PDA

View Full Version : I give up on Kubuntu



equal
February 16th, 2006, 05:15 PM
I've been using gnome Ubuntu for months now, and I love it. There is something about the GUI of KDE that I enjoyed though. Also, everytime I read Tux Magazine, I see people talking about how great Kubuntu is over Ubuntu. So, having nothing better to do one weekend, I downloaded the .iso, reformatted one of my computers, and installed Kubuntu from scratch.

What a mistake! The learning curve wasn't so bad, but there were some things that just refused to work properly. If I selected all the files in a folder and right-click > preferences > permissions to set the files to be readble on my iRiver mp3 player, I'd get an error message that, rather than doing somethign useful like explain the problem, would simply say "error Konqueror:" and the path of the file. Worse: it would still change the permissions, but only for the last file of the group selected.

Also, any time I tried to edit a file using Kate or Kwrite, I'd get a string of errors in the konsole. It would still open the file and let me edit it, but I really don't see why I was constantly getting errors that didn't explain themselves, and that didn't actually seem to cause problems.

All in all, there were some nice aspects to KDE. I liked the GUI a lot, and the single-click activation is really nice once you get used to it. But I guess I'm just a Gnome boy at heart.

orev
February 16th, 2006, 05:24 PM
even though i like many things about kde, i grew tired of the bugs in the gui.

i love the robust gnome.

TechSonic
February 16th, 2006, 05:27 PM
Gnome just owns.

Master Shake
February 16th, 2006, 05:31 PM
I for one dislike the heavy KDE emphasis in Tux. They do have some good "generic" articles, but the lack of Gnome being mentioned is a large miscalculation on their part.

Anyway, I ditched Gnome and KDE for XFCE anyway. :D

PatrickMay16
February 16th, 2006, 05:34 PM
Yeah man!
I've been playing with Mandrake on a spare computer recently, and that has KDE. Overall, KDE seems very nice. Konqueror seems to be a lot more flexible than Nautilus.
One thing Nautilus annoys me with is loading folders full of images. It gets stuck for 10-15 seconds getting thumbnails for the images, and all the while that's going on you can't do anything else with it; it's frozen until the thumbnails have finished loading.
If Konqueror doesn't have such a problem with folders full of images, I'd switch over quickly. KDE overall seems nicer than GNOME, but I've been too lazy to install it.

tseliot
February 16th, 2006, 06:22 PM
I find KDE in Fedora Core 4 to be much less buggy than the one in Kubuntu (I'm NOT saying that FC4 is superior or inferior to Ubuntu)

EDIT: I have to be fair: Kubuntu Dapper works great (expecially for being under development) and it's faster than FC4

SuperDiscoMachine V.5.7-3
February 16th, 2006, 06:36 PM
Don't judge KDE by Kubuntu.
Kubuntu has, to put it mildly, a lot of issues.

mips
February 16th, 2006, 09:21 PM
Also, any time I tried to edit a file using Kate or Kwrite, I'd get a string of errors in the konsole. It would still open the file and let me edit it, but I really don't see why I was constantly getting errors that didn't explain themselves, and that didn't actually seem to cause problems.


You get those with a fresh install, I don't know why. They dissapear after a update & upgrade via apt. I've actually upgraded to 3.5.1.

I must admit that Kubutu is not as stable s Gnome but things will improve.

nalmeth
February 16th, 2006, 09:27 PM
KDE is great, looks great, maybe has some funny errors, but if they don't affect performance, then it is just dirt that will be cleaned in time. Gnome is great, works great, maybe a little less bloated and less shiny and as a result is a little faster.

Got the space? Use both! I do, only problem is that desktop icons turn out different, so I use desktop as temporary space, and use gdesklets for gnome, and karamba for kde.

GeneralZod
February 16th, 2006, 09:37 PM
Don't judge KDE by Kubuntu.
Kubuntu has, to put it mildly, a lot of issues.

What he said :)

aysiu
February 16th, 2006, 10:01 PM
Kubuntu's working just fine for me.

The only complaints I have about it are:

1. It defaults to the huge balloon mouseovers when you drag your mouse across the taskbar. I'm not talking about tooltips--I mean big mouseovers. Luckily, this can be turned off.

