case for both Windows and Linux.
Pretending that KDE4 team somehow made bad decisions (especially in the light of what Vista developers did) is just ludicrous.
So, are you pro-FOSS or just anti-Nvidia? It seems all about blame with you.
Let’s look at FOSS devs’ historical track record in this arena. ATI opened their specs on the 8500 era chipsets. The FOSS devs fumbled the ball. After (many) years of floundering, the driver was still incomplete, even with respect to the ancient old 8500 card, and the story went out that ATI just hadn’t helped enough. Yeah, right.
Fast forward to today. Intel, with a far simpler hardware base than Nvidia, has opened their specs, maintained a public dev site, and have allocated their own employees, including Keith Packard. And after years… the FOSS drivers for their hardware are still shit. (Pardon my French. But there is just no other word.)
And you are saying that if only Nvidia would invite FOSS’s version of the Keystone Cops in to mess around with what is probably the only decent high end graphics driver that Linux has at this time, everything would be peachy?
I think that in the make believe world that you seem to live in the answer to everything is to open source it. Sounds like a cool world. But then again, there is reality.
And reality is simply where KDE4 is having to live right now.
Edited 2008-12-27 07:24 UTC
That is a very good question.
If the source code had been available for study (ie open), it would have been possible to examine the differences between the last version that worked and the newer versions that introduced the regression. From that study, it should have been possible to fix the bug far faster than two years.
However, Nvidia have the perfect right to keep their own source code to themselves. I have no problem with that at all.
The question then becomes … why didn’t nvidia examine their own source code and fix the bug? They kept a bug in their code … for Linux only … for over two years, and wouldn’t agree to fix it or even agree that it existed (despite published benchmarks showing that it did).
That is the primary problem as I see it with closed source from a single supplier. There is no possibility to fix a problem that the vendor won’t fix … or doesn’t want fixed.
I can’t say if this was the case with nvidia or not with this bug … but frankly, the circumstances around its history don’t make a good case at all for nvidia’s good intentions.
This is especially so when you consider that this bug is very good at crippling KDE4 but doesn’t have anywhere near as much impact anywhere else, that it appeared just as KDE4 was due out, and that it doesn’t exist at all in the Windows driver.
Couple all this with the observation that GNOME is slowly but surely succumbing to dependency on Mono, and KDE4 is potentially huge competition … and one can almost feel the beginning of a conspiracy theory starting to germinate here.
Departing from the back and forth about NVidia… Conspiracy theorists see evil plots and schemes lurking in their breakfast cereal. That way lies insanity, and I see no reason to go down that road.
Regarding Mono in Gnome, I disagree that is happening. But it would probably be helpful for me to briefly clarify my position on Mono.
In a way, I think of it a lot like I think of Samba. I wish we didn’t need it but I’m glad we have it. It helps us integrate into this Windows-oriented world, but I prefer that Unix/Linux admins/devs reserve it for when compatibility is needed, and do not use it unnecessarily. Please don’t start new FOSS projects based upon Mono.
I think that as long as we stick to the standardized parts of it, it’s probably safe enough. That said, I’m still generally nervous about playing anywhere *near* MS’s IP playground. Plus, as a user and administrator, I think that Mono apps suck, and badly.
So… I immediately remove Mono from my machines. This keeps me alert to current Mono dependencies in the distos I use and deploy. And there is not much that needs it. F-Spot? Neither my clients nor I care about photos. Does anyone actually *need* F-Spot? Tomboy? I refuse to allocate 30 or 40 MB or ram to a freakin’ sticky note application, and a better, lighter, and faster one comes with gnome. Beagle was beginning to become a problem… until everyone realized how sucky it was and switched to tracker. (I expect other Mono-based apps to fall in the face of superior competition in the future.) That’s about it. And with the demise of Beagle, the list is actually getting *shorter*. Note that none of these are core Gnome apps. Now, if you said that Novell and OpenSuse are slowly but surely becoming Mono dependent, you might have a better case. And careless statements like this one from a recent distrowatch review of OpenSuse 11.1 don’t help:
“I tried out Banshee, GNOME’s default audio player and found it quite usable.”
Banshee is *hardly* Gnome’s default audio player; It’s OpenSuse’s default audio player for *their* Gnome desktop. They also use that horrid start menu of theirs.
So basically:
1. I don’t think that Gnome is becoming dependent upon Mono.
2. I do think that if it did, quality would be more of a concern than IP issues.
3. I’m not the one to talk to about any wild Gnome/Nvidia conspiracy theories.
For my two cents worth … I agree with most of what you wrote here, except for the parallel with Samba.
Samba is an open source implementation of the Server Message Block protocol, which was invented by … IBM.
Samba allows a server machine or machines to provide various networked services to a group of client machines over a LAN, which is a concept pioneered by … Novell Netware. If there are any applicable patents to be had in this arena, they probably belong to Novell and IBM, not Microsoft.
If one wishes to make a server to provide network services to Windows clients, then one must necessarily use the SMB protocol (later renamed to CIFS probably because Microsoft felt too many people were aware that IBM had invented SMB). So Samba has a good “it is necessary for interoperability” defense against legal attack as well.
In the early days of Windows networking, the Microsoft development team actually worked with the Samba team, until one day the co-operation all suddenly stopped.
Now .NET is probably an attempt to supplant Java and replace it with something that is far less cross-platform, but nevertheless .NET (and hence by inheritance Mono) is arguably far more of Microsoft’s “methods and concepts” IP (to borrow a term from SCO) than is Windows networking / Samba.
