I’ve been using Kubuntu Jaunty since its release, and quite a bit before that as well (during the beta phase). Generally speaking, I can’t do without it. I use it as my primary operating system for both work and leisure, and I’ve upgraded virtually all of my staff’s laptops to use it as well. For our intents and purposes, it does its job. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a failure, especially when benchmarked against its own lofty goals it set for itself.
Kubuntu is the KDE version of the famed Ubuntu distro. Having been absorbed under the same umbrella body watching over all Ubuntu derivatives, one would assume that the same values pitched for Ubuntu would apply for Kubuntu as well. “Just works” has always been a key target of Ubuntu and its lot. Sadly, in my opinion, it falls far short of achieving that. And no, this has got very little to do with KDE (version 4 or whatever) or the fact that we need to install proprietary codecs ourselves.
Some background on the hardware we run on: The majority of installations here in my company are on Compaq Presario V-series and Dell Inspiron laptops. They’re all running some variant of either Intel Core 2 Duo or Dual Core CPUs. All of them have at least 2GB of 667MHz RAM. Graphics are provided by either Intel 945 or 965 chipsets. Pretty standard stuff with no esoteric hardware. We only use the 64-bit releases in all our installations.
Detailed steps on the steps we take to setup Kubuntu Jaunty is documented here.
Installation from the Kubuntu Jaunty CD is pretty much stock. We have moved to ext4 for all our file system needs. We do not use Kubuntu’s default filesystem layout and instead do a static multi-partition setup (read the detailed steps for more information).
The first impression I got post-installation was that it was slow when desktop effects are turned on. After some trivial googling, we find that Jaunty’s issues with Intel graphics chipsets are well-documented. The Jaunty Intel Graphics Performance Guide Howto documents how to get over this, albeit in a pretty non-standard way. The recommended 2.6.30 kernel to be installed isn’t available from any ready Jaunty backport PPA repo, so that was downloaded separately and installed using dpkg -i. An additional experimental PPA has to be added to take advantage of recent X improvements. The default acceleration method enabled EXA is practically useless for us if we want to turn on desktop efects. This necessitates a switch to the newer (and less stable) UXA. Fortunately, this switch has worked well for us, for the most part.
Even then, some niggling issues persists. KDE’s Plasma would crash every now and then. And when it doesn’t crash, some other weird issues would crop up, such as all text on my panels disappearing after about 12 hours of uptime. Fortunately, restarting plasma-desktop is trivial so this is just a minor irritant. Still, one wonders how would a user who does not know how to restart Plasma would take this.
After our initial install, I encountered several power management issues. Shutting down was a 50-50 affair. Half the time, it would just hang at a text prompt without actually shutting down. Logging out of KDE also often resulted in the KDM prompt failing to show up. This happened almost all the time. Suspending the laptop was another 50-50 gamble. Sometimes, I’d get my running session back, others I’d be booted out back into the KDM prompt (ironically, KDM didn’t fail in those moments). All these were fixed after we upgraded to kernel 2.6.30 and switched to the experimental X PPA repo.
Switching to the Kubuntu backports repo and upgrading to the 4.3 release candidates brought further improvements. The mystery of disappearing text on the panels resolved itself. The 4.3 betas were a tad too unstable so I was the only one subjecting myself to the guinea pig experience. After 4.3 hit RC status, however, I immediately upgraded my staff’s laptops as it brought real improvements to the overall experience. KDE’s performance in general improved as well. My desktop cube switching was noticeably faster, for example. However, Strigi failed to work since upgrading to 4.3 and I haven’t been able to get it working since. For us, it’s not that important as KDE still lacks a Strigi client friendly enough for general use. KRunner does a much better job of showing search results as of 4.3, but I still find it cumbersome to scan through when search results are large.
Right now, I’m happy enough with the state of my laptop, with the exception of one irritating (perceived) memory leak where my X process would eventually take up to 3GB of virtual memory after a day or so of uptime. I have just 3GB of RAM on my machine and 2GB of swap space, so when this happens and I have other applications such as NetBeans (500-600MB of virtual memory) running, my laptop is reduced to a thrashing brick pretty quickly. This doesn’t happen to all our laptops though so I’m not sure what’s wrong just yet.
