KDE4 and Upgrade Path

[rbrown3rd]

I am running Hardy 8.04 and KDE: 3.5.10 KDE: 4.1.2 on a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop using an Nvidia graphics card. I have become very happy with my KDE4 installation. It is nice and stable on this laptop. As I understand it the upgrade path for KDE4 and 8.04 is at an end. To stay current with KDE4 it is necessary to upgrade to 8.10. It seems that people are having problems with he upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 and KDE4 so I am a bit nervous about trying it. I also understand that if one upgrades there will be no more access to KDE3.

Will the new OS and desktop run ok on this old laptop? Will there be anymore upgrades to 8.04 and KDE4?

[barbolani]

Re: KDE4 and Upgrade Path

According to the product documentation, your laptop has a "nVidia GeForce 4200 Go", which is old enough that probably you'll be "transitioned" to the open source "nv" driver instead of the "nvidia" provided by nVidia.

This means that you may experience problems with the graphics, but also you'll neither have desktop effects enabled nor 3D acceleration. I have a nVidia 5200 and was able to restore both by installing an older version of the "nvidia" driver, but took me some time and it's not perfect (garbage inside windows the first time they are opened) but otherwise rock solid.

You'll have problems in your network setup if your machine uses a fixed IP, as the provided network manager cannot handle that. Very unlikely, as you're using a laptop.

Since you're happy already with the KDE4 provided in 8.04 (I was not, I keep KDE3.5 in my machine until the upgrade to 8.10) you will feel at home with 8.10. Bear in mind that in the control panel you'll miss some utilities (printer) and find that others don't work properly yet (samba) that probably you were using in KDE 3.5

All of those problems can be fixed, but require that you fiddle with configuration files and the like, so if you're afraid of that just wait for the following release. Hopefully the KDE team will progress quickly and those quirks can be ironed out. Feedback from the next KDE release that is in the works is that is a good improvement and already better than the 4.1 supplied with Kubuntu 8.10, at least in speed, stability and functionality (and I don't understand the point about stability, my KDE 4.1 has not crashed, ever and I managed to crash 3.5 from time to time)

[rbrown3rd]

Re: KDE4 and Upgrade Path

Thanks barbolani for your very thoughtful and thorough response. Since I use the laptop a lot I think I will wait for the next release of KDE4 and 8.10. I have tinkered a lot with this install of KDE4 to get it working the way I want. I really do like the 3d graphics as I feel that they really improve the feedback when using the desktop. I want to stay in the development path with KDE4. I really appreciate you checking on the specs of my computer. I'll monitor developments and move when the time is right for me.