2. It defaults to ivman not only automounting but also auto-opening anything you plug in. I find this behavior in general annoying, but it's especially annoying if you stick in, say, a CD. The CD will begin playing and the CD will open as folder in Konqueror. I can tweak this, but it's annoying.

3. It now uses System Settings instead of KControl (this can be fixed, too, of course.)

Lord Illidan
February 16th, 2006, 10:20 PM
Kubuntu's working just fine for me.

The only complaints I have about it are:

1. It defaults to the huge balloon mouseovers when you drag your mouse across the taskbar. I'm not talking about tooltips--I mean big mouseovers. Luckily, this can be turned off.

2. It defaults to ivman not only automounting but also auto-opening anything you plug in. I find this behavior in general annoying, but it's especially annoying if you stick in, say, a CD. The CD will begin playing and the CD will open as folder in Konqueror. I can tweak this, but it's annoying.

3. It now uses System Settings instead of KControl (this can be fixed, too, of course.)
That System Settings was a stupid thing to do in Kubuntu, imho. I don't know what the situation is in other distros, but KControl was definitely better.

I defintely hated 2 and 3. I also sometimes had issues with kicker crashing. It would come back again, but I didn't like it.

I also had the issues when opening kate and kwrite..

On the whole, I think I am now becoming a Gnome fanboy.. minimalised interface, less shiny icons and boyo, my desktop looks awesome.

KDE 3.5 upgrade was good, but not that good. Imho, Kubuntu needs a major polish, and more stability.

nalmeth
February 16th, 2006, 10:35 PM
3. It now uses System Settings instead of KControl (this can be fixed, too, of course.)


That screwed me one time, changing settings all across the board against what I already had. What a terrible thing to have right on the panel.

Bandit
February 17th, 2006, 12:20 AM
Everyone knows I am a huge Gnome fan.
I compile apts for it and make themes from time to time.
There are some things I like about KDE and things I dont like about KDE.
KDE does tend to have more bugs from time to time. But it is getting better.
Its not as stable as Gnome yet, but its getting better.
What scares me is that they are finally getting the KDE 3.X series stable and they are already working on the 4.X version series.. I expect 4.0 to be extemely buggy.
I grew up using both KDE and then Gnome. Since version 1.x on both of them.
Guess I always wished they were like combined and the best features of both were shared.
KDE 3.5.1 seems very stable. I think KDE is headed in the right direction. But the 4.0 release may have more buggs then I can stand.

Cheers,
Joey

nickle
February 17th, 2006, 12:28 AM
Suse kde is definately more polished than kubuntu. However, a problem with both is the instability of the much hailed konquerer. It is amazing how often the damn thing crashes. Somehow it tries to do everything, but achieves nothing well. I have fully given up on it as a web browser.
Despite the problems, I find KDE somehow more intuitive than Gnome, maybe is a bit of you can't teach old dogs new tricks...lol

I will wait for Dapper before deciding whether to perhaps finally bite the Gnome bullet

orev
February 17th, 2006, 12:46 AM
KDE was what I really wanted....I thought. At first glance it seems so easy and pretty.

In the end...I think that gnome is more easy to learn, less buggy (therefore easier), and can be made to look quite nice - but maybe not quite as flashy.

I ran KDE from the time that 5.04 was released until about 3 weeks ago. Now, I am sold on gnome. Buggy, crashy, sh*t was the reason I left Windows in the first place, why invite it back in?

I have no problem hacking to make gnome better, more attractive, or whatever - IT WORKS. Kubuntu broke far too often.

It seems, right now though, that KDE may be the best way to compete against the other operating systems (MacOS and Vista), especially with plazma. Hopefully it all can be adopted to a stable, non-buggy, ubuntu based distro. IF NOT, then I hope the gnome keeps advancing!

equal
February 17th, 2006, 01:21 AM
Yeah, as we speak, my desktop is reformatting, with my trusty Ubuntu Breezy cd. The Kubuntu cd will most likely find itself in the trash bin. Someone else here said that they have hope for Kubuntu Dapper, and I'm inclined to agree. Maybe KDE 3.6 or 3.7 will finally be stable enough to justify my attention, but until then, Gnome it is. I even have to admit, the brown/orange theme is so warm and inviting, I love it over the stark blue.

