Why I Stopped Using Neon and Installed Yakkety

[NoWorries]

Over two weeks ago, I decided to replace Neon with Yakkety on my Laptop. My reasons for doing this are:

1. Every time I entered an appointment into Kontact it would only put a PM time even though I specified an AM time. I tried numerous ways to overcome this but all my attempts failed.
2. I do frequent video editing and I found that the timeline cursor on Kdenlive was difficult and time consuming to get to work. I also could not load and play successfully MTS camera files. So I had to convert them to mp4 files.
3. I had installed Yakkety on my Wife's Laptop which is an ASUS F3Jr which was bought in 2007. To my surprise, the boot time was comparable to what I was getting on my ASUS R505VM. Also, Kontact and Kdenlive worked as they should!

I now find that my Laptop has new life and I can do all that I want to do without the above hassles.

[GreyGeek]

It just goes to show how different hardware works (or doesn't work) in different ways.
My Neon installation runs Kdenlive's timeline just fine, but my GPU is NVidia 650M. I don't use KPM so I have no experience with Kontact. On my previous Acer, before 11/1/16 when I switched to this box, KMail ran fine.
Ya just have to go with what works for ya!

[oshunluvr]

It just goes to show how different hardware works (or doesn't work) in different ways.
My Neon installation runs Kdenlive's timeline just fine, but my GPU is NVidia 650M. I don't use KPM so I have no experience with Kontact. On my previous Acer, before 11/1/16 when I switched to this box, KMail ran fine.
Ya just have to go with what works for ya!

I know this has been said a ba-zillion times, but that's the beauty of linux

[MoonRise]

I agree. I'm on Maui which uses stable Neon as a base which it used to be Kubuntu but so far rock solid.

ooops, I jinxed it now!

[woodsmoke]

It just goes to show how different hardware works (or doesn't work) in different ways.

Ya just have to go with what works for ya!

ummm we as Linux people view this as a strength ...

but for the normal windblows user she or he looks at this as a detriment.

woodjustsayinsmoke

[dequire]

Woody I agree but I will make an exception for Kontact. That beast is one maybe best left for the "lessons learned" category. Just...maybe.

[NoWorries]

Woody I agree but I will make an exception for Kontact. That beast is one maybe best left for the "lessons learned" category. Just...maybe.

The reason why I still use Kontact is that I have Calendar records that I started in September 2004 and continue up to the present time. So I can check easily on past activities when needed. I also use Kontact for Contacts as well as Popup Notes. The latter contains various bits and pieces. For example, purchase of computers, commands to recover from package related problems and various other miscellaneous items.

I like to keep this all in one spot with quick access. That is why I stay with Kontact and make sure all the aspects that I use work.

[dibl]

I started using KDE (3.xx) on my PC in 2006 IIRC, and KDE PIM has been fraught with bugs and performance issues for the entire succeeding 10 years, KDE 4 and Plasma 5. It still is. I only know because of seeing the complaints on this and other fora for 10 years. I'm a dedicated daily KDE user, but the PIM is pretty much a waste of time, as far as I can tell, and always has been. Fortunately, there are smart phones now.

[GreyGeek]

I started using KDE (3.xx) on my PC in 2006 IIRC, and KDE PIM has been fraught with bugs and performance issues for the entire succeeding 10 years, KDE 4 and Plasma 5. It still is. I only know because of seeing the complaints on this and other fora for 10 years. I'm a dedicated daily KDE user, but the PIM is pretty much a waste of time, as far as I can tell, and always has been. Fortunately, there are smart phones now.

I had a love affair with KMail for years, but there was a time when it didn't work very well and akonadi & mysql (IIRCC) gave it a ton of trouble. KMail2 worked fairly well with Kubuntu 9.04, which was when I started using Kubuntu, but around that time I started using gmail and didn't rely on KMail so I didn't install it. This spring or early summer the big three social networks announced that they were joining hands to fight "hate" speech. It soon became evident that what they meant by "hate" speech was postings pointing out Hillary's flawed credentials, mostly by Conservatives. That's when I dropped my Google account and installed KMail. It worked flawlessly for me on my Acer 7739 laptop (2010) and on this Acer V3-771G laptop. When I switched to Neon KMail had akonadi and mysql problems again. I switched to Thunderbird, which I always used before Kubuntu 9.04 because it was integrated with FireFox, and it has been working great, but it's showing its age and I may give KMail another try. I have never used Kontact, and as you say, now there are smartphones.

