OSNews

KDE 3 will be dropped from 2009 Spring. Some packages remain so we can build important KDE 3 apps that have not yet been ported to KDE 4, but you will not be able to use a KDE 3 desktop.

Many more apps are now available in KDE 4 / Qt 4 versions, and KDE 4.2 is a substantial improvement on 4.1. We'd really like it for people like to you test the 2009 Spring pre-releases and report problems; it's the only way the KDE 4 experience will come to meet and exceed the KDE 3 experience in all areas. If people just give up and go to old releases or other desktops, it will never happen.

Well then, I guess it's time for a new DE. KDE 4 is just not what I am looking for; I prefer KDE 3.

I'm running KDE3 under Mandriva 2009.0 on one of my two main machines, and finally have almost everything running right (problems with sound remain).

I never could manage to configure mouse buttons under KDE4, and wasted lots of time trying to get it to work. In particular, I never could get mouse-buttons-in-root-window to work correctly: ever since OL(V)WM on a SPARC2 fifteen years ago, I've expected to be able to get application-menu and windowlist-menu by clicking on the root window. Frankly, KDE3 has had the most friendly/configurable menu setup I've encountered anywhere, but I can't figure out how to get this to work under 2009.0's KDE4.

And this is a showstopper for me: I do highly detailed graphics work, and usually use virtual 3200x2560 on a physical 1920x1200 monitor, and having to find the "MENU" button somewhere in a corner is painful.

What will be the status of mouse-buttons-in-root-window for 2009.1?

While I must say my first experience with KDE4 on Mandriva 2009 was a bit of a bumpy ride, I am used to it and really like it by now. I do not want to go back to KDE 3.5.

I don't know if you also did the rather massive update after installing Mandriva 2009. It upgrades KDE 4.1.2 to KDE 1.2.3. The latter is far more polished than the original version.

Also - I think a lot of problems you experienced stem from the fact you installed KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1.2 at the same time. While I must admit I still use some KDE 3.5 applications (Kommander, Kedit etc.) that are not (yet?) ported to KDE4, I only have some needed libraries installed, but no KDE 3.5. I do not have double menu entries and all that stuff.

Yes - KDE4 has still some rough edges, but no showstoppers as far as I concern. And yes, it takes some time to get used to KDE4, but if you use it on a regular day-to-day base this does not take a very long time. I am really looking forward to Mandriva 2009.1 where KDE 4.2 will be used.

While it is possible to jump to another distro that is still using KDE 3.5, I think it is just a matter of time before they will drop KDE3 too. Do not forget a lot of major distro's (Fedora, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu etc.) are allready jumping on the KDE4 bandwagon (altough I must admit Kubuntu does a lousy job on it). It is just a matter of time KDE 3.5 is something of the past.

I would say - just use KDE4. Help to improve KDE4 by requesting new features and submit bug reports if something goes wrong. If you keep standing on the sideline, just shouting you don't like it it will never improve the way you want it. Do not forget it is not possible to please everyone, but it is completely impossible to please someone who does not participate and does not say what he/she/it wants.

I don't know; every time I've tried KDE4, it just wasn't there yet. Buggy, incomplete, a memory hog, and just not very pleasant. While those "big distros" try to gain users by being on the bleeding edge with the latest-and-not-so-greatest software, I'll stick with the more conservative distros when it comes to KDE. I'll take KDE3 any day over KDE4, and I don't see that *ever* changing on a machine with around 256 megs of RAM or so. It's unsuitable and runs *horrible* on such systems. Maybe sometime in the future KDE4 will be nice on a more modern system, but last time I checked it left a lot to be desired.

KDE 1.2.3? :-)


At least openSUSE still offers KDE 3.5. While it's unlikely that KDE 3.5 will still be included on the openSUSE 11.2 DVD, it's very likely that it will be in the repos.
I'm not sure if KDE 3 will be part of SUSE Linux Enterprise (to be released in January), but if it will, then Novell has the obligation to its customers to maintain KDE 3.5 for another 7 years.


True. There's so many outdated stuff in there (aRTs for example).


Also true. It's not that much work to simulate KDE 3 with KDE 4 technologies.

