Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

[eggbert]

Hi,

I just can't use either Gnome Shell or Unity, so I am -trying- to make Kubuntu 11.10 work for me. Kind of a frustrated with KDE as well, however... But I am going to give it a try. I have an awful lot of questions though...

First of all, I need some sort of mail notification. It must check pop3 AND gmail. I know there is the gnome mail-notification, but it has become wonky in the last few releases of ubuntu. Has a weird dependancy on the postfix mail server, which is extreme. So I would like to avoid that.

I have tried a bunch of different "plasmoids" or whatever they are, but they either don't work right, or I always get some kind of prompt asking for the KDE wallet password!

Surely there is some kind of mail notification thing for kde that actually works? I found one called kbiff, but it looks ancient, and does not even appear to be in the repo.

Secondly, related to the above question the KDE wallet... Netbeans also opens this when I start it, I have no idea why. I *think* I understand the purpose of the wallet, but why are these apps not able to access it?

printer-applet: How do I get rid of this thing. I do not have a printer, and it sits there completely useless, using up about about 25 MB or ram.

Gtk themes: I seem to get better performance memory usage by NOT using the oxygen theme. Plastik, looks ok, but then Gtk apps look like crap. Is there some way to make Gtk apps look like plastik or the clean looks theme?

Anyway those are my most pressing questions. I may have more once I actually try to start using KDE

[oshunluvr]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

I'm not a my KDE desktop right now so I'll come back later - as far as the kwallet thing, if you don't enter a password and give the app perminate permission to access the wallet, the pop-up doesn't return.

I use Thunderbird email with gMail and I get a pop-up regularly. What email program are you using?

[sps]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

KDE has many more customization options then Gnome!

Open Kontact and configure your email account
Select on the left pane "mail"; Then go: menu / settings / configure notification.
Select Kmail from drop dpwn menu; You will find the options there!
Good luck and welcome to KDE

[eggbert]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

Thanks for the kind replies.

Sorry, I should have mentioned. I am using thunderbird for email. Been using it for years, and do not really want to switch.

I solved my problem with the kwallet. However, I am sad to say I don't think KDE is for me. It looks pretty, but memory usage is err, well, absurd. Also, I have observed that things tend to crash a lot.

Think I will stick with my current gnome 2 distro for as long as I can, and then move to xfce or something similar.

Thanks!

[The Liquidator]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

As stated above, KDE comes with way more functionality than gnome- the latter to me is a bit like watching paint dry. Unfortunately the fundamental problem is that everything comes enabled, so services run whether you need them or not. Desktop effects are also enabled by default.

The beauty of KDE is that any or all these things can very easily be turned off, if you know where to look, making KDE a quite different beast. It shouldn't be crashing all the time.

I can tell you that kubuntu 11.10 performs extremely well (even with desktop effects enabled) on my 5.5 year old Dell inspiron 630m laptop.

First things first, what hardware have you got (CPU/Graphics Card/Ram/hdd)

Secondly - we need to establish what "nice to have" things you want :

- integrated desktop search - Very intensive at first because it has to index all your files
- desktop effects etc.
- you have established already that you want to use thunderbird (as I do) - which will enable you to turn off the akonadi resources.

I would recommend you don't give up until you have done a bit of tweaking.

[eggbert]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help


Well, I did try tweaking it a little. I turned off nepomuk, and disabled some krunner services (I never did figure out how to get rid of the printer-applet)

My specs are:
Intel Core 2 quad core, 6 GB Ram, nvidia GeForce 9500GT.

By crashing all the time I mean that every other logout, I'd get a message from "kcrash" from either policykit, or plasmadesktop. Or I'd be tweaking settings and the control panel would disapear and "kcrash" would pop up. Things just feel a little more unstable that I would like.

Another issue is knotify4, it uses 2% of my cpu all the time no matter what. I read somewhere to switch to the vlc phonon backend, which fixes the cpu use issue, but then sound became all choppy... I had to finally just turn off sound in the system notifications.

Another issue i noticed is that KDE takes *forever* to copy files. I had a lot of files to copy over from my home dir on another partition, so copied them via dolphin, but it went so slow I would have been waiting for hours. I had to cancel it and just do a cp -r from the terminal which completed in a couple minutes. Something is seriously wrong with dolphin file copy. It is just not usuable, unless you are copying a few small files.

My other big problem was memory usage. After a reboot and logging in it would be using about 500 - 600 MB, even with all the nepomuk stuff turned off and running very few desktop effects. Just using the system lightly for a while this would grow to 1 GB . Kwin and Plasmadesktop were the biggest culprits. Not sure, maybe a memory leak or something?

