Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 21:24 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There's no "Input Actions". There's "Shortcuts and Gestures" setting. Ok, we open it and what do we see?

https://picasaweb.google.com/101124040654278670402/Bugs#5...

So I'm supposed to check through a list of about 20 applications to check which one has grabbed the shortcut. Very semanticly desktopy.

Oh, and several shortcuts are not listed there. For example, clipboard daemon grabs ctrl-shift-ins shortcut (which I already use extensively in JetBrains IDEA) and it can't be configured anywhere.

Then there's my taskbar: https://picasaweb.google.com/101124040654278670402/Bugs#5... There are several bugs there - window captions are squashed and incorrectly positioned (taskbar works fine for the first several windows and then starts to behave incorrectly).

Then there's an icon telling me that I have pending updates. Except I don't - I update my system using "apt-get dist-upgrade" and KDE doesn't understand it.

Then there's a problem with shortcuts - I can't change their icons. So shortcuts for bash scripts on the taskbar all look the same.

Then there's a bug with taskbar positioning - I put it on the top of the screen and KDE stubbornly places it in the CENTER of the screen during the startup so I have to drag it back to the top each time I reboot my computer.

...and so on and so on....

KDE just isn't polished. And why would it need to be polished? After all, only its developers use it to fiddle with all the semanticy thingies.

My taskbar doesn't work correctly, but I can share it on the network so other users can access it remotely.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 10:41 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

Thanks for replying with some concrete issues - could have done without the additional snarky comments however.

several shortcuts are not listed there. For example, clipboard daemon grabs ctrl-shift-ins shortcut (which I already use extensively in JetBrains IDEA) and it can't be configured anywhere.

That's not a global shortcut, it's just defined locally for any KDE application that can paste. However, you can go to "Standard Keyboard Shortcuts" and disable it there, and it will apply to all KDE applications. I've just tried several non-KDE applications with this setting changed, and none that didn't grab Ctrl+Shift+Ins themselves did anything. So I'm not sure what's going on on your system, could be a bug.

Then there's an icon telling me that I have pending updates. Except I don't - I update my system using "apt-get dist-upgrade" and KDE doesn't understand it.

This is a distro-supplied utility, AFAIK it is not part of KDE. Besides, if you don't want the notification, disable it (for Apper you just right click, configure, set "check for updates" to "never").

So you list some legitimate issues here, but no crashes or anything else that would fall into the "flaky" category. The taskbar one appears somewhat obvious though, and I've seen that here once (although now that I try to reproduce it on 4.7.2 I can't seem to do so, perhaps that's why no developer has fixed it yet...).

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 16:51 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>That's not a global shortcut, it's just defined locally for any KDE application that can paste.

Nope. It's intercepted by clipboard app to show the clipboard ring. I can trigger it from IDEA which is decidedly NOT a KDE application.

>So you list some legitimate issues here, but no crashes or anything else that would fall into the "flaky" category.

Well, with that attitude my software is perfect. After all, it doesn't crash. Oh, and when it crashes it doesn't take out the whole building. So that's OK.

>The taskbar one appears somewhat obvious though, and I've seen that here once (although now that I try to reproduce it on 4.7.2 I can't seem to do so, perhaps that's why no developer has fixed it yet...).

And that proves my point.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 17:45 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

Nope. It's intercepted by clipboard app to show the clipboard ring. I can trigger it from IDEA which is decidedly NOT a KDE application.

What do you mean clipboard ring? If you mean Klipper, just close it, that will determine if that's the source of the problem. It does not behave that way on my system, FWIW.

Well, with that attitude my software is perfect. After all, it doesn't crash. Oh, and when it crashes it doesn't take out the whole building. So that's OK.

I didn't say it's OK that these issues exist and I definitely didn't say it's perfect. You said "flaky and unusable", I took issue with that description.

And that proves my point.

No, it does not.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 12, 2011 18:53 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

What do you mean clipboard ring? If you mean Klipper, just close it, that will determine if that's the source of the problem.

In the interest of balanced criticism here, it should be noted that Klipper was awful in KDE 3 as well. It was one of the first things I removed from the taskbar after having popped up for the tenth time wanting to open on my behalf some URL or other I was merely copying.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 10:57 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

Your taskbar problem is one that I just started running in to. I've been running KDE for several years, but a few weeks ago I started running microsoft communicator via citrix and it appears that something that is happening with this software opening and closing windows is reserving spots on the taskbar that do not get freed up again later. I did not have this problem while running a handful of other apps via citrix over the last year or so.

given that citrix is a closed source app, I haven't tried to generate a bug report on this. If you can trigger the problem with some other app, I would be very interested in finding what it is to have some chance of tracking it down.

If what you are seeing is similar to the problem I am having, there is probably one app you are running that adds itself to the taskbar (either when it starts or when it pops up a new window) and that spot doesn't get freed up when the application/window closes. can you identify what app is triggering this?

as for changing icons. if you right click on the shortcut and go to 'edit launcher', in the window that comes up, click on the icon and it will pop up a new window to let you select a different option (I assume that by shortcut you are taking about an icon on the taskbar here)

with your task bar positioning, my guess is that somehow you are not ever getting the change saved after you reposition it. next time you reboot your system, try logging in, making your changes, and then log out and log back in. I've found that sometimes the desktop changes don't get saved until you actually logout, so if you reboot the machine without going through an official 'logout' it doesn't save some things.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 16:48 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I'm not using anything unusual, apart from IntelliJ IDEA and JIRAClient - both are Java applications and I'm using a stock OpenJDK JVM for them. No other closed-source software. I don't understand what triggers it, but it happens pretty regularly.

>as for changing icons. if you right click on the shortcut and go to 'edit launcher', in the window that comes up, click on the icon and it will pop up a new window to let you select a different option (I assume that by shortcut you are taking about an icon on the taskbar here)

Well, there's no such option for me. I can change icon for the file type, but of course it changes it for _all_ bash scripts.

>with your task bar positioning, my guess is that somehow you are not ever getting the change saved after you reposition it. next time you reboot your system, try logging in, making your changes, and then log out and log back in.

Does not work and it would still be a bug in any case.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 13, 2011 20:56 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> with your task bar positioning, my guess is that somehow you are not ever getting the change saved after you reposition it.

I had a problem like that once, where I added an icon to the panel, but after restarting the desktop, it was gone. IIRC, the cause of the problem turned out to be that while quitting the desktop, some process would crash rather than exit normally; whereas if I had compositing turned off (Alt+Shift+F12) when quitting the desktop, the crash wouldn't happen (and the settings would be saved correctly). So, it's possible that the bug here was actually in the i915 video driver and/or Mesa.

(Incidentally, I've noticed a different bug with the panel: with the panel in pop-up mode and positioned at the bottom of the screen, the area where you need to put the mouse pointer to make the panel pop up will initially be near the top of the screen instead of along the bottom edge; but when you pop up the panel for the first time after starting the desktop session, the activation area moves to its correct location.)