However, given that Apple tends to "error 53" iPhones that are not repaired at certified Apple repair centers, and other reasons, I am looking to move away from iPhone. I know one thing for sure, if I cut back or drop my iPhone and return to a flip phone but with texting, I would probably cut my Internet time to 1/4th of what I do now.

[Tahaan]

I've just about had it with Neon's inability to not screw up my screen layouts. Why can't the desktop widgets stay where I put them.

Why can't my desktop wallpaper stay on the screen I put it.

Why can't the panel stay on the screen where I put it?

Why is it that it all changes in a random way every time? Sometimes the panel moves, sometimes the widgets re-organise themselves, sometimes the wallpaper and the panel will move, sometimes only the wallpaper. Sometimes the panel moves and the wallpaper becomes black. It is literally as if there is a random generator built in. This time the widgets stayed on the screen where they belong, but they re-arranged themselves to different places.

Sometimes the K-menu on the panel stops working.

Sometimes one of the three "items" - panel, wallpaper, or widget layout, will remain in tack. It is like I'm fearing to resume from suspend because I never know what it is going to throw and me next.

Occasionally, just very occasionally, everything stays where I left it.

I'm not OCD but I like my wigdets to be aligned in neat groups...

WHY DID IT BREAK, Back in August/September it was working perfectly.

Interestingly (touch wood) my external monitor now never forgets where it should be relative to the laptop's built in screen any more. Pre-September it was a random thing, finding it either moved back to the original location, or sometimes moved down by about 450 pixels, or rarely just stayed where it belongs. This problem is thankfully a thing of the past... until I update, maybe.

I can fix 99% of these "issues" (move the wallpaper back, move the panel back) by running two commands:
killall plasmashell
kstart plasmashell

It will even move the widgets back to their original location, but only if they moved over to the other monitor, if they disappeared, then the commands re-start / shows them on the correct monitor, but in the wrong locations

UGH.

The randomness of this is driving me crazy!

[oshunluvr]

Disable Kscreen

[NoWorries]

Sorry to hear that you have been having so much trouble, I hope that deleting the .local/share/kscreen directory solves your problem.

I have been having mega problems with my Laptop in the past week. I had some important video editing that I had to do and Kdenlive and my system kept crashing on me, whereas my Wife’s laptop worked OK. Unfortunately it was too slow for the video rendering task. I ended up suspecting that my SSD had developed memory faults.

The problem that I saw with an SSD, is that memory errors are difficult to find and I could not find any suitable test. I ended up installing KDE Neon and, as that would use different areas of the SSD, it seemed to work OK. I have now swapped the SSD from my Wife’s Laptop onto mine and I have now been able to fulfil all my Video editing responsibilities.

Throughout this process, I have found that using usb-creator-kde caused installation failures whereas unetbootin worked without fault. I have also found that Kdenlive version 16.12.0 fails with Concurrent threads =8 and Processing threads =8. I had to reduce these values to 2 even though using 8 worked on earlier versions.

I am not sure if you are using an SSD for all your system. If you are, then if all things fail, you could look into suspecting your SSD as I did.

[Tahaan]

Hello NoWorries.

This morning I woke when I unlocked my laptop (the problem is not limited to sleep/wakeup only) I found the wallpaper and widgets moved to the external monitor, actually the wallpaper from the external monitor, which is the Neon default, switched places with my selected wallpaper, and the desktop widgets moved to the external monitor. The panel stayed put. Sigh.

What is this kscreen directory. Do I delete it from another or while logged in?

FWIW I do not have an SSD (yet).

Your SSD drive does wear levelling so "re-installing" to avoid using the same physical storage cells doesn't make sense.

However it does sound like you're closer to finding the solution to your problem, by a process of elimination, having switched out the SSD drive. If that does prove to be the solution you had better go buy wifey a shiny new SSD, else she will have some silent data corruption in some special birthday photo when she can least afford it!

[Tahaan]

Disable Kscreen

Is that the screensaver? I like the suggestion, but two questions:

Can I still lock my computer if I do, and why do you suggest this? And how do I disable it? That's three questions :-)

[Tahaan]

Disable Kscreen

Is that the screensaver? I like the suggestion, but two questions:

Can I still lock my computer if I do, and why do you suggest this? And how do I disable it? That's three questions :-)