Best. KDE. Ever. (Never thought I'd ever say that...)

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rayyu
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Best. KDE. Ever. (Never thought I'd ever say that...)

Post#1 by rayyu » 22 Apr 2013, 14:05

Wow. This is the first distribution in a long time that actually shocked me with how good it was. (The last one was Tiny Core :))

Particularly, whoever is responsible for the KDE4 version deserves a huge round of applause because, imho, this is one of the slickest, fastest, and functional KDE implementation I've ever come across. I've tried Chakra, Netrunner, openSUSE, Kubuntu, Salix OS...the list goes on :wall:

Honestly I was about to give up on KDE4--I wanted very much to like it because it had some cool features that weren't necessary, but still cool and potentially useful despite all the backlash from angry users who cursed it :) I wanted to see if they were wrong, but everywhere I went it seemed like they were not--even in Chakra, the most obsessively KDE distribution around, I experienced lots of crashes, sluggishness, and unresponsiveness.

I was really just about to give up on KDE4 and go back to the trusty WMs like Openbox or stable, consistent DEs like XFCE when I decided to give the 64-bit edition of Porteus a spin. KDE in less than 300 mb is noteworthy indeed.

As I've already said...I am blown away. This is fantastic. This is the KDE that I didn't think existed. It's beautiful, responsive, reasonably fast (on my 2 year old hardware :)), and so far nothing has crashed. It lags a bit when I add widgets to the desktop, but no freezes or anything that needed more than a few seconds of waiting.

I've tried so many distributions that are said to take KDE to another level, but I think you guys have done it too. At least for me :) It is VERY polished, more polished than even openSUSE imho.

Haha, if anyone's still reading my ramblings, I'm just curious--what on earth did you guys DO?

I know Porteus, by its very nature, is lighter and faster than other distributions, but how you guys managed to wrestle KDE into this kind of speed and responsiveness on my unimpressive hardware is a heck of an achievement. So far, KDE has been a struggle for me. But for the past few hours I've been able to play around with it without pulling my hair out in frustration from all the freezes and slowness. I'm more of a WM person, but this is pretty freaking cool and I have you guys to thank for that :D

Also, this is the first time I've connected to the wifi without being bothered with KWallet. And the application choice is awesome too...Firefox instead of Konqueror/Rekonq, and not a lot else. If there's one thing I absolutely detest the most about KDE is their seeming obsession with the letter K, it drives me nuts xD (Krita, Kopete, and Konsole are bad enough, but Kwrite, KDevelop, KNetworkmanager...c'mon KDE devs, give it a rest ;))

Haha anyway...thanks a lot to fanthom and everyone working on Porteus. Thanks for making the most unexpectedly kickass KDE distribution I've ever seen in all my weeks of distro-hopping :good:

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fanthom
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Re: Best. KDE. Ever. (Never thought I'd ever say that...)

Post#2 by fanthom » 22 Apr 2013, 19:11

hello rayyu,

i'm kde4 desktop maintainer and i find your words very motivating - thanks a lot :)
there are still few bugs around (reported by hamza) which i fixed already so next release should be even more robust. i''ll also try to make it under 200MB (if not decide to add extra apps) as LXDE desktop and gnome components splits into a separate edition.

btw: future of KDE4 looks really promising with:
- kde frameworks 5 and plasma2 - link
- lightweight version of kde4 - link
- speedy startup - link
- other projects like kscreen or ssdm - link link2

watching them closely and will try to pull to porteus when they reach stability.
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rayyu
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Re: Best. KDE. Ever. (Never thought I'd ever say that...)

Post#3 by rayyu » 23 Apr 2013, 01:14

All of that sounds awesome :O I've always stayed well away from KDE and Gnome because they are big and slow...Porteus turned me into a KDE fan :good:

Well, maybe it'd be more accurate to say I'm a fan of the Porteus version of KDE, because I booted up the Chakra livecd last night and it wasn't as fun XD

I'm curious though...how did you steamline it so much? Aside from all the KDE applications missing, Kwallet is also gone and I've always had such a hard time removing Kwallet. There were a few other things missing (not that I missed them :)) that other distributions have. Is this doable on other distributions?

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Re: Best. KDE. Ever. (Never thought I'd ever say that...)

Post#4 by fanthom » 23 Apr 2013, 19:15

i think other distros includes meta packages like 'kdegraphics' or 'kdemultimedia' which contains much more utilities but makes KDE4 heavier.
in porteus i'm selecting only minimal config with most lightweight components as i realize that speed and desktop responsiveness is very important.
unfortunately you wont find nepomuk/akonadi, etc so for example tooltip preview in dolphin wont work (you'll see only a spinning mouse pointer), but as i said - footprint takes priority and compromises are unavoidable.
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Re: Best. KDE. Ever. (Never thought I'd ever say that...)

Post#5 by surio » 24 Apr 2013, 18:35

I have to chime in here and agree that before Porteus, I absolutely hated KDE for bloat and sluggishness! While on Porteus, I always use KDE over LXDE!

On 32-bit, I love the Razor-Qt desktop too :)

I have openSUSE on KDE installed, and man, it is as slow as a ton of bricks moving in the Saharan desert!

@fanthom, thank you thank you, thank you...... for not including nepomunk!

Case in point, nepomunk crashes every 30 seconds on my machine, and wants to "send a bug report to developer", then freeze the machine while it "collects data fro developer", then freeze again while it decides "collected data is not useful for developer" and asking me manually report the bug on bugs.kde.org....

And this cycle repeats every 30 seconds! You have to see it to believe it!
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