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edd07
December 7th, 2009, 07:38 AM
Hello.

I've read a lot of people on the internet saying Kubuntu isn't a good KDE distro and that OpenSUSE and other distros are way better for this DE. Why is this? I've been using Kubuntu for a while now without problems and am reluctant to leave the Ubuntu way of life. If anyone feels this way, can you tell me what you think Kubuntu's missing?

Thanks

Hallvor
December 7th, 2009, 08:20 AM
Hello.

I've read a lot of people on the internet saying Kubuntu isn't a good KDE distro and that OpenSUSE and other distros are way better for this DE. Why is this? I've been using Kubuntu for a while now without problems and am reluctant to leave the Ubuntu way of life. If anyone feels this way, can you tell me what you think Kubuntu's missing?

Thanks

It misses nothing. It has all the bloat you`ll ever wish for and more, and a lot of new and interesting bugs.

the yawner
December 7th, 2009, 08:21 AM
Kubuntu lacks placebos, or much love? Hopefully either or both are addressed by project Timelord. :)

DeadSuperHero
December 7th, 2009, 08:24 AM
I actually really liked Kubuntu for the fact that it also uses APT.

My big beef with most KDE distros in general right now is that they all use stock artwork and configurations. Using Kubuntu does not feel very different from using Chakra.

In stark contrast, the KDE 3.x series really stood out and felt diverse. Kubuntu, Linspire, and SUSE all felt very different, even though they used KDE.

I kind of want to see more of that across KDE distros. It makes checking them out more fun.

Exodist
December 7th, 2009, 08:30 AM
Kubuntu isnt bad. It just could use more love and little more testing before its released. But all in all, its just a basic KDE setup without any distro customizations commonly found in other KDE distros.

earthpigg
December 7th, 2009, 08:32 AM
Ubuntu's release schedule is centered around GNOME's release schedule.

Ubuntu is April and October. GNOME is March and September. That one month apart thing... Not a coincidence.

That should indicate where Ubuntu's priorities lay. End-user experience using DE's other than GNOME should be expected to reflect that priority.

Miguel
December 7th, 2009, 11:29 AM
I've got one spare partition with Kubuntu 9.10 (64 bit), and it works quite well. I used to have OpenSUSE 11.1 there, but I'm considerably happier with Kubuntu. I fear that some of it is having KDE 4.3 instead of 4.2, or a backported 4.3. I also felt somewhat lost with the admin options in openSUSE. Yeah, yast, I know. Well, that felt slow, bloated and (this is my fault) the package manager coupled to the repository set up system had me banging my head. I say that the latter is my fault because I suspect that's because I'm not used to the rpm way. I also may find Kubuntu better because I share the home partition in both distros, and the kubuntu and ubuntu config files are certainly compatible. Don't know about openSUSE.

I feel that KDE offers quite a good software suite, like the whole Kontact plus Amarok plus digiKam (this one is infinitely better than F-spot). It is a tempting platform. I'll probably give Debian Squeeze a go if they release it with a recent KDE.

However, Kubuntu has a really weak spot: translations. You may have heard this before, but it seems that the mix between launchpad and upstream translations is just awful. I can't believe that spanish (the second language with most native speakers in the world) is not fully translated in KDE. So that you get an Idea, spanish in Kubuntu is supported more or less like basque in ubuntu (about 1 million of native speakers). I haven't even tried basque in kubuntu. It would be funny if basque only had upstream strings and is thus better translated than spanish.

EDIT: I've been browsing for some screenshots of KDE in basque, and I've found the translation stats of KDE. For spanish, 99.99% of the KDE apps are translated (3 strings to go), but that goes down to 94.05% + 2.83% fuzzy in the docs. That is totally against my experience in kubuntu, where more than half of the help is in english.

As a sidenote, 78% of the kde apps are translated into basque, but no stings of the docs have been translated yet. If you want to check the upstream status of your language,
Applications (http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable-kde4/team/eu/)
Documents (http://l10n.kde.org/stats/doc/stable-kde4/team/eu/)

Dragonbite
December 7th, 2009, 03:06 PM
Hello.

I've read a lot of people on the internet saying Kubuntu isn't a good KDE distro and that OpenSUSE and other distros are way better for this DE. Why is this? I've been using Kubuntu for a while now without problems and am reluctant to leave the Ubuntu way of life. If anyone feels this way, can you tell me what you think Kubuntu's missing?

Thanks

They use the little "K" icon for the main menu, not the Kubuntu logo.

The killer for me has been trying to get my hardware working, specifically my Broadcom wireless card. Kubuntu has not been successful yet. I got openSUSE once and am currently using Fedora KDE because it recognized and used my wireless card out-of-the-box!