By comparison my current Gnome set up uses about 300 MB on a fresh boot and memory usage stays pretty consistent, even after it's been up for a week at a time.

So all in all, KDE is nice, but just feels so darn buggy. Stability is most important for me, so just don't think it's going to work out.

[realzippy]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

If stability is so important to you, why using brand new 11.10 ?

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

Well, I did try tweaking it a little. I turned off nepomuk, and disabled some krunner services (I never did figure out how to get rid of the printer-applet)

My specs are:
Intel Core 2 quad core, 6 GB Ram, nvidia GeForce 9500GT.

By crashing all the time I mean that every other logout, I'd get a message from "kcrash" from either policykit, or plasmadesktop. Or I'd be tweaking settings and the control panel would disapear and "kcrash" would pop up. Things just feel a little more unstable that I would like.

Another issue is knotify4, it uses 2% of my cpu all the time no matter what. I read somewhere to switch to the vlc phonon backend, which fixes the cpu use issue, but then sound became all choppy... I had to finally just turn off sound in the system notifications.

Another issue i noticed is that KDE takes *forever* to copy files. I had a lot of files to copy over from my home dir on another partition, so copied them via dolphin, but it went so slow I would have been waiting for hours. I had to cancel it and just do a cp -r from the terminal which completed in a couple minutes. Something is seriously wrong with dolphin file copy. It is just not usuable, unless you are copying a few small files.

My other big problem was memory usage. After a reboot and logging in it would be using about 500 - 600 MB, even with all the nepomuk stuff turned off and running very few desktop effects. Just using the system lightly for a while this would grow to 1 GB . Kwin and Plasmadesktop were the biggest culprits. Not sure, maybe a memory leak or something?

By comparison my current Gnome set up uses about 300 MB on a fresh boot and memory usage stays pretty consistent, even after it's been up for a week at a time.

So all in all, KDE is nice, but just feels so darn buggy. Stability is most important for me, so just don't think it's going to work out.

Your system is almost like mine spec wise.

I don't have your stability issues, but I do notice your issue with Dolphin. I, too, move large amounts of data on the SAME partition and its like molasses.

Not sure if its a KDE thing, specifically, because Chakra and Suse do not exhibit this behavior at all. Can't imagine what Kubuntu does to cause this issue, but it is frustrating.

I still think KDE is light-years ahead in technology than Gnome or any other desktops, but this is entirely my option. I know others like Gnome Shell and, still yet, others like Unity.

To each their own, so I hope you find your happy spot with Linux again

All the best!
Joe

[kubicle]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

@eggbert:
I don't think your experience with KDE is the norm, but obviously you should use the DE that works the best for *you*

Well, I did try tweaking it a little. I turned off nepomuk, and disabled some krunner services (I never did figure out how to get rid of the printer-applet)

Probably redundant information for you, but in case someone is searching for an answer, printer-applet is started by /usr/share/autostart/printer-applet.desktop (simplest way to disable autostarting is deleting/moving the file)

By crashing all the time I mean that every other logout, I'd get a message from "kcrash" from either policykit, or plasmadesktop. Or I'd be tweaking settings and the control panel would disapear and "kcrash" would pop up. Things just feel a little more unstable that I would like.

That's odd, basically the only app that ever crashes on my installation is akregator (feed reader for kde)

My other big problem was memory usage. After a reboot and logging in it would be using about 500 - 600 MB, even with all the nepomuk stuff turned off and running very few desktop effects. Just using the system lightly for a while this would grow to 1 GB . Kwin and Plasmadesktop were the biggest culprits. Not sure, maybe a memory leak or something?

On my kubuntu laptop, kde boots up to about 300 MB, and doesn't really increase over time (started apps and normal buffers and disk caches excluded). And kwin never goes over 10MB. Mine is a pretty customized installation, though, and I'd assume kubuntu uses more memory out-of-the-box.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Gnome/Unity refugee needs help

I'm not sure I would call the latest releases of KDE "buggy" but I see how a new user coming from Gnome might think so.

They're often so overwhelmed with the plethora of settings and options that aren't available to the casual Gnome user that it is daunting. Also, let's face it; several basic things just don't work as well out-of-the-box in Kubuntu as they do in Ubuntu. The network manager and audio come to mind right away.

As far as memory use, a 1GB RAM limit is too small for KDE IMO. I don't really need to conserve RAM on my systems and on the one I do; I don't use KDE or Gnome for that matter. I consider KDE and Gnome memory hungry compared to many. On my 8GB desktop which runs 24/7 and I never close down my browser, email, Office, dropbox, nepomuk, Amarok, Skype, Bluetooth - it "idles" around 3GB of RAM used! I also have tmpfs in RAM.

I guess I'm "driving" the RAM equivilent of a GAS HOG