KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software [LWN.net]

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Jan 28, 2009 22:32 UTC (Wed) by eli (guest, #11265)
Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

I found KDE in Fedora 9 unusable. And wound up sticking with Fedora 8.
I tried Fedora 10 when it was released, and ran into a lot of problems
again. And wound up setting up dual-boot between Fedora 8 and Fedora
10... and spending all my time in Fedora 8... even after it has been
end-of-lifed.

I run Fedora not so much for the bleeding edge, as for the Free Software
ideals, and many years of experience with rpm packages, etc. It can be
rather frustrating though, when unusable software (KDE 4.0) prevents
using desirable features (such as disk encryption) in that same release.

Wish I had a good solution.

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KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Jan 28, 2009 23:12 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

KDE 4.2 will be available as an update for Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 shortly. It might fix your issues. Otherwise a long life distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the free rebuilds might work out better for you. Since they are derived from Fedora, they are based on RPM and usually carry the same Free software ideals as well. Disk encryption was backported in RHEL 5.2 and improved in 5.3

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Jan 29, 2009 16:15 UTC (Thu) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link]

I'll be sure to boot into F10 and upgrade when KDE4.2 hits. Hopefully
that experience will be better.

As for RHEL; I hadn't considered that an option since I had mentally
classified it as a "server" distro. Does it work well with current
laptops -- suspend, hibernate, powermanagement, etc?

Thanks for your suggestions!

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Jan 29, 2009 17:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

RHEL tends to only backport fixes for selected hardware so support for suspend resume, power management etc tends to lag behind quite a bit compared to Fedora (having rock solid stability and the very latest software isn't really feasible) but RHEL 5.2 + does have some of the latest desktop software include OO.o 3.x, Firefox 3.x etc.

There are tends of thousands of customers using it on their desktop, workstations etc so it not just a server distribution. As a rule of thumb, if you are not using the very latest hardware, it would likely work just fine.

https://hardware.redhat.com/

I would also recommend using the EPEL add-on repository for extra applications.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL