I installed Slackware 13.0 a couple months ago on my laptop. I did a clean install, and so far I haven't noticed any serious problems with KDE4, although I can't find what I'm looking for, usually. I don't use my laptop much though.

I also did a clean install on another system to 13.0 about the same time. X won't start on that system, it can't figure out the hardware I guess. So I've just been using the command line. I don't really need a graphical interface on that system anyway. Right now I'm using the motherboard graphics support, but I will probably install a video card in a PCI-E slot and try X again.

The system that I just upgraded from 12.2 (LUKS encrypted volumes and LVM) to 13.0 tonight has a number of problems. This was an upgrade, not a clean install.

Based on my experience so far on this system, KDE4 does not seem to be ready for prime time. It is buggy, the menu system is more difficult to navigate than KDE3, and there are some apps I just can't find (e.g., Kedit). Overall it seems to have fewer apps than KDE3. Either that or they are well hidden well enough that I can't find them.

My first impression was that KDE4 had clean lines and a modern appearance. I was initially excited and I was prepared to like it. But this KDE makes it difficult. The more I use it, the more it reminds me of Gnome; vast, empty, useless screen space with everything that should be at your fingertips hidden and/or tedious to reach.

The calendar that pops up when you click the digital clock in the lower right hand corner of the screen is broken. B-R-O-K-E-N. There is no way to display January 2010. Today is January 3rd, yet the calendar comes up as December 2010, with day 24 highlighted. Clicking the left arrow to go back a month at a time will not get you to January. You can get to February 2010, but when you click back to try to get to January, you get December 2010 again. Click the forward arrow and you go to January 2011 (as expected). January 2010, however, simply doesn't appear to exist in the calendar.

After searching in vain for the "Administrator Mode" button to enable me to alter and synchronize my system clock, I learned from another thread here that I have to use "kdesu systemsettings" to get authorized to make privileged changes. When I attempted to change the clock settings, KDE4 crashed. I got back in the saddle and tried it again, and it worked the second time without crashing KDE.

There are some other things that simply don't work. Right click the tool bar at the bottom, select Panel Options, then Panel Settings, and nothing happens. Nothing. How exactly are you supposed to turn on the auto hide option? Ah wait, after four attempts to access the Panel Settings, they finally appear. I turn on auto hide, and it works. Bravo. Now why was I unable to access the Panel Settings the first three times I tried?

The desktop folder on my desktop has several icons. A couple of apps I had there from my 12.2 system worked fine. But the Home and System icons did nothing when clicked. I looked at the Permissions tab in the Properties dialogue for the Home folder. Owner "can read and write", Group "forbidden" and Other "forbidden". Yep, that's how I have my home folder set up. But wait, the "Is executable" flag is not set. That's strange, because my home folder has permissions 700. I click the "Advanced" button, and the executable flag is not displayed. Doublecheck my home directory, and yep, it's really 700, so I'm not imaginging things. I click the exec flag on, and then click the "Is executable" flag (why do we need two ways to set it? what if they don't agree?), and now I can click on the home folder, and it opens up. At no time was my directory physically set to anything other than 700.

I tried the same thing with the system folder, but nothing I do makes it work. It won't open. In Properties, User is set to read, write, and exec permissions. Group and Other are set to read and exec. The "Is executable" flag is set. Yet nothing happens when I click on the system folder icon.

I've noticed that every now and then, the tool bar at the bottom of the screen will not pop up right away when you mouse down to the bottom. There'll sometimes be a delay.

Nepomuk and Akonadi both give me noise when starting KDE. Nepomuk always suspends the Strigi file indexer to conserve resources. Akonadi give me an error, but when I try to save the output, the windows disappears before I can do so.

Another thing; nothing I do seems to affect the volume of the sounds that are played when starting KDE or terminating it. I'd love to turn them off altogether, but I can't see how.

This is after just an hour of playing with KDE4 in my normal desktop environment. Maybe things will get better, especially if I ditch KDE4 or use another desktop manager.

Overall KDE 4.2.4 in Slackware 13.0 is not, in a lot of peoples opinions and countless threads, up to scratch, however it should be noted that KDE 4.3.4 in Slackware-current is fast, stable and effective, I am also led to believe that KDE 4.3.1 packaged by vbatts is also very good. Try a quick search and you will find the links that you need.

Slackware 13.0 is excellent and you will see this if you use another desktop environment, either XFCE, KDE 3.5.10 or upgrading to the 4.3 series of KDE. Remember KDE 4.2 is not Slackware and other distributions have had problems with it also.

samac

Might also be worth noting that when upgrading to KDE4 you should remove any old ~/.kde directories.

Agreed, just try the 4.3.1-vbatts packages for 13.0 or upgrade to current. Its a totally different experience IMO.

I upgraded to Slack 13 last week and was very surprised at KDE4. I couldn't find anything either and nearly went back to 3.5 but I stuck with 4 since this is the wave of the future and all.

This was a clean install and my calendar works, as does everything else. Kedit apparently has been removed, Mouse editor is the closest thing left. I compiled and installed Kuickshow, since that was also gone. Right click on the K menu and select classic mode to have the programs there displayed normally.

