Introduction

• Add your feedback like this w/o the bold, and then use the @SIG@ at the end of your line, look at the first post for reference

• All serious issues should still be submitted as bug!

• Please nest a reply when you are responding on another reaction. Otherwise it will grow in a mess.... Thank you.

• We do not usually respond to these comments, there are too many, but they do go directly into the developers e-mail and every one is read

• 8.10 is intended as an intrepid upgrade. If you find KDE 4 still lacks features that you need please continue to use 8.04 with KDE 3 which is supported for another year.

• I loved it, thank you all, -- jr 2008-10-29 16:33:23

• Unfortunately Intrepid is totally broken for me. I just upgraded a pretty much vanilla 8.04 installation, and ran into a bazillion of issues, ranging from a totally messed up xorg.conf to Dragon not opening stuff from Dolphin. And that is without trying to migrate KDE3 apps or the really serious stuff such as Bluetooth not working. IMO Intrepid has the worst quality of all Kubuntu releases so far. I know that there were lots of transitions, so thanks for all the hard work nevertheless. -- q-launchpad-az82-de 2008-10-31 16:43:24

• Thank you kubuntu devs! I upgraded from kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Remix, and I encountered some problems: At some point during upgrade, X started to act weird - mouse cursor was still moving, but clicking on buttons didn't work. Also the upgrader crashed right at the end, and X wouldn't start anymore. I had to dpkg-reconfigure X manually. I had lots of packages from universe, multiverse, and kubuntu-members-kde4 PPA, so this might have caused some of the issues.

• Thanks for this new release! In my opinion it's a good idea to warn users of the pitfalls a kde4 install might have. I myself have encountered a lot of them (some extremely annoying) for instance volume keys on keyboard don't work anymore, dolphin doesn't play stuff dragged from the folder view desktop plasmoid, kontact keeps on crashing on startup etc. but ok. Other than that I really like the new version there's some stuff I'll need to work out but given the huge jump from kde3 to kde4 great job (seriously though in the context it might not look like it I do think you did a great job!) Thank you and I'm looking forward to Jaunty when these issues will hopefully have been resolved -- ANDREA54

• I've had big difficulties getting the upgrade started on my system running with Danish as system language. Seems I'm affected by bug #107779 and that I have to change system language to English to get upgrade running. -- Henrik Vinther

• Unfortunately the Live-CD falls to but, it crashes directly after the GRUB-menu. I am using a Thinkpad R50e. @SIG@

• I really wish I hadn't bothered installing this release. It was a complete bitch to get installed and has so many things not working it's ridiculous.
  • I tried to install it over an existing system, and that left me with a completely un-usable system. So I tried a clean install, wiping / /usr and /var, leaving all my data directories and /usr/local as they were. And the installer crashed, taking out the GRUB bootloader configuration with it, so that even when I restored from my backups, it was impossible to boot the system. After many attempts, I found out that it was trying to create directories in /usr/local and rather than acting sensibly, it was just crashing when it found them already there. Eventually managed to get an install that would boot by telling the installer to ignore existing partitions, then I had to mess about afterwards getting everything working, as well as having to reinstall all of the stuff I originally had (probably still more to do yet.) So that was three days to do an install that should have taken a few hours at most. And now it's running, what's it like? Well on the plus side, it boots wonderfully fast and even KDE4 starts up much faster than it originally did. But apart from that...
  • The replacement for Adept Manager (just called Adept) is a totally useless pile of rubbish. Search for something (apache, for example) and you won't see a SINGLE package whose name contains the string "apache", instead you get presented with a load of totally unconnected packages. And trying to work out how the silly little buttons that are supposed to filter what's shown is virtually impossible.
    • X now takes no notice of what's in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So if like me you have an unusual mouse, for example, you'll have to spend a long time Googling to find out just how to actually get it working. xgamma no longer has any effect on the display, so instead of a sensible display, I'm currently looking at a ridiculously bright one and can't fix it.

      I could go on, but I've got more things to get configured back the way they used to be. Unless you really HAVE to, give this release a miss @SIG@