Skripka
December 7th, 2009, 03:20 PM
It has all the bloat you`ll ever wish for and more, and a lot of new and interesting bugs.

That is a combination of a packager issue, and great distortion. Default Gnome packages weigh as much as KDE's packages.

Kubuntu takes the easy route in using the monolithic packages straight from KDE, rather than splitting the packages so you only have to install what you want. If we had to install every Gtk/Gnome app with Gnome due to monolithic packaging, we'd all gripe about Gnome's "bloat" too. Ubuntu is almost completely Gnome centric. According to Shuttleworth, Kubuntu gets "lots" of backing--which there is little to no real evidence of, from the end-user's perspective.

Xbehave
December 7th, 2009, 03:24 PM
The killer for me has been trying to get my hardware working...
That's a ubuntu issue not a Kubuntu one (i.e it's not really because Kubuntu is a good/bad kde distro)

SUSE is a damn good kde distro because yast has a qt based frontend and it has a few other kde tweaks, however kubuntu doesn't deserve most of the stick it gets. It is as good as fedora's and debian's and probably most other distros.

Dragonbite
December 7th, 2009, 03:30 PM
That's a ubuntu issue not a Kubuntu one (i.e it's not really because Kubuntu is a good/bad kde distro)

SUSE is a damn good kde distro because yast has a qt based frontend and it has a few other kde tweaks, however kubuntu doesn't deserve most of the stick it gets. It is as good as fedora's and debian's and probably most other distros.

Ah, but the kicker is that in Ubuntu I can get it up and running in no time flat! Not so with Kubuntu.

Xbehave
December 7th, 2009, 03:38 PM
Kubuntu takes the easy route in using the monolithic packages straight from KDE, rather than splitting the packages so you only have to install what you want.
What are you talking about, you can install individual apps things like kdetoys kdegames are just metapackages.


Ah, but the kicker is that in Ubuntu I can get it up and running in no time flat! Not so with Kubuntu.
knetworkmanager does suck, have you tried installing nm-applet? (and possibly remove knetworkmanager) as it can run in the kde systray.

RiceMonster
December 7th, 2009, 03:44 PM
I just use wicd with KDE. It works great, but it does feel a little out of place, being GTK

Hallvor
December 7th, 2009, 03:54 PM
Default Gnome packages weigh as much as KDE's packages.


It was not my intention to get into a KDE vs Gnome debate, because it was never the issue. Kubuntu is by default very heavy. So is regular Ubuntu, by the way. Being based on Debian Sid there are a lot of bugs to be fixed. Sid is in a horrible state now, and Ubuntu 9.10 mirrors that.

http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/

Miguel
December 7th, 2009, 03:56 PM
knetworkmanager does suck, have you tried installing nm-applet? (and possibly remove knetworkmanager) as it can run in the kde systray.

Oh, yes! How could I forget? knetworkmanager may suck, but, alas, kpackagekit is useless! I mean, some coder from Redmond surely infiltrated that piece of code into kubuntu.

Remember, kids, if you use kubuntu, fire konsole and use aptitude directly.

Marlonsm
December 7th, 2009, 04:00 PM
I don't know why people say it's bad, I'm using it and I've had no big problems...


Oh, yes! How could I forget? knetworkmanager may suck, but, alas, kpackagekit is useless! I mean, some coder from Redmond surely infiltrated that piece of code into kubuntu.

Remember, kids, if you use kubuntu, fire konsole and use aptitude directly.

Or just get the Ubuntu Software Centre from synaptic, like I did. Kpackagekit is not the best, but it does work...

kbm
December 7th, 2009, 04:17 PM
I'm struggling with the same decision right now, and can mirror many of the opinions shared here.

Having some trouble getting my wireless to work on two of my machines almost drove me insane because of knetwork manager's flakiness. In desperation, I did a fresh ubuntu 9.10 install on one of my machines. It struck me as much more polished than the kubuntu install. So much so that I am thinking about moving my other two over to ubuntu as well. But then I look at the desktop, the level of customization, etc. and wonder.

Apps like digikam (so much better than f-spot) may deal the final blow. I know I could run it on a gnome platform, but there is something to be said for consistency.

I don't know. I've used kubuntu happily for years and have never used an ubuntu install. But this recent experience has me wondering how much pain I'm causing myself, mostly in little annoyances, but pain none the less, by sticking with KDE. I think KDE is just so much better (for me and my ways) though.

Tough decision.

Cam42
December 7th, 2009, 04:33 PM
knetworkmanager is not fun. I'm glad openSUSE (Excellent KDE distro, btw) replaced it with their own stuff.

liamnixon
December 7th, 2009, 05:38 PM
What are you talking about, you can install individual apps things like kdetoys kdegames are just metapackages.