For the icons that don't work, it may help to recreate them. Since there is no root terminal or file browser, I made a hidden directory in my home and right clicked > create new > link to application and created links to the commands "kdesu konqueror" and "kdesu konsole", then dragged those links to the K menu to create shortcuts. Now I have su mode terminal and file manager in my menu. How they left that out is beyond me.

Those are just a few tips to getting KDE4 useable, but I think your issues are from upgrading. My clean install works great.

Yes, I deleted my .kde directory before I started the upgrade from 12.2 to 13.0, as recommended in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT. I don't have any mixture of KDE3 and KDE4 that I know of.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one experiencing less than stellar results with KDE 4.2.4. Thanks for the info about 4.3.1, I'll look into that.

Thank you for the additional useful tips. I am not sure how to interpret the > and " above. What is >?

Yes, it is interesting that my laptop clean install doesn't have the calendar / clock problem that my upgraded system has. In addition, my laptop clean install did not create a ~/Desktop folder with the default home, system, and trash folder icons (et. al.) like my upgraded system has.

Besides removing your ~/.kde folder before an upgrade, there must be something else that needs to be removed to get a proper KDE4 install.

Yes, my comments are about KDE, not Slackware 13. Slackware 13 is stable and wonderful, as always. As I mentioned, I've been running it for over a month on two of my systems. Both of those were clean installs, however, unlike this system which was an upgrade.

I would like to understand why a clean install of Slackware 13 with KDE 4.2.4 produces a more stable KDE than the change from KDE3 to KDE4 via the Slackware 12.2 to 13.0 upgrade. I'm thinking there must be some other cleanup besides just removing your ~/.kde directory that is needed before an upgrade.

~/.kderc should be removed as well.

samac

I'm not sure what .kderc is used for, but this is what it has in it right now:

I renamed it, exited KDE and restarted X and KDE. KDE4 didn't create a .kderc file.

i have to agree with the first post
i had a three day kde4 nightmare last week after a fresh install of slackware 13. thats the most useless linux distro i ever installed, nothing worked, the whole thing is has absolutely no usability.
thats not pats fault, he can only include whats coming from upstream but i think it was too early to switch to kde4 and its far too early to stop support for kde3 by the kde team.

most simple things dont work, like "one click for starting programs" or "change focus on mouse over". this is configurable in the configuration menu but simply dont work.

then the whole device button system is not implemented. im used to have a button for a device on the desktop to mount or unmount the device very easy and fast by hand. in kde4 nothing similar exists.

the simple possibility to place buttons on the desktop for starting programs not predefined by the developers is not available, or not in an easy way accessible. i didnt found a way to place an icon on the desktop which is starting a shellskript thats starting a .exe file via wine for example.

the usability of programs is completely gone. kile for example. on kde 3 it looked a bit messy ok, but after a while you know where the buttons are. if you need a command, you move up the mouse hit the button an thats it.
now kile looks much more clean, beautiful for cleaning maniacs but not for working. if you need a command you have to move up the mouse have to hit a menu bar, move down the mouse to the button and hit the button, much more work and moving the mouse from here to there.
i have to work with the software and not hit menuebars all day.

the alternative xfce is like a huge step back to the nineties. its simple and fast ok. but the configurability and usability of kde3 is not there. no device icons. the panel doesnt stay at the right upper corner of the screen and suddenly disappeared completely no way to get it back.

after three days of trying to configure this "kista" nightmare i installed slackware 12.2. i have still some issues with the radeonhd driver and the runlevel 3 but the system is working, configurable and stable as im used from slackware.

campher

After installing exaile to use in place of amarok - which repeatedly crashed - I've found the stock kde in 13.0 to be usable and quite stable on my old hardware. Otherwise, openbox and blackbox are my preferred environments. I expected KDE 4.2 to be far too slow for me, so I'm looking forward to the improvements.

Wow, the forum software is overly sensitive and converted them. The &quot were just quotation marks I put around the kdesu commands to seperate them from the sentence. The > were greater than symbols. It was: and in the command section, I put:
kdesu konqueror
and
kdesu konsole

KDE4 defaults to plasma view (or something like that) and doesn't have a Desktop folder. You can right click on the desktop and change the view mode to folder view. Somewhere else, under system settings I think, you can select which folder it displays. You can have a traditional Desktop folder or any other folder you want. I use a ~/desktop directory, for example, because I hate typing the upper case D on the command line.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just an update on my experience with KDE 4. It's still not good. I'm running vbatts 4.3.1 on top of Slackware 13 stable. It is certainly better than the 4.2.4 that was released with Slackware 13, but it is still buggy. I haven't had any crashes since upgrading to 4.3.1, but some things still don't work. The problems are mostly annoyances now, but they still reduce the utility of the desktop.

I need a stable system for my primary desktop (not that 13.0 with KDE 4 is stable), so I won't go to current on this system. Maybe on my laptop I will give it a try.

KDE 4 was not ready to be released. It was a poor decision to include it in 13.0. It taints the distribution.

Not sure if you already know about this, but there are KDE 3.5.10 packages for Slackware 13.

http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub...13.0/packages/

EDIT

That mirror doesn't have a README.
Be sure to read this