MartinJ
February 17th, 2006, 01:23 AM
In case you're still interested in getting that permissions problem fixed:

Try this link: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=119407

edit: um, you're formatting, I guess not.

rfruth
February 17th, 2006, 01:38 AM
It's gnome all the way for me, I tried KDE and it didn't work out :-#

6190

jdong
February 17th, 2006, 03:52 AM
Don't judge KDE by Kubuntu.
Kubuntu has, to put it mildly, a lot of issues.
I wouldn't say that so strongly. There are certainly more polished KDE distros out there (SUSE for one, if you want to see KDE at its best. MEPIS is also pretty nice, but falls short of the SUSE power :) ), but KUbuntu does work hard on getting better, and has come a long way since Debian to make KDE as simple as Ubuntu's GNOME.


Try what you like. Recently, I've been switching between KDE and GNOME every other week :). I'm a bit ambivalent like that, but happily I think my distro junkiness has been cured by Ubuntu!

Robgould
February 17th, 2006, 04:03 AM
I tried kubuntu and I concur. It has issues. Did not take me long to get back to gnome. I was so worried I actually re-installed ubuntu. I know that it was probably not necesary, but made me feel better.

I have used KDE in fedora and it worked fine.

K.Mandla
February 17th, 2006, 05:06 AM
My gripe with Kubuntu (and KDE, really) stems from the first time I ever tried Linux and couldn't get a darned thing done. Since I was using KDE at the time, the experience left a bit of an aftertaste, even years later. I've installed Kubuntu but couldn't get past the underlying frustrations.

Since it was my first Ubuntu desktop, Gnome was new enough to keep me intrigued. XFCE is slowly gaining ground for me. KDE, while prettier, will probably never win my attention. And I just discovered 3ddesktop, so transparencies don't seem as cool as they did a few weeks ago. ... :mrgreen:

Qrk
February 17th, 2006, 06:35 AM
It doesn't help that Ubuntu has set the standard in Gnome integration. To really judge KDE you should try SuSE; it is to KDE as Ubuntu is to Gnome, IMHO.

I made the same mistake of judging Gnome by Mandrake.

SuperDiscoMachine V.5.7-3
February 17th, 2006, 08:10 AM
I wouldn't say that so strongly. There are certainly more polished KDE distros out there (SUSE for one, if you want to see KDE at its best. MEPIS is also pretty nice, but falls short of the SUSE power :) ), but KUbuntu does work hard on getting better, and has come a long way since Debian to make KDE as simple as Ubuntu's GNOME.

Just wanted to clear this up. My intention was not to bash kubuntu in any way. Having used kubuntu on and off for some time now I know the devs are working hard on it and it is getting better.

But still, kubuntu isn't as mature as ubuntu is, which isn't a kde vs. gnome problem, but imho simply reflects that kubuntu is something like the younger sibling of the ubuntu family.

That's why I think many people who judge kde after only having tried kubuntu get a very false impression about kde, as they are experiencing problems and issues that are kubuntu and not kde specific.

jdong
February 17th, 2006, 12:10 PM
KUbuntu is definitely less mature than Ubuntu, but it's being rapidly developed and improved.

True; currently it's not as easy-to-use as Ubuntu/GNOME, but a good number of people are able to use it fine.

This case might just be a fluke of some sort.

Alpha_toxic
February 17th, 2006, 01:13 PM
Kubuntu works just fine for me.
As a win power user I'm used to not using the default apps (IE, WMP...), so at first I repalced everything in KDE with apps that I have worked with before (amaroK with XMMS, Kaffeine with Totem and VLC, Kopete with GAIM...). But the new ones never worked quite as they should, so recently, after a fresh install, I gave the defaults a try and I'd say THEY ROCK!!! After some tweaking everything works perfektly, no bugs, just pure joy :)

P.S. As a win user I really never thought that I'd be able to install an OS and not have to install 20-30 more apps to replace the default ones. In Kde it just worked "out of the box"