At the end of the day though, I wouldn’t call Kubuntu Jaunty a particularly successfully release. It took a pretty significant effort to fine-tune the setup to its current state and I don’t find that to be particularly associated to “just works”. I’m going to try out Karmic as soon as it hits beta. Hopefully, we can avoid jumping through hoops to get it setup properly this time.
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I had a pretty good laugh reading this. It’s as though you had been looking over my shoulder the last few months. I’ve been going through the exact same issues and resolutions. I finally broke down yesterday and tried out daily build 20090717 64-bit. I was amazed at how smooth and solid everything was right from the install to getting my hands dirty in apps. Particularly amazed since a daily build from one week earlier would even launch the install routine.
If you have a spare machine kicking around it might be worth your while to take Karmic for a quick spin.
Kubuntu Jaunty is pretty awful. I had all the same experiences and more. Flash videos gave me problems with desktop effects turned on. Third party applications such as Matlab and Crossover Office failed to update the menu properly. Suspend didn’t work.
So I’m back to Ubuntu now. I dislike gnome but I need something that works.
i totally agree with you. been switching back to kubuntu from time to time to check the progress, and i think it is still just a good idea (since the big 4.0 change). i am using it on one of my computers but it is much slower (graphic) performance then on other boxes. hope new releases will make it “just work”, but i see people good at gnome are also preparing some nice new stuff for the next release.
very nice informative article, thanks!
I’ve found that installing the standard Ubuntu and then Installing KDE usually provides a much more stable and reliable system.
Kubuntu is 1000 times better than Debian 5 with KDE 4.2 tho.
Try xubuntu. Find a pleasing theme. Get accustomed to blazing speed, fewer crashes, no wtf daemons running (nepomuk, evolution server, etc). Prepare for lightning quick Thunar file mananger and almost instant jpg thumbnails. No X gone mad. The only memory leak problem I seem to have is with firefox and flash. Don’t look back.
I have Kubuntu9.04 installed and been using it for 2-3months and it still is not in my top 3 KDE distros.
I last tried Kubuntu around 7.04 to see which distro to install for my folks after testing a few distros I settled on Mandriva and PCLinuxOS.
I want to like it but they just enough damage that it is annoying compared to Mandriva 2009, OpenSuse and some others.
I will give it a show in 18 months again.
But right now, I dont recommend.
I must be doing it wrong. I haven’t had near the frequency of problems you are describing. However none of the machines in my possession have intel graphics.
You are right. Kubuntu is not up to the mark (as most KDE releases from Ubuntu family). Jaunty fails especially on motherboards with Intel graphics boards. I also have strange problem that Kubuntu 64bit freezes on my Asus P43 (P5Q) mobo, it freeze suddenly, the mouse moves but nothing clicks, not even the alt+ctrl+F1. The system was so unreliable that I can’t do any work. I moved to Fedora 11 KDE 64bit, though I have the freeze problem but not very frequent. Fedora 11 seems much faster and responsive than Kubuntu. Moreover I can’t understand why Firefox 3.5 is still named Shiretoko in K/Ubuntu. Why don’t the add the right version in the official repos. I love KDE but Kubuntu makes me hate it.
Jaunty has been a bit of a disappointment. However, upgrading to Karmic (although not final) is a step in the right direction. I have found Karmic to be very stable and quicker than Jaunty.
Just wanted to reinforce the thought expressed already in other posts
@allen: Unfortunately, I still love KDE too much to switch desktop environments. For all its own shortcomings, KDE’s still a pretty compelling package for me. Sad that Kubuntu seems to have exacerbated the problem.
@tom: you must be doing something right then
but yes, I’ve had much better results with an aunt’s PC with an embedded NVidia graphics chip running Jaunty
@sid: the Shiretoko issue affects all of Ubuntu derivatives. Not sure why either.
@Dave, @KenP: yeah, gonna try out Karmic pretty soon. Let’s see how things go.
You’re just spreading FUD for M$. There is nothing wrong anywhere, w/ anything Linux or FOSS related. Anyone criticizing Linux or FOSS is working secretly for M$….even if criticism helps improve Linux & FOSS.
Seriously, thanks for the honest assessment of yet another messy *buntu release. The crap they’ve put out sometimes is just astonishing to me.