This is especially so with KDE 4.2. However, even with KDE 4.1.3, it is possible to emulate a KDE 3 desktop fairly well. It is a mistake to install both KDE 3 and KDE 4 at the same time, because of confusing duplicate menu entries that doing this causes. If a KDE 3 application does not have a KDE 4 port at this time, most distributions will re-compile the KDE 3 version against KDE 4 libraries and emulated-kde3-compatibility-libraries such as libao2 (which is an audio output library on KDE4 which supports ALSA, aRts, ESD, OSS, Pulse and several others). This means that if one installs KDE3 and KDE4 at the same time, one will have quite a few programs which have a KDE3 version, sometimes a KDE3-but-complied-for-KDE4 version, and sometimes a new version for KDE4 only of the same program on one's menus.

This is bound to cause confusion if it was not what one was expecting.

The only thing that I found to be essential for a quick transition form KDE3 to KDE4 was to remove the Kickoff menu from the panel and install the Lancelot menu instead.

http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
This should be available for installation via the package manager if it is not included by default.

Also recommended, but not essential, is to change the default theme to something like Glassified or Aya.

There was until very recently a bug in the nvidia binary driver for Linux that caused dramatically horrible performance, and instability on many systems. If you have a nvidia graphics card, then in order for KDE 4 to be useable you must install the latest nvidia beta driver. The versions shown on this page:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
are not recent enough, as these versions still contain the bug. As this thread shows:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=8885a0b51b794ca159...
you need a nvidia driver of version 180.06 or later in order to avoid this bug.

Please don't confuse any poor performance resulting from this bug with performance of KDE4. There is a great deal of dismissing of KDE 4 that has been done because of this nvidia bug.

Also recommended on older systems is to turn off the desktop effects.

After few tweaks like these the KDE 4 experience easily surpasses the KDE 3 experience.

KDE 4 is, after all, the ONLY desktop environment for Linux that makes use of the system's GPU to accelerate graphics rendering of the desktop. As a consequence, it out-performs any other Linux desktop, even the "lightweight" ones such as fluxbox and openbox, on any system that has even a modest (but working) GPU.

Edited 2008-12-26 00:30 UTC

Nice spin, lemur. MS's and Apple's reps would be hard pressed to do better. But to rephrase in clearer terms, KDE4 is the ONLY desktop environment that requires you to beta test proprietary video drivers, or have certain specific video hardware that has very specific feature support in FOSS drivers to be usable.

I'm sure you'll have a host of links to throw back that have little to do with the topic at hand.

Edited 2008-12-26 00:33 UTC

Nice spin, lemur. MS's and Apple's reps would be hard pressed to do better. But to rephrase in clearer terms, KDE4 is the ONLY desktop environment that requires you to beta test proprietary video drivers, or have certain specific video hardware that has very specific feature support in FOSS drivers to be usable.

I'm sure you'll have a host of links to throw back that have little to do with the topic at hand. "

Excuse me? What is this rant all about?

How on earth is it the fault of KDE development team that the current version nvidia proprietary driver for Linux has a long-standing (apparently over two years) performance bug that drastically affects the Xrender API, which in turn affects only a few Linux desktop applications such as: Firefox 3 (specifically scrolling), OpenOffice and especially KDE4?

http://forum.kde.org/openoffice-plasma-new-nvidia-beta-180-08-t-150...

You most certainly do not need exotic hardware to run KDE 4 and to get the best-perfoming Linux desktop out of it:

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/09/on-kde4-performance.html



Well, it turns out that what gives is that certain models of nvidia cards have abysmal Xrender performance using the current nvidia proprietary driver, or any version from the last two years.

Anything else works fine. Intel graphics, ATI, Via, any number of others, and even older nvidia cards ... all fine. And nvidia cards using the nvidia proprietary driver of version 180.06 or later ... also fine.

It requires only 2D accelerated graphics, which is not at all an "exotic feature". It should be working almost everywhere:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xrender

Xrender was written in 2000.

Apparently, if Xrender doesn't work properly, you can now opt to use OpenGL for the KDE4 desktop instead.



If you have a nvidia card that suffers this bug in the driver, and you want to run KDE4, and you do not want to run a beta driver ... then run the nouveau driver, which works for 2D acceleration but not 3D.

So how many systems still running would there be that do not have a GPU, and hence be unsuitable targets for KDE4? well, there would of course be some, but it can't be any more than a few percent, if that. The GPU has been a part of PCs now for over 12 years, surely. I'm sure that I once had a 3D-accelerated PC game called Tomb Raider - running under MSDOS.

