[PLUG] KDE 4.2 Evaluation - Don't Get Your Hopes Up

[Casey Bralla <MailList@NerdWorld.org>]

Well, I threw caution to the wind and compiled KDE 4.2 on my Gentoo AMD-64 
system last night.  (It takes about 18 hours to compile the whole thing.)

The results were not good, and I'm back to KDE 3.5.10.   Here's what I found:

1.  KDE 4.2 started without sound (maybe a mixer problem, but it worked fine 
in 3.5)
2.  It started in 1600 x 1600 mode, even though my LCD display is only 1600 
x1200.  (The screen would scroll so I could get to all 1600 x 1600 pixels, 
but it did not fit on the screen at one time.)
3.  Changing the display parameters worked fine, except that the corrected 
parameters were forgotten when I restarted KDE.  In other words, KDE 
**ALWAYS** started in 1600 x 1600 mode.  When I started the display setting 
program, however, it would instantly remember the correct settings even 
before I tried t change them.  There is an "apply settings on start-up" 
setting in KDE 3.5 which is not present in 4.2. 
4.  Changing the RandR settings to rotate the screen 90 degrees worked fine, 
but was also forgotten along with the screen resolution when I restarted KDE.
5.  The system crashed repeatedly when I did very simple things, like trying 
to change widgets on the task bar.   I wasn't doing anything 'complicated", I 
was just exploring the task bar and it would crash.


It is possible that the crashes would have been reduced if I had not been 
running "sideways", but I wasn't willing to experiment further, since I've 
grown addicted to having a tall display.

I had hoped that 4.2 was finally going to be the acceptable version, but now 
it looks like 4.2 is really 4.0-rc2 and that 4.3 will be the real 4.0. <sigh>

-- 


Casey Bralla
Chief Nerd in Residence
The NerdWorld Organisation
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