Sunday, July 13, 2014

KDE Likes to Crash

One of the rude bugs of KDE is that it likes to crash when I'm browsing the Internet. Firefox will suddenly freeze for a solid minute, after which Netrunner throws up an error message saying, "The KDE desktop had to be restarted because the graphic environment was reset." That is very annoying, and it's something I never experienced in Xubuntu.

I turned off most desktop effects and will continue paring them down to zero if the bug persists.

Right at the moment, I'm busy hunting for the option that will let me set up keyboard shortcuts. KDE hides this away for an unknown reason. In Xubuntu, I found the option in about a minute. I'm still searching in KDE's wilderness that they call a Settings Manager...

Update  the answer to keyboard shortcuts in KDE is here and, compared to Xubuntu, it's ridiculously complicated. I'm beginning to think that XFCE is much more advanced than KDE. The supposed advantage to KDE is the bells and whistles, but if they cause the desktop applications to freeze at random intervals, then that is not of much use to anyone at all. Reliability is the most important factor in a desktop, bar none. I would rather go with XFCE being 99.9% reliable than with KDE being 99.89% reliable, because that .01% error rate is going to cause a lot of irritation in the long run.

Update # 2 I think I found the answer after about a half hour's Googling. Settings | Shortcuts | Custom Shortcuts actually allows entering in a simple command such as /sbin/shutdown -P now, which after doing a sudo chmod u+s /sbin/shutdown works like a charm. I suppose, in retrospect, the shortcut manager was rather obvious, but I don't find Netrunner's organization of settings obvious at all. What precisely is the difference between the categories "Hardware" and "System"? Actually, nothing. Hardware is the system, and the system is the hardware. Advanced | Other just seems strange. I rather like Windows' way of listing everything when one selects the traditional view of Control Panel. Sure, it's a long list, but it is organized alphabetically, and once one has looked it over a couple times, one can find things quickly. I really don't like the categories in Netrunner's System Settings, because they are unintuitive and not helpful. Xubuntu's settings could use some tweaking too, but they are light-years ahead of Netrunner in terms of ease-of-use. Whoever designed Xubuntu's settings understands. He just understands.

I'll continue using KDE. Perhaps it is unfair to hold it to the same reliability standard as Windows 7. Microsoft, after all, has legions of full-time programmers and testers. I really like Netrunner overall, at least when my browser isn't freezing up on me.

However, next time I'm in the market for a new desktop, I think I'll pass on buggy KDE and go with tried-and-true XFCE. I like a desktop most of all that just works.

No comments:

techlorebyigor is my personal journal for ideas & opinions