Comments on: KDE 4.2 on Gentoo

By: kev009

kev009 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:40:39 +0000

I’m not sure I track your last argument. An end user should never need to compile their own software. Gentoo, or source packages are clearly for developers, system administrators and masochists only. The relative difficulty of building KDE has a lot to do with just know what is best, like CMake, Strigi, Phonon versions and Qt patches. Not unlike building any software really.

Also, do NOT use Qt 4.5 unless you are prepared to debug if you read my comment again. A lot has changed, whether these are KDE bugs, or Qt bugs has yet to be determined but Qt 4.5 still has a few months yet before release. The one you want is Qt 4.4.9999 from the Qt overlay. This includes the Qt-Copy patches from KDE that distros such as Fedora are using. It is probably safest to rebuild all of KDE after switching Qt out, but I don’t know what the official policy is.

SVN builds can be broken at any time for any number of reasons despite freezes or policy. To make opinions on them doesn’t make any sense, no matter how good Paludis is or it being first to package live ebuilds. I think we need to compare two like things, and my post was based on the official 4.2.0 ebuilds in Portage, so I think any arguments between us have no relevance until you give them a whirl. For what it’s worth, this system is ~amd64 with all the recent goods like GCC 4.3.3, glibc 2.9, kernel 2.6.28.

By: Milan

Milan — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:13:52 +0000

Hi, well our setups are different for sure, it is gentoo after all :) I am just saying I am realy not noob who try to install kde4. No qt-4.5 here, but I will try that too. And that “Show Desktop Plasmoid” is just a workaround, I found kde bug about request for toggle show desktop and it seems it will not be implemented?! I don’t want a plasmoid in my panel so I can set shortcut for something that is a plain WM job to do. I tried too many times kde4 from svn and every time I was disappointed, last time I build it was couple of days ago and I said I will try to switch to stable fork of overlay. And I must say that you are not informed about that “Paludis crap”, kde4 paludis overlay was the FIRST overlay for kde4, portage overlay was just a unsuccessful port, so you waited long time for “real” overlay and than inclusion in portage. It uses special EAPI called kdebuild or something like that and I was amazed when I first saw the overlay, USE dependencies and SETS for kde, months are passed before you could do the same thing with portage. So overlay was amazing and still is. I will just try to not build code from HEAD but from stable branch. And if as you are saying kde needs heavy lifting from distribution and vanilla just doesn’t work then it is not ready, or is it?

By: kev009

kev009 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:51:47 +0000

Also, if you right click on the new “Show Desktop Plasmoid”, it will map to a keyboard setting perfectly. Again, I suspect your arguments are all based on previous problems rather than current fact. Try the real ebuilds with Portage 2.2, not Paludis crap, or let a distro take care of the heavy lifting (Arch Linux, external repos for Fedora, OpenSUSE, kubuntu have 4.2 professionally packaged) and make an informed opinion this time around.

By: kev009

kev009 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:50:31 +0000

Hi Milan,

That is what I am saying, our setups must differ somewhere because my environment is very stable. You say you are running the snapshots. Does that include Qt 4.5? The Qt 4.5 beta I tried broke a lot of things (whether KDE or Qt’s bugs), and the devs said to just wait until they start switching to it. Likewise, Qt-copy contains the official KDE patches (which hopefully wont be necessary in the future since they are making the development more open). It might be worth a spin of the qting-edge overlay and trying the SVN qt-copy build.

I never used genkde4svn (just kde-testing and kde-crazy), perhaps you should switch to the official portage ebuilds. Naturally they will have many more users and testers.

By: Milan

Milan — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:20:46 +0000

Well, after 5 years of gentooing I think I am very experienced with gentoo and there is absolutely no possibility that my system is not consistent. I tried latest kde from svn on two different machines, one with nvidia and the other with ati graphic. The one with the nvidia hardware performs much better but anyway plasma occasionaly just crash. The other machine with ati was much worse, I tried with fglrx and with xorg drivers, without kwin effects but damn thing always crashed, plasma will restart and I can continue to work but sorry, when I see posts like this, “kde4.2 stable and usable” I feel like I have to say something. And I have tried with nouveau drivers which have very good 2d (at least on my nv40), and I not complain about slow effects or slow rendering, now this works fine (I know about problems with binary nvidia/ati drivers). I used genkde4svn overlay, and will try again with stable fork of this overlay but how it looks now we will wait long until this thing will realy be stable. And shortcut key thingie should go into bugs and not wish-list, every WM I tried has these “feature” and kwin doesn’t.
Sorry again for bitching on your blog, it is yours, you can write whatever you want, but someone can read and make a false assumption that kde4.2 is actually stable.

By: kev009

kev009 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:04:14 +0000

Milan,

Myself and others I have talked to have had system uptimes of several weeks without crashing (I’ve had a single kde 4.1 and 4.2 snapshots sessions running for over a month). I use my system VERY heavily. How experienced are you with Gentoo? It is very possible that your system is not consistent, and if you aren’t experienced at building beta/rc software you shouldn’t make generalizations about it. If you were using 4.1.4 or 4.2.0 final and everything was built correctly, it should be just as stable as I’ve seen. If not, its a bug and you should post a backtrace instead of bitching on a blog. The shortcut key for hide desktop is the only valid complaint you made (and should be filed as a wish-list item).

I use the improved alt+tab and expose effect all the time now. The effects run smoothly and improve my productivity. My guess is you are using a low quality video driver. Try the latest Intel, Nvidia, or ATI driver. And don’t blame KDE for bad binary drivers.

By: Milan

Milan — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:45:11 +0000

Stable and functional? With frequent plasma crashes, yeah right… I have latest kde4 and I am really trying to use it but would not call it stable and functional. Very functional to not be able to set shortcut key for toggle show desktop, but instead you have plasmoid that you can click to show desktop?! But we now have functional clock on desktop and all those fluffy effects, who wanted those effects anyway?

By: numerodix

numerodix — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:51:11 +0000

Thanks for reporting, I think I will try this now. Never had any success with kde4* on gentoo in the past, but it’s been a while since I tried. Annoyingly, I run my other box on ubuntu and although kde 4.2 just came out it’ll be months before they bump the version. Don’t really want to use the ppa either cause it’s incomplete.