Edited 2008-12-26 06:10 UTC

I have two comments.

1. Concision is obviously not your forte:

steve@firefly:~$ wc -c lemur2_responses.txt
4555 lemur2_responses.txt
steve@firefly:~$ wc -w lemur2_responses.txt
762 lemur2_responses.txt

2. You seem really worked up over this issue. Perhaps because the Linux graphics platform of choice is Nvidia hardware with Nvidia's drivers. From the OSNews story above: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13284

I should say that performing like crap on the most popular Linux graphics platform in 2008, as you spend so many words admitting that KDE4 does, is a problem.

Edited 2008-12-26 17:07 UTC

It is indeed a problem because many people, yourself included apparently, have apparently totally got the wrong end of the stick here.

It is not KDE4 that performs horribly, it is rather (and most unfortunately) "the Linux graphics platform of choice, Nvidia hardware with Nvidia's drivers" that performs horribly.

Benchmarks show that Nvidia hardware with Nvidia's (current) drivers as a graphics platform on Linux performs slower than software rendering.

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11044

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=793&num=1

(3D performance is fine, it is only the 2D performance of Nvidia's current binary drivers that suffer this bug).

The problem does not only affect KDE4, it also affects some other modern desktop applications such as Firefox 3 and OpenOffice, because they too utilise the GPU (on systems where one is identified) to speed up rendering operations. Unfortunately, Nvidia hardware with Nvidia's (current) drivers actually slows it down.

From the first link I gave above:


Fortunately this point is about to become moot. Nvidia will no doubt soon release their current beta drivers, and the performance bug will go away.

When it finally does so, the Linux graphics platform of choice will finally correctly support KDE4, Firefox 3 and OpenOffice, and other programs that utilise the Xrender functionality (as it should have done all along), and this will finally reveal to the majority of Linux users that KDE4 is actually easily the fastest desktop platform available for Linux.

Nice spin, lemur. MS's and Apple's reps would be hard pressed to do better. But to rephrase in clearer terms, KDE4 is the ONLY desktop environment that requires you to beta test proprietary video drivers, or have certain specific video hardware that has very specific feature support in FOSS drivers to be usable.

I'm sure you'll have a host of links to throw back that have little to do with the topic at hand. "

Never being one to disappoint, here is just such a link, just to please you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_raider

Any point to this link? Well, only that the required level of graphics hardware capability to run KDE 4 was available in popular PCs as long ago as 1996. A pretty good estimate was that 12 years figure, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_raider#Reception


It was state-of-the-art in PC graphics ... a full 12 years ago.

Edited 2008-12-26 06:21 UTC

Sorry, I wasn't clear: after having wasted about twenty hours trying to get a KDE4 based 2009.0 install to work properly for me (including two installs, with lots of time waiting for the net-based 4.1.3 upgrade), I re-formatted /usr, installed a no-KDE 2009.0 from scratch, and then installed KDE3 from the net repositories. Now, it works for me.

I still have my question unanswered: when will mouse-button-in-root-windows be configurable? Or will that ever happen in KDE4? I repeat: That is a show-stopper for me.

I'm afraid I have no idea, sorry.

Thanks for the reply, anyway. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Yeah, looks like I'll probably have to try it that way, too. :-P

Is your graphics card composite-compatible? The card in my desktop PC is not, but when I enable OpenGL-based compositing anyway I get exact the same error. It could be that there's a bug in composite detection and that it gets enabled even though it should not.


I purged my installation of KDE 3 apps a while ago so no double entries for me. :-)
Too bad it's partially Mandriva's fault that some apps still don't have KDE4 ports. K3b's main developer works for Mandriva, but they think that tagging files through Nepomuk is more important than burning DVDs...
Well, Brasero works fine in KDE so I no longer care about K3b.

No, but it's still pretty good! I would say it is even better than it was a few years ago. Try it, you'll like it!

We'd rather get the changes from 1.5 done and stable before deciding whether to go with 1.6.

Edited 2008-12-25 00:55 UTC

Adam

i thought you were leaving Mandriva? did they re-hire you?

but yeah just seems more viable to use X-Server 1.6.0 as that will have all the bug fix's in that, that didnt make it into 1.5.x series

It was a contract position. But as someone who left a very long time position 6 months ago... I still say "we" sometimes, when referring to my former association. Old habits die hard.

Edited 2008-12-26 00:08 UTC