I am by no means a legal eagle or anything approaching it, but it certainly does seem to me at first glance that Microsoft doesn’t have anywhere near the “anti-open source legal attack surface” in Samba that it possibly has in Mono.
PS: You have an excellent policy to remove Mono from your machines.
Here is how to do it for Ubuntu:
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/11/16/how-to-remove-mono-from-…
This step is un-necessary for KDE desktops, including Kubuntu.
One has to wonder exactly why the default Ubuntu distribution includes 60MB of problematic libraries in the GNOME desktop variant of the distribution all for the sake of a photo manager, a notes applet and a media player.
PPS: Once one has removed Mono, one can always then install Mononono which is a way to bring up an automatic alert if any package tries to re-include Mono via dependencies.
http://tim.thechases.com/mononono/
Edited 2008-12-28 04:59 UTC
That’ll be the day. 😉
OK. So we’re in for some tedious hair splitting.
OK. Most of us know that. Or was it DEC? Or does it really matter? The protocol as we know it today was mostly developed by Microsoft. No matter how much some of us might pedantically quibble about the history. Let’s skip the rest of the pedantic, and rather tedious and irrelevant hair splitting and skip to the end of your post where you actually say something interesting.
Photo mangager and Sticky Note applet. The media player is a Novell thing, as my previous post pedantically and hair-splittingly made clear.
But Banshee aside, and with Beagle essentially in the critical care ward, in the bed next to XFree86, I would guess that F-Spot is Mono’s single attraction. With Tomboy thrown in to show that Mono isn’t a one hit wonder. But despite my disdain for Mono, we probably do want a strong contender in this area. .Net has achieved a certain critical mass; We can’t kill it by ignoring it. And from a compatibility standpoint, I do not want to see us left behind. I just hope that FOSS devs steer clear except where Mono’s use is really indicated.
Are you aware that Microsoft lost an anti-trust type case in the EU over its obscuring of the SMB networking protocols, and was consequently required to give Samba access to its networking protocols specifications?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1064
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9836784-39.html
Uhhh… is there anyone in the world who missed that episode?
At any rate, what you say is not accurate. (Did you read the links you posted?) MS was required to license the documented specs to competitors, but was allowed to charge a reasonable royalty, largely excluding FOSS developers from participation. Andrew Tridgell negotiated with MS, and MS went the extra mile to make it possible for FOSS devs to gain access to the specs via the PFIF.
MS was never under any obligation to give the docs to Samba. Samba came up with a clever way to make the specs available to their own project, and also to certain FOSS projects, at the discretion of the PFIF, and MS went way out of their way to accommodate Andrew’s plan.
This is in fact the single most encouraging bit of behavior that I have seen out of MS in over 10 years, BTW.
Was there some relevance to this point you brought up?
Edited 2008-12-28 16:47 UTC
Never being one to disappoint, here is just such a link, just to please you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_raider
Any point to this link? Well, only that the required level of graphics hardware capability to run KDE 4 was available in popular PCs as long ago as 1996. A pretty good estimate was that 12 years figure, no?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_raider#Reception
It was state-of-the-art in PC graphics … a full 12 years ago.
Edited 2008-12-26 06:21 UTC
Sorry, I wasn’t clear: after having wasted about twenty hours trying to get a KDE4 based 2009.0 install to work properly for me (including two installs, with lots of time waiting for the net-based 4.1.3 upgrade), I re-formatted /usr, installed a no-KDE 2009.0 from scratch, and then installed KDE3 from the net repositories. Now, it works for me.
I still have my question unanswered: when will mouse-button-in-root-windows be configurable? Or will that ever happen in KDE4? I repeat: That is a show-stopper for me.
I’m afraid I have no idea, sorry.
Thanks for the reply, anyway. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Yeah, looks like I’ll probably have to try it that way, too. 😛
Is your graphics card composite-compatible? The card in my desktop PC is not, but when I enable OpenGL-based compositing anyway I get exact the same error. It could be that there’s a bug in composite detection and that it gets enabled even though it should not.
I purged my installation of KDE 3 apps a while ago so no double entries for me. 🙂
Too bad it’s partially Mandriva’s fault that some apps still don’t have KDE4 ports. K3b’s main developer works for Mandriva, but they think that tagging files through Nepomuk is more important than burning DVDs…
Well, Brasero works fine in KDE so I no longer care about K3b.
I am mostly a Gnome user, but Mandriva was actually my convincing trial of KDE4. I used it before over Ubuntu and OpenSuse, but Mandriva did a great job of visual and technical polish, and really helped show (to me) what KDE4 could do.
I’m really looking forward to the next release, and hope it continues to provide the same experience.
I used Mandrake several years ago and it was pretty good, is Mandriva still based off Red Hat?
No, but it’s still pretty good! I would say it is even better than it was a few years ago. Try it, you’ll like it!
why is Mandriva sticking with XServer1.5.3 an not jumping to 1.6 ?
We’d rather get the changes from 1.5 done and stable before deciding whether to go with 1.6.
Edited 2008-12-25 00:55 UTC
Adam
i thought you were leaving Mandriva? did they re-hire you?
but yeah just seems more viable to use X-Server 1.6.0 as that will have all the bug fix’s in that, that didnt make it into 1.5.x series
It was a contract position. But as someone who left a very long time position 6 months ago… I still say “we” sometimes, when referring to my former association. Old habits die hard.
Edited 2008-12-26 00:08 UTC