• KDE 4 rocks, it's a lot more usable than what I expected from my previous tests and all the warnings. Though there is a major problem: the new Xorg!!! There is no way to configure it!!! Nothing in systemsettings! And the xorg.conf is now ignored!!! (Quoting xorg.conf: "Note that some configuration settings that could be done previously in this file, now are automatically configured by the server and settings here are ignored.") And the man page refered in xorg.conf has not been update for the new server!!! Moreover, my screen now horribly blinks!!! Shame on Xorg developpers: Autoconfiguration sucks!!! -- Adrien Cordonnier
• KDE 4 is a nice try, unfortunately, nothing more.
• * Upgrade process: the usual stuff of breakage, using update-manager updates packages list, complains about debsig-verify, exits. So better the safe route called apt-get dist-upgrade after manually editing source.list, which is useful as simply replacing hardy by intrepid won't work due to some external repositories. There were lots of overwrite conflicts when upgrading KDE4 relative to the previous KDE4 packages for hardy; all of those were fixed by retrying (and thus reordering the order of the packages to install). It is about time that dpkg simply puts updates with overwrite conflicts on hold until after the package containing the file to be overwritten has been updated. Or just move it to the end of the queue and try again as long as at least one package has been installed/upgraded successfully.
• * Graphics: nvidia made the usual problems, even though I've already been using the ubuntu kernel since hardy. Guessing the right nvidia driver version (here: -177) from text mode and installing it worked. However, there keep being graphical glitches, with icons in the tray not properly being rendered. With compiz enabled, there's the additional issue that new popups (e.g. from menus) contain, when they appear, garbage (like leftovers from previously rendered images) for a second until the popup is rendered correctly. This is annoying.
• * KDE4 itself: there are lots of usuability issues:
• * * the b0rked German translation
• * * the calender applet, pardon, witchet, pardon, plasmoid: the popoup it creates is not a window anymore, so it cannot be moved around. Also, any click will make it disappear, so I cannot enter anything into any program without the popup that I want to look at already gone. There is also no way to select a font size - it will expand waaay into the task bar if its height is increased.
• * * the weather plasmoid is a bad joke; instead of letting the user select his location, he has to enter some mystic code labelled postal code that isn't a postal code at all. Anything that is not the expected format will cause some wierd overseas place being taken instead. Additionally, the overly cute graphics is unusable to be put into the task bar as it is simply too big; it is only readable on the desktop (where I don't want to have it)
• * * the window list only uses one row, even if it is more than sufficiently high for several ones.
• * * the system tray has a shiney border around it that keeps the embedded icons to be aligned with the border of the screen, thus effectively making them the fraction of their effective size.
• * * it is impossible to drag icons from the start menu to the task bar. They have to be dragged to the desktop first, and then they have to be dragged by using the handle, not by clicking into the icon, to drag them to the task bar.
• * * when saving history from konsole, I used to select a file from the menu, change its name, then save. Now just clicking on the file name will not only select the file, it will also overwrite it without further questions. THANK YOU FOR KILLING MY PRECIOUS LOG FILES! Now I have to carefully drag the file to "nowhere" to get only the filename into the edit box.
• * * the icons are named differently for KDE4, which means if anything else than the ... nice... oxygen theme is selected, many icons will just be a fallback image. In particular, the "delete" button on plasmoids on the desktop will look like an edit symbol, and clicking it will delete the respective file without further questions. Nice...
• * * konqueror sometimes crashes when text is entered into the ahhhhsomebar and backspace is entered. There must be an additional condition, though, but it happened several times.
• * * adding a button to any konqueror toolbar will switch off all toolbars except main and url and reset them to "icons with text under them".
• * * it seems impossible to make the URL bar extend to all space available when put right to the main bar without making icons that only appear for certain file types not being hid

• * * konqueror now renders www.thenoobcomic.com properly - but now it doesn't load GoogleMail's chat window anymore. That at least used to kinda work.

• * * it is impossible to select the "default" browser identification after it has been changed as the OK button is greyed out. And, btw, the list of predefined browser IDs could get an update as well.
• * * nothing happens when I insert a movie DVD, nor is there any configuration for it. D'uh!
• * * systemsettings ... is... well... you might get used to it, if it would at least display all available settings. Which it doesn't do.
• * * plasma keeps my CPU from idling - around 7% on average.

• .... I want my usability back! -- -- kubuntu-rk 2008-11-03 23:42:10

* Nice try. Kubuntu 8.10 looks pretty but nothing more. Do not disregard your work at all, but I think you have very limited resources. Kubuntu 8.10 is totally unusable. Even the list of known bugs is bigger than that of improvements. It has not been resolved almost no one of the known bugs from the Beta and RC. Anyway I will follow you closely in the hope that something will change in the future.

* I have installed Intrepid on a separate partition since I didn't trust it enough. I am glad I did so, since the x-server is crashing quite often. This shouldn't be a labeled as release, neither should KDE. It still has beta quality, even though it is impressive and also very fast. There are a lot of issues which prevent me from customising. I would prefer to have everything with small icons and small texts. In some apps (e.g. adept) and the menue this is not possible. It also looks ugly since there is too much spacing around (was ok in KDE 3.5). Setting small icons in the Folder containment on the Desktop makes the filenames unreadable. Switching back to the classic icon set from KDE 3.5 does not really work, many icons missing or false. There is no way to hide the taskbar. BTW: I can provide an logfile of the Xserver crashing, to whom can I send it? Knetworkmanager allways logs into the wireless network first, instead of prefering the cable based one. This was different in last Kubuntu. Anyway there should be a way to choose the priorities of different connections and connection types -- -- [[mark-wege]