Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Moaning about the problems with software is one thing and it might serve as a warning to people considering that software, but more important is to find solutions to problems and explain them. In fact, while I was working on solving my KDE4 problems I also ended up fixing a long-standing KDE3 issue where the fix was made possible by KDE4. So it’s not all regressions, there is progress! I’d still like to wait a few more minor versions of KDE4 before declaring it a success, but bear in mind that a lot of these problems only exist because of complex settings I had in KDE3. If someone does a clean install of KDE4, or has been largely using the defaults from KDE3, then their initial experience of the new version should be vastly different from the impression I am giving of it. Either way, I hope that the solutions below are helpful to people, just as I am grateful for the people that first documented the solutions that I link to.

I recently updated from KDE3 to KDE4 (because Debian told me to) and despite the great efforts of everyone involved in the writing and packaging of the software, and despite my own extensive research, I still bumped into some issues which made it a jarring change. Fortunately I was spared the disappointment of trying the earlier KDE4 point releases, and I am prepared to accept that they were not intended for general use so I will not criticise anyone for their quality, but it is worth me pointing out the sort of problems which someone might bump into when doing this upgrade, for instance when Squeeze is released and people upgrade from Lenny. I will spoil the surprise now and say that for nearly all the problems there is at least a workaround if not a complete fix, and I will be detailing these workarounds and fixes in my next blog post. This post, however, is just about the fail.