I used Kubuntu Maverick before it’s first alpha released, I upgraded my system from Jaunty. But between the beta and the RC something went wrong… The load went high often, the GUI freezed out, and I had to return to Lucid. I hoped that the problems will cease, but they didn’t. When Maverick released I upgraded again, but the problems still exist. I would like to use KDE 4.5, but in Kubuntu, I simply can’t, however I am a Kubuntu user since 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. I have now two choice: returning back to Lucid, or switch to an other KDE distro.
Ulysses' Blog 
Fedora! 😛
Troll:P
I second this. Especially if you get the Infinality font rendering patches, which believe it or not actually look better than *buntu’s.
My last Fedora test was only about 3 months ago testing exact the KDE environment because somebody tried to convince me switching to KDE.
My experience was awful. A lot of crashes and general experience of cluttered desktop. – No, no, I stay with Ubuntu and Gnome. I rather would consider using LXDE than KDE as I prefer the keep it simple strategy.
I have also experienced this. I installed Lucid a few months ago and have experienced nothing but problems with the load constantly being high (~1.0), and randomly shooting up to past 10, making the system completely unusable.
I upgraded this week to Maverick hoping it would fix my Lucid woes. Unfortunately, it made the problem even worse, to the point where I couldn’t even use my laptop!
However, today I installed an older kernel from the karmic series
(http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.31.13-karmic/)
and maverick is now running really well! My loads have dropped and my temperatures have dropped.
I added the xorg-edgers, kubuntu-ppa/ppa PPA-s and enabled the -proposed and -backports repositories. Now KWin crashes when I don’t press Alt+Tab enough fast to see the preview of the windows. Load isn’t so high now, it’s around 0.40.
I have the same problem with 10.10. Load seems bizarrely high. I’ll try downgrading my kernel and see what happens. =P
Please consider that it is not the core distribution or the kernel. E.g. I had gdm lockups that I finally nailed down to be related to VirtualBox – currently testing with different VB settings and try to find out if it depends on the Guest System. – Anyway, I want to point out that it could be a particular application that is doing the harm.
Ugh, SUSE or Kubuntu Lucid with the 4.5 ppa’s are both good options.
Hopefully someone will patch your issue in maverick, or 4.6 will fix it, as I do love Kubuntu and hate to see it break for you.
I tokk an openSuse DVD on the Software Freedom Day last week, but as a Kubuntu member it would be better to use Kubuntu instead of anything else:P
Obligatory question: did you file a bug when you saw the issues in the RC?
I don’t remember well, that was beta, but yes, I reported: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/644740
OK, glad to see it at least has a “high” importance. Do you know if bugs have been filed on the load issues?
I think no reason to report until knowing what causes the high load, the bug report will be marked as invalid or incomplete.
Well, yes and no. A normal user might not know what caused the issue, but if they report “between the last beta and the RC my load went through the roof” it will give those more knowledgeable a place to start researching. A (possibly non-technical) user cannot be expected to file a bug report with full root-cause analysis.
You use the word upgraded. I never upgrade and also never have problems. Clean installations are the only way to go. I know that this is a small heresy because Canonical wants us to believe that upgrades work. Well, they sort of do and sort of don’t. Many other distros do not want you to try to upgrade and only suggest clean installations. I am not saying that fresh installations are a panacea. They just work better for me.
What I would miss about going back to Lucid or Jaunty (say it isn’t so, Joe) is KDE 4.5 which is the best KDE ever and as good or better than anything else you wish to compare it to. I have used GNOME Shell and Ubuntu 10.10 and every major distro.
What I would miss if I moved to Fedora or openSuSE is the huge repositories of K/Ubuntu. Many of the applications that I use just aren’t available in other distributions. Add to that all of the PPAs and you can see that it is a no brainer. Unless you like compiling from source code which I don’t. I don’t have the time or patience. I want it all. I want it now. 🙂
I missed to mention that I tried the clean installation too, but nothing changed. Yeah, I like the huge repositories, the people on #kubuntu-devel and the local peoples, but I need a working system to my studies right now.
I’ll just say ditto.. Been on Kub for 3+ yrs now. I have tried multiple times (without reporting the errors) to consider a fresh version of Kub in the past year. As you stated, the last 2 versions (even as fresh installs), have exhibited behavior as you describe..
Not sure what to do, but Kub has been disappointing recently. Ub has been pretty nice. But still a fan of KDE.. What to do..
Debian – you get many of the benefits of Kubuntu plus upgrades that work, sometimes across many years 😀 Something similar about the difficulties of upgrades versus clean installs was also added by me to Martin Owens’ blog
Stability versus new versions, good question. KDE is improving from time to time, and I want to use the latest version because I am an upstream translator, and Kubuntu gives a good choice for me with the PPAs and devel releases, but these annoying bugs make me sad:(
When Debian got to the status of an Ubuntu 9.04 or 9.10 from the features then I consider a switch.
Well, Debian will never have all of the features that 9.04 or 9.10 have, in the same way that Ubuntu will never have all the features that Debian has – otherwise one of them would just be superfluous.
Perhaps you should instead tell about the features that you really miss in Debian. 🙂
Let me sum it up into: When the current unstable kernel and application versions got stable and hence adopted into debian stable I would switch to debian stable. That’s because since Ubuntu ~9.04 I find Linux really useable on the desktop.
