Yesterday night I decided to upgrade my system from Debian 5 Stable to Testing. As you might know Debian has three branches for every version that it releases:
Stable -> The most tested branch. Everything is as stable as possible and applications should not conflict with each other. The software versions available in this branch are slightly older
Testing -> This is slightly less stable branch but contains more recent versions of programs. For example I had to upgrade to Testing to get the correct libraries to run Firefox 3 in Debian Version 4
Unstable -> As the name says this repository contains programs that might have issues integrating with other programs in Debian. Doesn’t mean that the programs themselves are unstable, just means that they might not play well with others. Usually this contains the latest versions of software.
Anyways, usually I always run the Unstable branch but this time since v5 had just been released I stuck with the Stable branch to try it out. I really liked it.
Yesterday I decided to upgrade to Testing. So I pointed the repository to Testing and ran the following commands:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
and went off to sleep. Today all the items were downloaded and I logged in to KDE4 (the latest version) and I am not pleased. It looks like Vista. All the menu’s are changed. The control panel looks and works like the Windows Control Panel. If I wanted a Vista experience I would have installed Vista on my system.
In the old KDE I could update the wallpaper for any of my 4 desktops from one location. I this one I don’t seem to be able to do so. Plus I can’t get the system to start showing the ‘Quick Launch’ bar. When I add that widget I get a 2mm – 5 mm wide blank area added to my taskbar. To top it all Plasma is using 80%-90% of my CPU even when I am not going anything other than typing this post.
I thought I should get a screenshot of my CPU usage and loaded up GIMP, but in KDE4 this loads up two separate windows, one with the toolbox and one with the menu items. What the hell? What was wrong with the old way where the menu items were listed on top of the toolbox. Now that place is empty and the menu’s are in another window.
Ok, now I am annoyed. Now the Acquire menu item has disappeared from GIMP. This could be a change in GIMP but I am pretty sure I was using the same version earlier. So I can’t seem to get a screenshot easily. I know I can do it other ways but am too lazy to do that. So no screenshots. In anycase too many images increases the load times of the blog homepage 🙂
So my verdict? I am switching back to Debian Stable. Unfortunately it will mean reinstalling the OS ’cause there is no way to downgrade from Testing to stable. thankfully all my data is kept separately so I just have to format one partition. But still its a pain.
I will keep with this version until Debian forces me to upgrade to KDE4. After that… lets see, I might try other desktop managers or hopefully by then KDE4 will have matured and cleared up these issues.
Ah well… Let me get my system back the way it was, then I can get some work done…
– Suramya