Horrible review of 16.04 LTS

[Don B. Cilly]

This one. Here and now. Mine.

So, after a few months that my lovely, properly customized Kubuntu 14.04 was leaking steam out of countless holes (the most annoying to me being the marble wallpaper clouds being totally stuck, and not being able to fix them - again, in a Forrest Gump voice), I finally decided to try and upgrade to 16.04.
Upgrading broke half the stuff that was working and fixed none of what was not. Oh well. Happens with upgrades.

So I did a clean install of 16. Pow. Bang. Even less stuff works.
Particularly annoying were two things: marble/globe wallpaper absolutely not available and support for Superkaramba terminally ditched.
So much for Kubuntu being the most customizable distro, the user is in charge, we believe, etc.
This is becoming worse than friggin' Apple.

Now, the globe wallpaper with clouds was the single nicest feature in KDE. What's with ditching that?
But above all, how can you possibly conceive of ditching support for Superkaramba?
All my good stuff is in SuperK. I write it myself, so easy it is.
So much for Kubuntu being the most customizable distro, the user is in charge, we believe, etc.

[claydoh]

superkaramba=KDE3 = 8 years ago, I am guessing KDE dropped it finally after lack of action or development on things.

https://frinring.wordpress.com/2016/...red-by-marble/

fwiw, the marble developers are the ones who create, maintain and update the wallpaper thingy, not at the distro level so for good and bad we are sometimes at the mercy of what they are able to release with their particular set of volunteer programmers.

You'll likley want to stay with KDE 4 for the time being, as you will not get superkaramba or the wallpaper thingy with any distro on Plasma 5 (which is most all of them)

[whatthefunk]

Its not Kubuntu's fault that people stop developing stuff.... Kubuntu didnt ditch those packages, the people who developed them did. Write them an angry letter or something.

[dequire]

superkaramba=KDE3 = 8 years ago, I am guessing KDE dropped it finally after lack of action or development on things.

---

You'll likley want to stay with KDE 4 for the time being, as you will not get superkaramba or the wallpaper thingy with any distro on Plasma 5 (which is most all of them)

Or move to Trinity as a desktop environment, via installing on Ubuntu. Trinity's history*:

The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3. The name Trinity was chosen partly because the word means "three" and TDE was a continuation of KDE 3. TDE now is its own computer desktop environment project.
The TDE project was founded by and is still led by Timothy Pearson. Timothy is an experienced and skilled software developer and was the KDE 3.x coordinator of previous Kubuntu releases.

It has all the KDE 3 apps, including Superkaramba.

Long-term that would be your best course of action. Or as mentioned above, stay on 14.04 w/ KDE 4 as that's supported until 2019, I believe. Or, port it or sponsor someone to do so to Plasma 5?....

[TWPonKubuntu]

dequire, Thanks for the Trinity link, it looks useful for my older systems.

[GreyGeek]

Sorry, Don, about your problems. But... in my experience upgrades rarely turn out right because old config files give newer apps problems, among other things.
There were huge changes between 14.04 and 16.04. The Qt API was upgraded from 4.x to 5.x, which meant that Plasma 4 (KDE4) was dropped and Plasma5 (KDE5) was adopted. The devs had no choice about that. Secondly, Upstart was dropped in favor of Systemd, which was, IMO, and excellent change. However, not all of Upstart/sysVinit has been removed. Since all distros that I know of, except PCLinuxOS and Slackware, have switched to Systemd, learning it would be desirable, regardless of which distro you decide to move to. Those that fail to move to Systemd will eventually be isolated and die on the vine.

So ...
Did you do a CLEAN install of 16.04.1 (not 16.04) from here,
And did you check the iso md5 checksum against the sum posted here?
And did you do a sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade after your completed your install and before you installed anything else?
(Those commands may have to be done more than once over a day or two to make sure all the updates have been downloaded and installed. THOSE updates are what fixes the bugs, holes and other problems. I did a clean install on my 6 year old Acer 7739-6830 it is running at least twice as fast as it did on 14.04.
Continuing ...
Did you check KGear -->Settings-->SystemSettings --> Display and Monitor to make sure your Display Configuration and Compositor were best for your display and driver?