On my test machine I installed a current debian version right now (fortunately runs in background) – what should I say:
1. Screen resolution not correctly detected (No problem with Ubuntu at least >=9.04 – testing since 9.04)
2. Longer install process (requires more inputs at different locations than Ubuntu)
3. No WLAN (Ubuntu 10.10 recognizes this already during install!)
4. Default user not added automatically to sudoers (just annoying)
5. No graphical package manager (ok, just annoying)
6. Crappy old sound management with 50 separate sliders
… – don’t examine further
And it looks approx like Fedora 9 or so – so basically we are talking about status of 2008 or so – just a rough estimate.
That’s what I meant – I will wait until the debian stable version gets to a level of 9.04 (at the very least I expect resolution detected and WLAN without hassle).
Try uninstall gwibber. Gwibber for me on Lucid and Maverick uses 100% cpu all the time. I haven’t tested this since the last Maverick alpha, but the bug was present then.
The Gwibber is in general a strange thing – on my Lucid installation it neither starts. I removed it completely right now.
Gwibber was never installed because I use Kubuntu. For Kubuntu there are two choice: the built-in KDE Microblog plasmoid and the Choqok identi.ca/Twitter client.
Ulysses if you serious going to consider another distro, please serious try openSUSE 11.3.
I got fed up with kubuntu 6 months ago, tried mandriva 2010.1 (rc at the time) for a few months, then switched to openSUSE 11.3 a while back.
I must say as a KDE fan, openSUSE 11.3 is fantastic, you have so many options, the KDE packages are really well polished and everything works exceptionally well!
You can have latest kde 4.4 stable if you like, or latest kde 4.5 stable with upstream recommended qt 4.6 for most stable or if you prefer(like me) you can use latest kde 4.5 with qt 4.7 and you can easily switch back and forth as you like.
Try it out, I’m a very happy openSUSE user at the moment.
I still like the idea of kubuntu from a more political and freedom POV but at the moment openSUSE to me, seems more stable, up to date and a better KDE distro.
I too switched to Fedora and the forums indicate that Fedora is doing an excellent job of supporting the hardware cast by the wayside in Ubuntu’s forward march. I liked Ubuntu, but no more, because the experience of trying to debug unsupported (fairly standard) hardware is too trying, and the vitriolic attacks when requesting help have put me off the Canonical bandwagon for life.
I happened to notice a few specific processes spiking to stupid CPU loads when I upgraded to KDE 4.5 through the Kubuntu Lucid backport PPA. Generating high loads were virtuoso-t and, suprisingly enough, Kontact and KMail once I had disabled the semantic desktop. I did a little research, and found the fault to lie in nepomuk. Once I killed nepomuk (killall nepomuk-server; killall akonadi-nepomuk), though, everything seemed to work perfectly smoothly.
As strictly enforced rule, I never upgrade. Even with Microsoft Windows who encourage upgrades and despite having 90000 employees and 10’s of millions of testers problems happen. I never have upgraded and will not start.
I say in the strongest terms, impose this rule on yourself.
I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my netbook, and it’s perfect. I still have Ubuntu 9.04 version on my desktop, and will stay there until I have time to do a clean install to a newer version.
Ubuntu is the best OS I have ever used. BTW: OpenSuse still fails to detect my wireless dongle.
This is a major reason why I switched to Ubuntu: Most other distris have problems in recognizing new hardware well or in particular when it comes to mobile internet and the like. – And I was a Fedora user for many years when I had it installed only on my home wired fixed machine. Since I went to notebook plus docking station plus mobile internet plus new scanner/printer/fax-all-in-one thing plus using a lot more apps, Ubuntu was simply the better choice.
Some things simply did not work on Fedora, other small things simply went more smoothly (e.g. apps already in the repository instead of trying to find some rpm somewhere).
On my Ubuntu Lucid currently, I have killed and removed every package with “ubuntuone” in its name. I found those to be the cause of my short battery life and one CPU core constantly running at 100% busy.
I am running Kubuntu 10.10 and I can confirm am having non of the problems you speak of here. I do know though that Intel drivers on Linux generally has gone to the dogs performance wise, ever since there decided to go this UXA thingie which was suppose to bring awesomeness to linux desktop in term of graphic performance 2 years on its been a disaster. the once smooth as silk performance wise is not chubby and laggy. I was getting the same shitty performance with the i965 chip that I sold my laptop and got one with the newer arrandale chip which is a bit better but still not there yet. When it comes to driver issues most of the problem is not kubuntu as I experienced same when I used fedora, mandriva and opensuse. I am sorry you have this problems but really u need to put the blame where it lies.
Kubuntu Maverick works well on my PC AMD +2800 Sempron..it’s cooooooooooooooooooooool.
Kubuntu Lucid works well on my Lenovo G550. It’s not cool, I want KDE 4.5:(
Get the 4.5 backport to Lucid:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
Watch out for the semantic desktop, though—it likes to eat CPU.
I tested different variants of Ubuntu and in this order the number found bugs (by me testing quickly a few things) increased:
Ubuntu (least number of bugs)
Kubuntu
Xubuntu
Lubuntu