I think he means that the KDE folks put out monolithic packages. I have no evidence that this is true, but the KDE packages in Slackware are like that (huge, that is), and as far as I know, Slackware packages are as vanilla as possible. Like this. (ftp://ftp.oss.cc.gatech.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-13.0/slackware/kde/)

NoaHall
December 7th, 2009, 05:42 PM
If you use Gnome as well, open the network settings, and click the "apply to all users" tickbox on the bottom, then you should be able to connect automatically in KDE.

Xbehave
December 7th, 2009, 05:44 PM
I think he means that the KDE folks put out monolithic packages. I have no evidence that this is true, but the KDE packages in Slackware are like that (huge, that is), and as far as I know, Slackware packages are as vanilla as possible.
but Skripka says

Kubuntu takes the easy route in using the monolithic packages straight from KDE
Which simply isn't true, not the first time I've seen complete BS said about kubuntu and i doubt it will be the last.


kpackagekit is useless!
Personally i love kpackagekit for maintenance but I've always used CLI for installing/removing software because adept used to really suck


I just use wicd with KDE. It works great, but it does feel a little out of place, being GTK
If your going to use GTK you can always use nm-applet and stick with networkmanager, ofc if you prefer WICD that's not ideal, but fedora use nm-applet instead of knetworkmanager because it works better.

TheNessus
December 7th, 2009, 05:45 PM
I dislike KDE (only tried on Ubuntu) for being so not intuitive. there are like 3 different sections to set how the system looks, instead of in one place. It has poor gtk support, and it's freakin' bloated as hell. the menu is very annoying. Poor conky support.

it's pretty, ya, but so what.

Simian Man
December 7th, 2009, 05:46 PM
I think he means that the KDE folks put out monolithic packages. I have no evidence that this is true, but the KDE packages in Slackware are like that (huge, that is), and as far as I know, Slackware packages are as vanilla as possible. Like this. (ftp://ftp.oss.cc.gatech.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-13.0/slackware/kde/)

That's exactly it. KDE packages a lot of stuff together as one. For example to install Kate, you need "kdesdk" which comes with a bunch of other programming tools. To install kgoldrunner, you need the whole "kdegames". Fedora does this too because they use upstream vanilla packages as well.

RiceMonster
December 7th, 2009, 05:48 PM
It has poor gtk support

It's written in Qt, what do expect?

Grrr GNOME has poor Qt support!!!11

Dragonbite
December 7th, 2009, 05:51 PM
If your going to use GTK you can always use nm-applet and stick with networkmanager, ofc if you prefer WICD that's not ideal, but fedora use nm-applet instead of knetworkmanager because it works better.

I didn't know that about Fedora. I am currently using Fedora 12 with KDE, in part because it detected my wireless out-of-the-box, but the network connection has been wonderful compared to past experiences.

Maybe Kubuntu should do something similar?

Xbehave
December 7th, 2009, 05:55 PM
That's exactly it. KDE packages a lot of stuff together as one. For example to install Kate, you need "kdesdk" which comes with a bunch of other programming tools. To install kgoldrunner, you need the whole "kdegames". Fedora does this too because they use upstream vanilla packages as well.
apt disagree with you

sudo apt-get install kgoldrunner
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed
kgoldrunner
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/1,930kB of archives.
After this operation, 5,358kB of additional disk space will be used.
Selecting previously deselected package kgoldrunner.
(Reading database ... 115801 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking kgoldrunner (from .../kgoldrunner_4%3a4.3.4-0ubuntu1~karmic1~ppa1_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Processing triggers for menu ...
Setting up kgoldrunner (4:4.3.4-0ubuntu1~karmic1~ppa1) ...

Processing triggers for menu ...

