KDE 4.3 - the straw that mended the camels back..

English Soapbox
#1

In a little under four weeks I get my Windows 7 dvd. I made a new machine specifically for games. I was however planning on moving all my work stuff to that machine too, email, office, image editing, - everything, and use my Suse box for a server / backup machine.

But now I’m not so sure.

I have openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.3.1 and fglrx working on the ATi HD4550. Apps like Dolphin, - such an amazing little file manager, Gwenview, - great for organising photos, Grsync, - amazing for fast differential backups, Kontact, - so much fun to use, all these, and so many other apps make it very, very hard to leave Linux. Quite frankly I’m torn. I know there are teething problems, and my one remaining is multiple audio streams (pulseaudio), but I’ve come to the realisation I’d actually be losing a whole lot more than I would be gaining in moving back to Windows for all my day to day stuff.

If I want to fire up a game up Burnout Paradise, - sure, I’ll just boot up the Windows box. But for the five days out of seven when all I need to do is mail out, write docs, organise stuff and listen to a little music, I’m really happy where I am.

I don’t think I would have said this a year ago, the speed, performance and stability, and also the fallback operations, have improved so much. On the occasions when I do get an occasional segfault, plasma just reboots the desktop right back up.

I guess I just wanted to say thankyou, - Suse does things right (no matter how you spell it, caps or no caps!), and KDE with plasma and a composite-enabled desktop make for an environment I’m unwilling to let go of.

Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista, and a fantastic audio / gaming platform, but in terms of gestalt, the sum is greater than the whole. In that respect, Suse has won both my respect and admiration for bringing things together so well.

Kudos and keep up the great work.

#2

Gosh! :open_mouth:
A soapbox thread starting with compliments for both openSUSE and KDE4. I am pleased you’re pleased. I hope the developers see your thanks. :slight_smile:

#3

Kanoe wrote:
> I don’t think I would have said this a year ago, the speed, performance
> and stability, and also the fallback operations, have improved so much.
> On the occasions when I do get an occasional segfault, plasma just
> reboots the desktop right back up.

actually, hundreds of thousands of instances of Linux exhibit exactly
the same performance and stability today as they did one year ago…

they didn’t go through the learning and update pains you did because
they have two very specific circumstances your machine didn’t:

  1. they were not running KDE4 (instead they ran the more stable KDE3,
    Gnome, XFCE, etc etc etc or NO windowing system at all) and

  2. their owner-operator was not grappling with learning a new system,
    and in the process causing system stability problems…

so, as you struggle to decide if you want to spend your money to
play weekend games, just remember two things:

  1. if history is any indicator, Win7 will be relatively stable and
    dependable two or so years after its big release, and

  2. in two years you will just then be having one year of experience in
    that new system, which you already have in Linux!

–
platinum

#4

A little surprised at such a defensive post. I really don’t want to turn this into a contest :wink: I just wanted to say thanks.

There aren’t any struggles, I don’t know why you chose to put money in quotes either. Maybe I’m missing something. My money’s been spent, - I’ve been using Win7’s RC as my games machine for over half a year. It’s rock solid and dependable. I don’t think history is any indicator on this point. 7 has been exceptional. Suse retail boxes (since 9.2) sit on my shelf alongside Windows retail boxes, I use both.

Ofcourse I’m still learning Linux, - who isn’t. We never stop learning. I just wanted to relate my experience and offer my thanks for the improvements made with KDE4.

#5

KDE4.3 is :awesome:
SUSE is :awesome:
Linux is :awesome:

That’s all I can say :wink:

#6

Why on earth don’t you dual boot on the new machine?

Then you can keep working the way you have done successfully, but still boot games. You should be able to install Win 7 into a virtual box to, allowing use of non-3D applications. When a recent MS security update to IE8, broke my Vista box causing reboots rather than a login screen, booting into Linux to surf for info, and eliminate hardware fault as a cause, was invalauble.

Incidentally, to the guy who predicted Win 7 instability like Vista had. Do not count on it! Win 7 is far more widely tested, has not attempted to make huge core changes, not had stuff ripped out & rewritten late in development, and is more like a Vista Second Edition with User Interface & scheduler tweaks; rather than big changes. One of the good reasons to update will be to use modern CPUs in 64bit mode when they have 2GB or more RAM.

#7

Indeed. No truer words have been spoken. The longer time that one spends with an OS that mostly works, the harder it will be to switch OS. IMHO this difficulty to switch will be the case for any OS that one has happily used for a long time. I’ve been using Linux now at home since 1998, and I know it would be incredibly painful for me to move to any other Operating system. Too many new applications to learn, too many different ways to configure the new OS, … etc … I’ve simply invested far too much time to want to change.

The same is mostly true for openSUSE Linux, in that I’ve been with SuSE (and now openSUSE) since 2001, and to switch to another Linux distribution is painful. I do on occasion install Fedora, Sidux, and some other distributions for extended tests, but in each and every case it is somewhat painful, as despite the Linux simularities, there are quirks to openSUSE that I am familiar with. It requires effort to learn the “equivalent” quirks of any new Linux distribution, and there can be some pain with that learning process.

Going to a different OS (other than Linux) is of course even more painful than changing distributions.

While I believe distro hopping (and indeed OS hopping) can be a waste of time, my hat is off to those who have the resilience to hop to different distributions/OS, and thus keep learning so many new things by doing such hopping.

#8

It’s more painful than a camel passing through the eye of a needle. If a camel can do that, so will KDE4 - eventually. :wink:

#9

But it is also fun to see new ideas, also one can become entrenched and over cautious and conservative. After all our own favourite distribution has changed in many ways over the years.

One example comes to mind for new release is the old, “Update” vs “Clean Install”. It is going to be such a time saver, should online live upgrade prove trustworthy see Fate #305634: Debian-like dist-upgrade live system full version upgrade that I really hope that the old advice can change. That the consensus forum opinion will be to backup, use live update and do a clean install only every few years when it becomes convenient.

#10

Aha! At last, someone who thinks openSUSE and KDE are great rather than gives a thumbs down to them! :wink: Recently we’ve had a few attacks on these forums by Ubuntu aficionados who say Ubuntu just works, openSUSE is a horrible distro, etc. etc.

And to sum it up:
openSUSE is the best distro, especially for KDE.
KDE 4.3 is the best DE yet.
and it’s nice to see someone who likes openSUSE so much to post a thumbs up message for it! :slight_smile:

#11

As an ubuntu afficiando, no it doesn’t, look at the farce of 9.10 and mobile broadband, which by the way I am using quite happily under suse 11.2 after defecting (admittedly back) after 2 years on ubuntu. I actually love KDE again (*I loved 10.3, hated 11 with kde 4.??). A netbook with an atom n280 processor and 2gb ram and it runs like a 8gb quad core. Yep I’m glad I’ve come back home.