I've been using linux for literally 20 years now. The first ten I did all my own sysadminning, the next ten I used it exclusively in organizations with professional administrators to complain to, and now in my current job I'm back to having to do things myself, and I can assure you it's just as much of a pain to do things in 2014 as it was back in 2002.
They gave me a new monitor at work and it took me literally six hours to figure out the right magic to get the resolution in a mode that wouldn't cause instant headaches, and I still can't run KDE applications without the X server segfaulting.
What distribution are you using ? And what graphics card? I remember some issues with the first version of KDE 4, but since then I run it on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA cards, with open and proprietary drivers without big problems (AMD sometimes have glitches..)
Ubuntu (13.04 and 13.10) and a recent nvidia, don't have the model number here.
My best guess is that it's some kind of font issue, plotting in R also segfaults the server but I can see the non-text part of the plot come up. I try to leave well enough alone because (a) I get paid to do work not to troubleshoot linux and (b) there's no guarantee that anything I do will result in a usable system.
Yep that's pretty much mu experience with Linux. By the way I really like Linux (I used to use Ubuntu before they added Unity), however the constant fiddling with drivers and all kinds of stuff is just annoying.
They gave me a new monitor at work and it took me literally six hours to figure out the right magic to get the resolution in a mode that wouldn't cause instant headaches, and I still can't run KDE applications without the X server segfaulting.