Thursday, June 12, 2008

[Computer] Revert back to KDE3 from KDE4.1 beta

After almost two weeks working with KDE 4.1beta, I decided to revert back to KDE3. There are certainly some problems to be expected for the beta release, including occasional crash of some applications. And I can make do with that.

The determinant is that I found myself often cannot use s2disk to save the current session for later resumption. That's very disheartening to me.I usually will not reboot my Debian GNU/Linux for months until I install a new kernel and want to run with it. That saves me a lot time rebooting the computer and bring all the applications up to their last state.

I'd keep using KDE 4.1beta if I reboot every day (if not each time I come to the front of my computer), as many users do.

Friday, June 6, 2008

[Computer] Seven days' experience with KDE4

Following Ana's howto I successfully upgraded to KDE 4.0.80 and have used it for 7 days now.

I was upgrading from Debian unstable. There were some conflicts preventing me from upgrading. I could only go ahead after some trial-and-errors. That is, trying to resolve the conflicts by manually adding package names to apt-get.

Overall, KDE4 is prettier than its predecessors. The best thing I find with KDE4 is the new package okular for viewing PDF and other format files. The review facility enables me to add highlight to some texts and comments. And those reviews can be copied to share with others or to be used on my other computers.

I've come across a few application crashes, and that's understandable as beta software. I'd say KDE 4 is quite usable and stable enough to me.

If you are interested in Okular, you can also just install Okular. That will remove package kdebase-bin-kde3. I'm not sure whether that will pose problems to me or not. So far I haven't rebooted or restarted KDE and everything seems fine.