Well, I haven’t had nearly as many problems with Kubuntu, although I’m use the 64 bit version, KDE 4.3 RC2, and I have nvidia graphic card on AMD. I have to admit that it uses up more RAM than I would like, but for the most part it runs pretty smoothly, only Kontact has a chronic crashing problem.
Well…
From time to time I try Kubuntu with some hope something has changed. Unfortunately every time once again I get disappointed. I really don’t know why Kubuntu seems to lag behind other KDE (4) based distro’s, but it does. When you take a look at distro’s like Mandriva, OpenSUSE etc. you can see a disto with KDE working flawlessly. The integration with Gnome based apps in a KDE environment is also very well done.
While Ubuntu is a great starters distro, the same cannot be said about Kubuntu. If people going to judge KDE4 on their Kubuntu experience I can understand KDE4 has gotten some bad comment. If you look at named other distro’s you can see KDE4 is far more capable (and in my opinion has a better artwork) than you would imagine using Kubuntu. It is really a shame, because KDE4 gets some really undeserved criticism just because the flaky implementation in Kubuntu. You can really see Canonical is firmly concentrated around Gnome and KDE is just an aftertought….
Too Bad…..
@John: definitely agree on that. Unfortunately, I rely on my distro to have ready packages for popular commercial software such as Oracle XE and to the best of my knowledge, I can only get that with either Red Hat or Debian derivatives (would love to be proved wrong). And the last time I was playing around with Fedora, getting all the proprietary shit installed was more of a hassle (multiple repos that don’t work w each other etc) than *ubuntu.
@Darryl : Nvidia graphics doesn’t have much of a problem with KDE4 and Kubuntu Jaunty. But still I feel Jaunty is sluggish on my Nvidia based chipset laptop. Jaunty is useless on Intel graphics cards. There are fixes in the forums but those fixes didn’t totally fix my problem. Upgrade to KDE backports and installing KDE 4.3, fixed some problems but created others, of course the packages are still in developemnt.
I think things (Intel graphics card problem) will be better with Karmic, though I seriously doubt if Canonical will ever release a really good KDE implemenatation.
@John
You are right Canonical concentrating on GNOME. This same situation also exists for Ubuntu’s parent distro Debian. (many Ubuntu devs are also Debian devs)
It is frustrating that they seem to relegate KDE to a ‘second class’ status. The KDE 4 situation in Debian in my opinion is a mess. Kubuntu seems to be following suit.
This post is exactly like what I have been facing since upgrading to Jaunty. Initial few days were really a havoc. I did a clean install to take advantage of ext4 system but since then I was regretting for few weeks till I found those tips in ubuntuforums and kubuntuforums. Now I’m a lot happier than those initial few days. As a big fan of KDE, how much I wish canonical give a gud status to Kubuntu. With better support from canonical Kubuntu can become the leading KDE distro.
I love how he says “And no, this has got very little to do with KDE…” then mentions problems with:
- “KDE’s Plasma”
- Shutting down, logging out of KDE
- KDM Prompt
- KRunner (A KDE App)
..I would beg to differ..
Kubuntu jaunty is shit. When it comes to ubuntu, use the lts or whatever release is newer that is generally stable, or go for pclinuxos or mepis. Seriously, why go for the sh!tty version if it works badly?
@Business101:
Plasma’s disappearing text – solved by upgrading to 4.3 so yes, probably a problem with KDE
Shutting down – solved by a kernel upgrade
logging out of KDE – solved by a kernel / X upgrade
suspend issues – solved by a kernel / X upgrade
KRunner – usability issue, but the lack of a full-fledged Strigi client is already well known and it’s a “coming later” feature.
So, one issue out of the others was identified to be a KDE specific problem. Am I justified?
I agree that the intel performance regression (on some chipsets a truly abysmal one, as you say yourself) is a real problem and the new Intel driver should just have been kept out of the distro with new hardware support backported into the old driver (a matter of copying pci IDs). Having said that, the problems were CLEARLY stated in the release notes. You should simply not have upgraded, especially not in a corporate environment.