This forum is here to help people solve problems. Perhaps by giving more info than what is just in a rant we may be able to help you get your system running properly.

[Rog131]

Superkaramba & Marble wallpaper

Superkaramba

http://marc.info/?t=144094342800001&r=1&w=2

From: Jeremy Whiting
Date: 2015-08-30 14:02:30

Hey all,

I think we should kill superkaramba (move it to unmaintained) like I
recently did with ktux and amor for the following reasons:

1. It's old mainly targeted KDE 3.x
2. It's unmaintained.
3. Plasma can do most/all of what it could do.
4. It's not been ported to Qt5/kf5.

Any objections?

.
.
.


From: Jeremy Whiting
Date: 2015-08-31 17:06:14

Ok requested it be moved to unmaintained. I'll remove it from the scripts
for 15.12 once it has moved.

Marble world map wallpaper

The latest released Marble 16.08.1 doesn't have the wallpaper enabled. With the git version there is the plasma wallpaper plugin available and it is working:



So the next Marble release (16.12 ? https://community.kde.org/Schedules ) could have the wallpaper plugin.

[dequire]

dequire, Thanks for the Trinity link, it looks useful for my older systems.

Glad to help out!

[Don B. Cilly]

Thanks everyone for the interesting information.
Yes, it was just a rant. I wasn't hoping for any "solutions", just expressing my frustration, but it's obviously a very personal view.

Good news about the marble wallpaper being hopefully reintroduced soon.
That is so addictive... and useful, I could forecast the weather way ahead of any services.

About Superkaramba...

Superkaramba
... 3. Plasma can do most/all of what it could do.

Well, interesting.
Does anyone know how to get something like this as a straight plasma widget (or something)?
That is pretty addictive too, to have most of your system monitored in one place...

Anyway, for the moment, I'm back to 14.04 and happy with that.

[whatthefunk]

Well, interesting.
Does anyone know how to get something like this as a straight plasma widget (or something)?
That is pretty addictive too, to have most of your system monitored in one place...

Anyway, for the moment, I'm back to 14.04 and happy with that.

You could easy do that with Conky. There are hundreds of decent looking conky config files out there. Heres a few: http://techpctricks.com/linux-conky-themes/

Also, there are Plasma widgets for nearly everything there.

[Snowhog]

Conky (and in combination with Lua if desired) is a very powerful system monitor. Take a look at this thread to see what one of our members has done with it.

[Don B. Cilly]

Conky ... is a very powerful system monitor.

Thank you very much.
Conky looks eminently usable.
I'll just have to learn it.
Let's just hope they don't scrap it as soon as I do :·)

[Don B. Cilly]

Actually, there are a number of ways that Conky falls way short of Superkaramba.
See picture. It's the best conky monitor I found so far.
To the right you have my trusted SK monitor.

Now, for one thing, the SK one is resizable, the C one is not (see how resizing just moves the frame over the info.
For another, it's got a frame. If you don't understand the problem there, maybe you should... retake aesthetics 101, or something ;·)
And another, as I asked in the Conky thread, and the answer seems to be no, it doesn't seem to be able to do unfilled graph lines. There again, aesthetics...

Anyway, IMHO, SK seems absolutely superior.
So it's 8 years old. Bash is almost 30, should that be scrapped too?
Who can I petition to have support for SK back? I mean what damage does it do?

[whatthefunk]

The problem is that it is no longer maintained. There is nobody fixing bugs, updating it for newer KDE releases etc. So there is really nobody who you can petition to get it back because it is dead.

[claydoh]

Oh, I think if you take a little google trip down Conky Config lane, you will find all sorts of configs from mild to wild Most people run conky scripts so that they are without titlebars and the like, so what you have is not the usual setup.

Also, have you looked at the various plasma widgets availoable that show
system infos? here are a few random ones I threw into a Desktop Activity:




I have a strong feeling that conky, NOT being tied to any particular desktop environment, has been and will be around a long time