never update a working computer

By basd on Feb 4, 2009 | In kde4, opensuse, -arghhh!!

when you've got serious work to do.

...

Okay, that naturally falls into the "do as I say, not as I do," category. I start the day with a software update. I started doing this when the updater applet ceased working, because I wish to be certain I have all the latest security fixes. (Don't presently know if updater works or not, since this system has so far been working for me.)

As mentioned in a prior post, I was having some annoyances with plasma at startup, but otherwise working fine.

Wwwelll, today it more majorly borked -- and I had serious work to get done. So, I decided I needed to build a new desktop by deleting (well, okay, renaming so I could "find stuff" if I need it) the .kde4 folder.

Plasma no longer crashes at startup. But, the widgets still move around on logoff/login.

Even worse, I couldn't figure out a way to save my kmail accounts. Copying the kmail folder from the old .kde4 to the new one did not work. So, I had to reconfigure that too.

And lastly, something is causing great problems with my external touchpad. The left click button has a mind of its own (tapping works okay). This may be some issue in KWin. I don't know for certain. The problem followed me to my Gnome (Kudomows) desktop, which I run on Kwin -- but seemed to be at least less of a problem when I switched to the Metacity windows manager.

Don't know if this is hardware specific -- I haven't tried to use the laptop's own touchpad yet.

Plus, networking is screwed up again and I can't make manual connections -- I'm stuck with DHCP. Plus, plus, the networking widget is taking a long time to think about whether it has received any keyboard input or not, so when I try to switch connections (which doesn't work anyway) I click several times and then after a lengthy delay, I get a whole row of feedback saying it is switching.

So, fairly major arghhh! day. Programmer persons, could we pleeeaassee treat a stable release as "stable" and not kill off stuff that works? (Yeah, I know there are reasons for this that have to do with things I know nothing about, such as problems someone else is having. Still...)

In addition, I decided to update some other computers to kde 4.2 which were still on RC1. Don't know if it is my local connection or loads on the opensuse servers, but very slow downloads.

Yeesh. Whattaday.