Yep, Kubuntu is terrible – not only is it affected by the intel chipset problem, it was also released with a known showstopper bug being the wireless plasma widget
Ubuntu 9.04 on the other hand generally was quite brilliant – if canonical wants to make out kubuntu is an officially supported distro then they should officially spend some time making it an equally good option as ubuntu.
Mandriva 2009.1 is IMO currently the best implementation of KDE4. I switched recently from opensuse 11.1 (which is a good KDE distro no doubt about it) to Mandriva and I was very surprised. KDE4 runs faster than gnome and KDE3 – go Mandriva! No kidding. Also KDE4 is far more beautiful, customizable and easy to customize than gnome.
Opensuse would take a long time browsing samba shares…up to 30 seconds to switch folders, Mandriva 1 or 2 seconds. Kubuntu from memory didn’t even have samba configured out of the box – had to go and figure out the packages to get to make it work.
I hope for the sake of the wonderful team at KDE that the Karmic release is at least a billion times better – yes literally…really =)
Oh, btw did I mention I strongly recommend Mandriva 2009.1?
In a coporate environment this is why there’s ubuntu lts releases. You should have stuck with hardy heron.
Having the latest and greatest in any software world is no good.
@James, @shamil:
Agreed for the most part. ‘cept that most of my staff had been upgraded from Feisty (no longer supported). I’d personally been using Hardy since it was out and honestly, I don’t think it’s much better than Jaunty, just a little, maybe. I’d fervently hoped that Jaunty would be better. Sucks to be me that it turned worse. So I guess that was just a value judgement that I got wrong.
I’ve been using Kubuntu Jaunty (and Intrepid with KDE4) for quite some time on Intel 965, 915 and Nvidia graphics.
I’ve had almost none of the problems you describe above with the Nvidia based machine using the binary driver. The Intel machines are a different matter though. Awful 3d performance with desktop-effects. I found Compiz was slightly better at dealing with the poor performance so use that instead of Kwin.
On the Intel machines I recently changed to UXA AccelMethod in xorg.conf which has solved the performance problems but decreased stability. Now the whole desktop will just freeze for no reason very occasionallu. I find it shocking that Ubuntu have allowed the Intel driver to have these performance issues all the way through Jaunty and have decided they won’t fix it. It led me to try other distros but I still can’t find a distro base I like better than Ubuntu. Karmic seems to be better, if only for the better Intel driver and Xorg.
More info here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/UxaTesting . Thing is – how does an uninformed user add that section to a non-existent xorg.conf ?
I’m really not happy with Canonical / Intel about this. Intel with Linux should be the best combination, now it’s better to use Nvidia with binary drivers.
Kubuntu has never been a KDE fan’s preferred way to show KDE to others (nor to use KDE) — Kubuntu just never gets it right. This isn’t news. Try Debian Testing for a real KDE experience, or any of the hundreds of other KDE distros out there. Just, please, not Kubuntu.
[...] http://envb.sapphirewillow.com/writings/2009/07/kubuntu-jaunty-just-cos-i-use-it/ [...]
[...] Kubuntu Jaunty: Just ‘cos I use it don’t mean it’s good At the end of the day though, I wouldn’t call Kubuntu Jaunty a particularly successfully release. It took a pretty significant effort to fine-tune the setup to its current state and I don’t find that to be particularly associated to “just works”. I’m going to try out Karmic as soon as it hits beta. Hopefully, we can avoid jumping through hoops to get it setup properly this time. [...]
@feicipet:
Why would you put Kubuntu on mission critical computers for you and your staff? I’ll admit it that KDE4 looks good, but that’s hardly a reason to use it. I take it you prefer aesthetics over stability? Or is your mission not that critical?
I would NEVER even consider putting any distro’s version of KDE4 on any of my customers computers. That would be foolish indeed. But I guess people like you are going to stick with it no matter what the price. That’s OK, as people like you are the guinea pigs (beta testers) of the world, and we do need those. Have fun compiling kernels and constantly updating. In the meantime, I will continue to be productive with my “never needs fixing”, rock solid gnome install.
@wolfen69:
I use KDE (3 and now 4) because I’m productive in it. I’m not in Gnome. Blow by blow, there’s not a single application in Gnome that fits my needs better than KDE (neither environment’s browsers currently meet the mark, and I don’t consider Firefox to be a Gnome app). The Gnome desktop on Ubuntu may be rock solid, but it loses its meaning to me when I have to run KDE applications on top of it just to be productive. And that’s exactly what happened to me when I tried out Gnome during the KDE 4.0 days.
