Hi,
2008 m. May 16 d., Friday, Felix Homann rašė:
> 1.1 KDevelop (Show stopper for me!)
>
> What's really keeping me from using KDE4 is a result of the package
> maintainer's decision not to let KDE3 and KDE4 be installed completely
> in parallel. One of the side effects is that you can't install KDevelop
> together with KDE4! For me this means I can't use KDE4 at the moment!
> Other packages will surely suffer from the very same decision.
Only very KDE3 desktop specific packages are not installable. kdevelop is not
one of them.
$ dpkg -l kdevelop* | grep ii
ii kdevelop 4:3.5.1-1 An IDE for Unix/X11
ii kdevelop-data 4:3.5.1-1 An IDE for Unix/X11 -
data
> 1.2 Metapackages are often useless (everytime I tried!)
>
> I tried to do a simple 'sudo aptitude -t experimental install kde4'
> several times before. Never, really never, could the pacakge
> dependencies be resolved: At the time of this writing, e.g. kdebase
> (4:4.0.72-1) depends on several packages (>= 4:4.0.72-1). But they are
> not there. Everything but the metapackage itself is still stuck at
> 4:4.0.68+svn794641-1 or so. I had to pick all those packages manually.
Metapackages are hard to keep up to date. However, they will be when stuff
hits testing or soon afterwards. What's is more, neither are binary packages
in sync, unfortunately
> 1.3 Bookmarks
>
> Where are my konqueror bookmarks? Shouldn't they get imported from KDE3?
>
> I'm not sure if this is a problem with the packaging (maybe .kde/ vs.
> .kde4) or an upstream problem.
That's exactly one of the reasons KDE4 is in experimental, many things have
simply not been taken care of just yet.
> 1.4 Menu entries - what's the name of the app?
>
> I tend to know the name of the application I'd like to start. If I like
> to find e.g. Amarok in the "Applications" menu I have to look for "Audio
> Player". Only when I move the mouse pointer over the "Audio Player"
> entry I see, that it's actually Amarok. The same holds for lots of other
> applications.
Search field of the new menu should find you amarok. However, you're right
about display of the entries. It should be configurable, but it is not
(upstream issue).
>
> 1.5 KDE3 vs. KDE4 in general
>
> Although already mentioned above, I don't think the decision not to make
> KDE3 and KDE4 co-installable was right: As long as there is a single
> KDE3 application that's not installable if KDE4 is installed, someone
> might be hindered to use KDE4 at all. See my case with KDevelop. It
> should be easy to switch to KDE4. A missing application might be a
> complete show-stopper.
Out of official KDE3, kdelibs4 is there to stay as some very important bits of
kdebase (KDE3) and probably other not yet ported things. Hence, absolute
majority of third party KDE3 apps should be installable and kdevelop is not
an expection. I don't know why you ran into a problem with it.
If Lenny is released with KDE 4.1 desktop, some apps will still be KDE3 based.
> Furthermore, testing KDE4 is made so very complicated by this decision:
> KDE4 doesn't install easily, and it's even worse to get back to your
> KDE3 environment. In essence, I strongly doubt I'll try again before
> KDE4 gets in by a dist-upgrade.
That's unfortunately true. There are many reasons for this. At this point, you
must be really determined to use KDE 4.1 and ignore its current deficiencies
if you upgrade to it.
> And there's another problem based on KDE3/KDE4 concurrence: Now that
> I've tested KDE4, and saw it's neither stable nor usable for me, how am
> I supposed to switch to KDE4 with good faith when it is supposed to be
> production stable? I can't. I'll really be afraid the day aptitude pulls
> in KDE4.
The version you tested was sort of a mix of KDE 4.1 pre and post Alpha1
snapshots (that's far far from stable release). So it is still too early to
judge how stable KDE 4.1 will be. However, we hope it to be stable. Current
snapshots are pretty stable too expect one thing called plasma, which happens
to be the most noticeable by the users as it governs desktop, panel,
plasmoids etc. and when it crashes, it might bring the whole desktop down
from the user's POV.
> If I would not loose my KDE3 environment, I would gladly switch to KDE4,
> knowing that I've still got KDE3 as a working fallback!
It's too much overhead to maintain both KDE3 and KDE4 desktops. Don't forget
that KDE3 is almost dead upstream, so no upstream bugs is going to be fixed.
KDE developers did not want both complete desktops to be installable on
normal user systems and whatever other distros did to achieve this
co-installability, will simply cause more pain for them to return "to the
proper way" later.
--
Modestas Vainius <modestas@vainius.eu>
Impressions of KDE4 and the Debian packages
