KDE's Aaron Seigo (who owes me a Martini) wrote about a few often-heard misconceptions and questions regarding KDE 4.0, which is supposed to be released January 11th. "Now that 4.0.0 is tagged and out and that bit of worry and concern is behind me for the moment, I wanted to take a moment to talk really bluntly about 4.0. In particular, I'm going to address some of the common memes in fairly random order that I see about kde 3.5 and 4.0. I'm going to speak bluntly (though not rudely) so prepare yourself."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-23
------------and blanket claims like this (faster how? Faster in every conceivable way? What if KDE4 "does more" than KDE3 but takes slightly more time to do it - can it be called "faster" then?) are really quite naive.------------
Faster how, I'm talking in terms of daily usage. Opening applications, windows, and such. Does it "feel" faster? Does it feel like it's in your way, or feel more permissive and smooth?(and yes, I know that's pretty subjective)
Actually, your own link is pretty indicitive of what I'm taking to mind. (KDE devel)
==========KDE 4 is going to be a serious contender for a high-performance, good looking interface on low resource machines like the Eee PC, and I can't wait to try it out on one.==============
Now mind you, I don't look at 3.5 as slouchy, slow, software. I like it, a lot. But 4 seems to be more slick and slippery from everything I'm reading, in all corners. 30-40%? I never believed the claims there. But all things considered, there seems to be universal agreement on it being fsaster.
And as far as memory usage:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/14/kde-uses-les...
I don't expect those numbers either, I expect the completed product to naturally use more. But this is worth noting:
======The old version(3.5) needed 348MB to work comfortably while the new one(4.0) sail through the same tests using only 228MB.========
My expectation is high 2xx. More features naturally and obviously means greater usage. But going from mid 3's to high 2's is a great accomplishment and well worth looking forward to in my book.
Member since:2007-08-03
"And as far as memory usage:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/14/kde-uses-les.....
I don't expect those numbers either, I expect the completed product to naturally use more. But this is worth noting:
'The old version(3.5) needed 348MB to work comfortably while the new one(4.0) sail through the same tests using only 228MB'"
Which really highlights my point about benchmarking being difficult: the results presented there, while in some ways flattering to KDE, are absolutely, wildly false. KDE3.5 does not take 348MB to work; I've run it easily on a 256MB computer on which I had forgotten to enable swap! The results were debunked here by Lubos and Thiago, who know a lot about profiling and memory usage:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3138
and withdrawn by the same guy who presented the figures originally:
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-3-5-vs-4-0-round-two.so
[in fact, his later figures suggest that KDE4 with compositing uses substantially *more* RAM than KDE3!]
It's kind of weird: I've been combatting claims of KDE's bloatedness compared to GNOME ad nauseum for ages now (
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=153631&highlight=kde+memor..., http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2015680&postcount=1235 ) and now, because of one article that got re-posted all over the place without people bothering to check their facts, I'm having to do the opposite 
How ironic!
Edited 2008-01-04 22:56
Member since:2006-12-16
Wow, people do love to bash KDE for any reasons they can find.
Let's do an example:
Microsoft Windows and Office
Each version is supposedly faster, but each version becomes more and more bloated (and slower), requiring faster hardware to take advantage of it all and make it seem like it's faster. Don't believe me - try running MS Office 2007 on an Athlon 1ghz, then a AMD 3000 (barton core), then a dual core Intel, say E6600. Notice the speed difference.
Speed is relevant - it has long been known that software developers take advantage of newer, faster hardware, and use that to offset bloated code. This is the norm (unless you just use blackbox/fluxbox, which will forever stay unusable, because speed is more important to them than usability).
Don't just go blasting KDE, you might want to have a look at a lot of other projects.
In fact, each release of KDE 3.x was slightly quicker than the previous one I might add.
I think you'll find that people are using such powerful graphics cards today, that that'll take a nice load off both the cpu core, and the memory. People want fancy, nice, cool looking desktop environments that fart, burp and shit themselves when you look at them, and the result is always going to be that it takes time to process the underlying code to achieve that "look".
Dave
Member since:
2007-08-03
This was actually one of the topics brought up in aseigo's TLLTS interview, which I highly recommend to people who want the 411 on KDE4.0 and the plans for the KDE4 series:
http://www.tllts.org/audio/tllts_226-01-02-08.ogg
Aaron's answer was disarmingly honest. Basically, if you hear claims of "KDE4 is 30-40% lighter/ faster than KDE3!!", take them with a pinch of salt: benchmarking is a surprisingly difficult and intricate business, and blanket claims like this (faster how? Faster in every conceivable way? What if KDE4 "does more" than KDE3 but takes slightly more time to do it - can it be called "faster" then?) are really quite naive.
Qt4's memory usage is a good example of this, which he brought up: most of Qt4 operations/ structures do indeed take up less memory than their Qt3 counterparts due to the extensive optimisation carried out by Trolltech - however, Qt4 also double-buffers all widgets, which takes up a fair amount of pixmap memory but also basically eliminates tearing, shearing and artifacting. Is Qt4 more or less memory hungry than Qt3 in this instance? In some ways yes, in some ways no, and in some ways it's apples-to-oranges, as Qt4 is doing a better job.
So don't believe all the performance claims that you hear - good or bad
Edit:
We can at least be assured that even with an unoptimised 4.0.0, performance and memory usage aren't completely diabolically awful, though
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3137
http://www.jespersaur.com/drupal/node/36
Edited 2008-01-04 21:46