In any case, my employees are developers. I try to inculcate a culture of learning in all of them, and that includes the OS they use as well. Someone who refuses to try anything new just for stability’s sake is not likely to attempt to invent a better mousetrap in the course of their work either. I have no use for an employee of this ilk, sorry to say.
BTW, neither do I force the developers to use KDE / Kubuntu. A few of them do use Gnome or XFCE derivatives out of their own preference. But they do need to support it themselves, as I am admittedly not qualified to support them due to lack of experience.
I’ll admit that there are some KDE based apps that are good, and I use a couple of them routinely on my gnome install. (K3B and Gwenview) But I don’t need to have everything KDE offers to run KDE apps. What is it about KDE that makes you more productive? I just don’t see the point in using something that is beta quality. But to each their own, as they say.
@wolfen69:
well, since we’re separating the apps and the DE, I’ll just talk about the DE itself:
If I could, I’d avoid something that’s “beta quality” as well. But not to the point of handicapping myself. Some of the other comments here have been recommending that I try out Mandriva, reason being their packaging of KDE is much tighter. I’ll look into that, but I do have other things to consider. For one thing, the Ubuntu family has this very nice ecosystem of 3rd party PPA repos that’re easily found. If I want something that’s not in the default repos, I just google “ PPA” and 90% of the time I’ll find some kind soul who’s packaged it already. When I was using Fedora, 3rd party repos were all over the place and sussing them out took a significantly longer time. This borders on nitpicking, but I also hated Yum and Yast’s refusal to accept Ctrl-C to end an update if I felt that the download was taking too much time. I had to suspend it and then run kill -9 on it, which felt brain-dead to me. Again, I’ve lost touch with the improvements other distros have introduced so maybe it’s time for a refresher.
Don’t get me wrong, I think KDE4 will eventually be great, but as of right now, it has nothing to offer me besides a lot of fixing and re-learning. When Gnome 3 finally comes out, if it does not me my high standards as far as stability, I will jump ship in a heartbeat to either XFCE or Openbox. I am not married to gnome you see, I am married to stability. I look forward to the day when KDE4 is finally “finished” and can use it without experiencing any glitches or hitches. Perhaps other people don’t mind little niggles, but to me, a DE should be (at least near) flawless. KDE is not flawless at the moment.
@wolfen69
I really hope you are not judging the quality of KDE4 on the experience with Kubuntu. That would be totally unfair to say the least.
I have done a lot of installations with Mandriva 2009.1 running KDE4. I only had to make some little tweaks now and then to make some merely personal adjustment for the consumer (some do not like the copy notifier for instance). I had no complaints about anything. Everybody runs (and really likes) KDE4 without any problem. I tried Kubuntu, but this is a really not advisable at this moment. A lot of tweaking has to be done to make things just as usable as KDE4 on Mandriva (or OpenSUSE etc.).
And KDE4 not ready yet? Yes – KDE4 does things a bit different, but to say it is not usable or not mature enough is a gross exaggeration in my opinion. KDE4 is absolutely ready for use on a day to day base. I think some people have a bit trouble to let go some old habits and change to new ones. You cannot design a new window environment without changing anything. That would be contradicting itself. If some people are too rusty and not capable to adapt to this new environment they can keep the old KDE for a while. No problems with that. People that have never used KDE before have no trouble adapting at all! The real trouble is with people whom want progress and at the same time do not want changes. I am however fully switched to the new KDE environment and certainly will not switch back to the old version of KDE, Gnome, XFCE or anything else.
this is really awesome blog post
i did basically everything you did to get my kubuntu working on both my intel pcs and amd/ati pc
it’s a lot of hassle to get things working
i for one am against the fixed 6 month release for kubuntu, it should be released when ready.
i don’t see ms or apple releasing their OSs on a fix date ever
kubuntu messed up some first impressions i had for my friends of kde4
am going to check linuxmint’s kde releases instead from now on (for my buddies), as i think they always get most things resolved on your behalf and add some extra useful stuff (like the 1 click live irc chat support, software center, etc).