Tomáš Pospíšek's Notizblock
I'm moving away from kde.
Recently at some random point in time akregator just stopped working. When I would start it, it would just use 100% CPU and that'd be it. Remeber working with some of the less stable versions of Word that did this? That wasn't funny and still isn't.
While trying to find out which configuration caused it to loop I discovered that when I'd start akregator a dozen or so new kde processes would start and a lot of them would remain there, even after having terminated akregator. WTF?!? Processes running and consuming ressources for no aparent reason. Am I running Windows or what?
And none of those background processes is properly documented:
- man knotify ?
- man knotify4 ?
- kded --help ?
Nothing useful there. Reminds me a lot of Windows, where one has to search the web to find out what most of the running process actually could be doing.
And it's not even possible to kill knotify sanely, one has to use SIGKILL. It's like on the Mac or Windows where some company and not you decides what's best for you to run on your PC.
So finaly my debugging session went something like:
$ killall akregator; killall kwalletd; killall kio_http_cache_cleaner; killall kwalletd; killall kdeinit4; killall kded4; killall -9 knotify4; rm -R ~/.kde/share/config/akregatorrc ~/.kde/share/apps/akregator/; cp -a ~/{backup/akregator/,}.kde/share/config/akregatorrc; cp -a ~/backup/akregator/.kde/share/apps/akregator/ /home/tpo/.kde/share/apps/; sleep 1; killall kwalletd; sleep 1; killall kwalletd
$ divide and remove stuff from konfig
$ akregator
$ restart loop
Insane. I didn't find out, I could not really pinpoint it to one or two entries.
And then: have you ever tried to start some KDE app from the command line? Most of them will swamp you immediately with errors, warning, missing libs and files, debug statements etc. etc. etc. Polution. Have you ever tried to debug Windows from it's logs? There you go.
So I'm sorry to say:
# apt-get remove akregator
# apt-get install liferea
KDE seems to be getting worse and worse for me, more and more bloat, pure point and click. But it seems like I'm the only one and every one else is cheering - or is maybe just buying a Mac instead?
The reason I left Windows behind and went with Linux almost twenty years ago, is because I wanted to understand my computer. "It works right now (and maybe not a moment later for no aparent reason)" was not sufficent then and it's not sufficient any more now.
Stuff breaking randomly - I can debug and contribute to part of it, but the flow of bugs is more than I can handle. I am dropping parts of my infrastructure and replacing some of it by differt one just to keep a sane working environment. Kind of depressing.
Tomáš Pospíšek, 2010-07-06
