Am I alone?
Here's the thing - I'm now in the habit of doing a whole bunch
of stuff I didn't have to do before, and putting up with a whole
other bunch, and today I realised just how bad it is. I'm a huge
advocate of KDE, as I've said before, but right now I can't (and
don't) suggest it for new-to-Debian users. (FWIW I encourage
them to go with a stable install, and stick with 3.5.9 while they
can.)
I'm starting to wonder if my experiences are really unique, or
if others are getting the same level of pain. Feel free to chip in,
ideally if you don't have *anywhere* near this level of pain, as
I'd dearly love to believe my woes are, somehow, resolvable.
I've talked before about the 5 to 20 second delay in re-sizing konsole
windows *only*, and only when they occupy > 60% of the screen.
This still lingers, and after recent work with VirtualBox sessions, I
can now add that the same problem does *not* apply to comparably
sized konsoles running in a virtual full-sized KDE desktop.
When I log in to KDE now, I have to change the order of sender/subject
in kmail (an outstanding bug that's been with us since KDE 4.0, where
it declines to remember your settings), and then I have to make the
size-column smaller (because kmail always ignores the previous column
sizes, and starts each time with a hugely wide size column, and as
a result, a horizontal scrollbar - another bug of the same vintage).
I then have to sort through *all* my konqueror windows, spread across
6 desktops. I find that I consistently get duplicates of these - be
they file or web konqueror instances - and the duplicates pop up on
whichever desktop is in focus at login. Because I can't be sure if
they are duplicates, or just misplaced windows, I have to send them
back to the desktop I think they belong to - I have VM's on desktop 1,
web dev on desktop 2, mail on 3, and so on. Then I visit each virtual
desktop and cull out the duplicates - not that easy when there are
a dozen or more windows on each. I used to be able to use my G7-G12
keys on my Logitech G15 keyboard as shortcuts for 'send window to
Desktop X', but since KDE 4.0 these keys have not been supported,
with an error about 'qt4 doesn't recognise this key'. So I have to
right-click every window, and send-to-desktop. Slow and painful.
In any case, every time I log in, I'm now looking at about ten
minutes or faffing around before I think (but still can't be sure)
my desktops are how they were when I logged out the day before.
While I'm working, I might go to one of my desktops to look at a
page I know I have open, and find it's simply gone. Alternatively
I'll just want to open up a web page and so I'll F2 / gg: something.
In either case, when I go to launch a new file or web browser window,
I'll often get a half dozen konqueror windows popping up - all things
I had open previously (on different desktops) and that had, sometime
in the previous little while, spontaneously and _totally silently_
just died. I'll then do my little dance again to work out which
desktop all these resurrected windows belong to, and whether any
are duplicates, and _then_ get back to what I was trying to do in the
first place (look at an existing, or launch a new, web browser).
Sometimes I'll have the new window open that I've launched, but
the back-button will be available, and hopefully I notice that,
because it reveals that the new-launch-window has overwritten
a window that I had running before. So I have to remember to look
out for that, and if it's there, I hit 'back', move that konqueror
window to whatever desktop it lives on, and then try *again* to
launch my new web search.
A month or so ago, after having konqueror dying on a web page I
was developing (no JS, just something about the HTML that caused
the process to freeze, requiring ctrl-alt-esc to kill it - another bug
I've reported, with consistent death-inducing .war file, to k.b.o)
I thought I'd get smart and changed the performance setting in
konqueror Settings | Performance | Minimize memory usage to 'never',
so that no konqueror instance could/would interfere with any other.
But this made no difference - one konqueror window dying will still,
somehow, take up to a half dozen other windows with it.
I have pondered using iceweasel exclusively - as I use it already
for gmail and a *very* small handful of sites that don't work
properly on konqueror. However, iceweasel doesn't start automatically
on KDE login. When I do launch it, it forgets the size, position,
and desktop of the two instances. I've also found that it will
sometimes, on launch, simply forget that it had two instances,
with a half dozen tabs on each - and give me a single, empty,
browser window. Not often, of course, but often enough to make
me not want to risk the bulk of my session information (web pages)
that I care about just being entirely lost. I suspect a fair few
people will understand the risk and the pain - if you use web pages
as a virtual kind of 'to do' list - but if you don't, then trust me,
it's really annoying. Conversely, it's something that I've been
comfortable doing since hopping onto KDE a decade ago.
I'm sure someone will suggest starting with a new ~/.kde - and I
think I'm going to go down this path, just on the off-chance. The
problem there is that I've only had this .kde set - a brand spanking
new instance since I had troubles with the 3.x to 4.x upgrade
process, for a couple of months. If I have to re-start from
scratch on my entire .kde-contained settings every few months
then that's even worse - it's a huge amount of effort to go through
and set everything up from scratch, and even then I tend to
miss a few things that bite me a week or two later.
So, please, if you can tell me that I *am* alone, I'll be very happy.
Jedd.
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