kdegames is just a metapackage, it's not hard to check things before you post

Package: kdegames
Priority: optional
Section: kde
Installed-Size: 68
Maintainer: Kubuntu Developers <kubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers <debian-qt-kde@lists.debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1
Replaces: kdegames-kde4
Depends: bovo (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), bomber (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kapman (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), katomic (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kbattleship (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kblackbox (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kbounce (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kdiamond (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kgoldrunner (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kiriki (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), killbots (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), ktron (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kjumpingcube (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), klines (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kmahjongg (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kmines (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), knetwalk (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kolf (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kollision (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), konquest (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kpat (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kreversi (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), ksame (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kshisen (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kspaceduel (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), ksudoku (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), ksquares (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), ktuberling (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kfourinline (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), lskat (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kubrick (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kblocks (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kbreakout (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), ksirk (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1), kdesnake (>= 4:4.3.2-0ubuntu1)
Conflicts: kdegames-kde4
Filename: pool/main/k/kdegames/kdegames_4.3.2-0ubuntu1_all.deb
Size: 22232
MD5sum: ebf34d20e13ee173f0793476f31fbbee
SHA1: 907eb701c6e39c5378df520bf705e9914d95271b
SHA256: 6377c326ee62081d23d601d01e00393e9d5ae14ea6a171c447 9fbb8a2459ef63
Description: games from the official KDE release
KDE is produced by an international technology team that creates free and open
source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a
modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office
productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many
categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment,
educational, graphics and software development.
.
This metapackage includes a collection of games provided with the official
release of KDE.
Homepage: http://games.kde.org/
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Origin: Ubuntu
Task: edubuntu-desktop-kde


like i said Skripka's post was pure BS

Xbehave
December 7th, 2009, 05:59 PM
I didn't know that about Fedora. I am currently using Fedora 12 with KDE, in part because it detected my wireless out-of-the-box, but the network connection has been wonderful compared to past experiences.

Maybe Kubuntu should do something similar?
I last used fedora 11, so maybe it's changed i think knetworkmanager my finally work well enough (does fedora 12 have kde4.4), but in the past the reason it worked was because by default they use nm-applet which is the gnome version which is more mature (NetworkManager was developed with nm-applet in mind)

foldingstock
December 7th, 2009, 06:04 PM
knetworkmanager does suck, have you tried installing nm-applet? (and possibly remove knetworkmanager) as it can run in the kde systray.

I second this. I have nm-applet set to autostart on my laptop (running KDE 4.3) and it works amazingly well.

Also, konsole is a bit to bloated for me. I use urxvt (rxvt-unicode package) in its place.

SunnyRabbiera
December 7th, 2009, 06:08 PM
I would say compared to openSUSE 11.2 and Mandriva 2010.0 yes.
Both are featuring highly customized KDE's and both have done a great job bringing a decent KDE4 experience.
I would have to give more props to openSUSE though, KDE4 is very well integrated in 11.2

slakkie
December 7th, 2009, 06:19 PM
I like the stock KDE enviroment Kubuntu offers. If they change the default theme also fine with me, I'll just copy my .kde dir and all is good again.

Simian Man
December 7th, 2009, 06:26 PM
apt disagree with you

<ugly apt output>

like i said Skripka's post was pure BS

I said that's how KDE does its packaging. Debian splits stuff up further when it repackages the KDE code, but that wasn't what I was talking about.

It's a different philosophy. Slackware, Fedora and Arch use unmodified upstream sources whenever possible while Debian (and its spinoffs) change things up quite a bit. This makes some things better like being able to install KDE stuff separately, but it also leads to bugs in many cases.

RiceMonster
December 7th, 2009, 06:33 PM
I said that's how KDE does its packaging. Debian splits stuff up further when it repackages the KDE code, but that wasn't what I was talking about.

It's a different philosophy. Slackware, Fedora and Arch use unmodified upstream sources whenever possible while Debian (and its spinoffs) change things up quite a bit. This makes some things better like being able to install KDE stuff separately, but it also leads to bugs in many cases.

The official Arch KDE packages are split now as well. Other than that, it's hardly changed at all though, so you're still right.

NormanFLinux
December 7th, 2009, 07:25 PM
The only thing I don't like about Kubuntu is the Kpackagekit package manager it ships with. I replaced it with Synaptic and everything works together much better now.

SuperSonic4
December 7th, 2009, 07:33 PM
I would not say it's a bad distro but there are better KDE distros out there. My favourite is Arch (in extra) then Chakra/KDEmod. Mandriva does a good distro too but I've not tried fedora or openSUSE properly

nikhilbhardwaj
December 7th, 2009, 09:05 PM
lets just say that
kubuntu isn't the best kde distro

Marlonsm
December 7th, 2009, 10:02 PM
If you use Gnome as well, open the network settings, and click the "apply to all users" tickbox on the bottom, then you should be able to connect automatically in KDE.

Or just get the gnome network manager in KDE, I didn't try it to know how well it works, but the package is available (image attached).

And yes, Synaptic is way better than kpackagekit, I had to open it to find out the name of that package, I just used kpackagekit for the image to show it's available in KDE.

earthpigg
December 7th, 2009, 11:35 PM
Or just get the gnome network manager in KDE, I didn't try it to know how well it works, but the package is available (image attached).

depending on your version of ubuntu, commenting out the "OnlyShowIn" line (the line lists GNOME and XFCE) of /etc/xdg/autostart/nm-applet.desktop will do it for ya.