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KDE 4.5 - one giant regression.
I installed KDE 4.5.0 on my Mandriva 2010.1 workstation and wound up removing it. KDE 4.5.1 isn't available yet for my distro, I don't want to deal with compiling it (which isn't all that easy; I've done it before...), and - given the state of things at Mandriva, it might not be available for quite awhile if ever. So, I decided to try 4.5.0.
KDE 4.5.0 broke a LOT of things. This new contextual desktop thing is being pushed into action, and it doesn't work. The database backend is virtuoso, and it would intermittently lock up the kernel. So I disabled it.
KDE 4.5.0 permanently lost some of my settings and never found them again. Some trivial things, like losing the toolbar icon for Amarok and the icons on the login screen, but also some more important things like some of my desktop settings.
I began getting kernel paging errors intermittently with 4.5.0. These came from all sorts of places; firefox, VMware Workstation, virtuoso. Whenever I would get such a problem the system would either lock up or shut itself down. After this problem, restarting would be very difficult. The plasma desktop would come up and take up an entire core, and apparently loop forever. Compiz would take another core, and the system would just sit there.
I would reload .kde and .kde4 from backup, then usually KDE 4.5.0 would start...until the next time it had a problem.
These paging errors etc were causing hard drive corruption. I had to reinstall my nvidia driver once, and I also was forced to use a backup of my Windows 7 virtual machine when a page error reported by VMware corrupted the VM and the Windows repair tool then consistently locked up the whole system while trying to fix it.
I had been thinking I might have a hardware problem since these paging errors were coming out of the kernel and I couldn't see how KDE could be responsible. I still don't know how KDE could be responsible, but the problems started when I installed KDE 4.5.0, they tied me in knots for a week, and they vanished as soon as I rolled back to KDE 4.4.3.
This is a very, very disappointing release from KDE. Reportedly 4.5.1 is a bugfix release, and maybe it will work better. I hesitate to try it though even when it becomes available for Mandriva; KDE 4.5.0 really put me through the mill and I want to use the bloody machine, not keep fixing it.
Has anyone here had success using 4.5.0?
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