Lords of Kobol! Mint 17 KDE works!

[Jedinovice]

Lemme explain...

I have this 8 year old AMD Turion laptop I have been given which has shown huge potential but I just COULD NOT GET MINT TO WORK WITH IT!!!!! Other distros had given me even more trouble so I stick with Mint now. I also only go KDE. I just can't help myself. KDE just works the way I do.

So... Mint 16 64 bit looked great on the laptop. Until the screen started flickering when the power was plugged in which was 98% of the time as the battery life stank. Hey, 8 years ago a Turion was cutting edge and so drank power. [Yes, I have replaced the battery.] I tried every damn version of Linux imaginable on the machine and always got screen flicker until someone here kindly suggested it was a kernel thing. So I tried Mint 13. That worked. No screen flicker. Well, 13 is LTS so I figured, sure, I'll stick with it.

Mint 13 64 bit. Libreoffice totally *%$$@&* up. A total non-starter for me. Only found out after a day of installing software and configuring too.
Mint 13 32 bit. Libreoffice worked. But I could not control speaker and headphones. After much work it was identified as... a kernel problem. A total non-starter.

Mint 15 32 bit – worked! If I changed the displayer handler to gnome to get any kind of decent display refresh, used the built in Libreoffice file manager as KDE's kept crashing the suite, and could put up with fact the machine would never, ever shut down properly. Yes, it's a confirmed kernel problem. I also had to accept that software would be out of date. Not too much of a hassle but no way to update Kdenline which I rather need cutting edge.

ALL of my above problems were confirmed Linux kernel problems!!!! I guess an old AMD processor and Radion chipset was just too much for the Linux world. So I had to wait until 17 came out and hope that the latest kernel would... just... work...

Mint KDE 17 RC out. Well, the bugs just had to be better than a system that just did not work at a kernel level so...

Well, my comments in another thread but, right now... it works! System is faster. Far faster than in 15 and 16 on the same hardware. Are drivers now optimised/working? System shuts down!!! No screen flicker, sound is excellent and speakers and headphone outputs are detected and switched appropriately!

Whoa! I hasten to add that I have not had this kind of trouble on my Intel machines, just this box. OK, I had HUGE trouble with Mint 16 KDE on my Atom but 13 fixed all that. This AMD machine (a Benq Joybook t31 for reference) has refused to work properly with ANY variation of Linux, installed or boot disk.

So far.. just after initial install and testing after massive package downloading and updating... all seems well. Everything works just as on my other machines.

AT LAST.

This bodes very well for Mint Qiana especially for LTS. So, given I seem to have the single most cretinous machine in the world for installing Linux (but I need it now my wife has snatched away my little Atom machine) then I think a lot of people are going to be very happy with this rendering.

[Jedinovice]

Ooooooo! Mint 17 is looking good.

I am not one to run to RC's before formal confirmation of release but this laptop has proven a dog to get Linux to run on. Well, Mint 17, so far, has fixed every single one of my woes. OK, I know for a fact my troubles were kernel related but it suggests that 17 is running on a very solid base. Looking very good for LTS indeed.

Next... Screen refresh much better under KDE even with desktop effects enabled. Under 15 and 16 I had decided lagging where I would click a menu item and wait half a second before the menu appeared even though general processing such as video edit rendering was fine. All gone away in 17 and everything flies!

Nice improvements to wireless connection selection. Very KDE – making it easy, visible and intuitive. Don't like the funky 'knight rider' sound effects when changing volume now but that can be fixed via system settings. No other 'surprises' as yet.

General operation very fast indeed and this is on one old machine running 32 bit Mint in just 1.5GB of RAM. Ignore the 2GB RAM 'requirement.' It's developers rounding up and covering themseves after endless complaints of the slowness of KDE I'm sure. Actually, I think Mint 17 is running faster on this box than the faster Celeron 877 with Mint 13. Can't be sure because I could never run another version of Mint on this box properly before. But anyway, fast. I wish people would stop talking about KDE being slow. Just-turn-off-desktop-effects.

Multi-tasking seems fine and seems better than 15 on this box. A quick test of rendering to MPG under Kdenlive (sunub repository 0.9.8 version) renders fine and at good speed – for a very old box here. MP4 turned up a blank but I bet that's ffmpeg and is a feature not a bug. So no worries. Pleased to see handbrake in the Qiana repository for media conversion.

Audio and video playback flawless and youtube is fine.

More testing to go. I do just about everything on my laptops so if there's a bug I bet I'll find it especially on this box. But so far... very, very sweet.

[DeMus]

I wish people would stop talking about KDE being slow. Just-turn-off-desktop-effects.

When KDE should be slow, which I know from experiences it is not, you can always have a look here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1889034

I wish I could install 17 as well, but my other computer is stowed away for 3 weeks because of renovating our house. I now work on the laptop and it sounds strange but I want to have one machine working constantly, so no possibility for experiences.