Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 8th May 2009 09:41 UTC, submitted by lemur2
It slipped by us, but the KDE team has released another minor bugfix release of KDE 4.2, version 4.2.3, a few days ago. Being a bugfix release, there are few user-visible changes, but still, there are a few things that stand out. "Online IMAP filtering in KMail has been fixed, KMail's system tray icon now reacts to changes to folder properties and updates the number of emails shown there automatically, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML - painting and interoperability with web standards has been further improved."
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RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by adiwibowo on Fri 8th May 2009 12:58
in reply to "But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2005-07-15
RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by agnus on Fri 8th May 2009 13:11
in reply to "But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2006-05-10
2. So I compiled everything 32-bit on the same platform. Managed to get kde-4 up and running and it wasn't pretty. I mean it was so hideously slow, it was painfull to look at. ...
3. Finally I tought, I'll give it a go on i386. Got it up and running on dual 1GHz Pentium 3 machine. No crashes thankfully, but it was still hideously slow. I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.
3. Finally I tought, I'll give it a go on i386. Got it up and running on dual 1GHz Pentium 3 machine. No crashes thankfully, but it was still hideously slow. I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.
I have put Kubuntu 9.04 on my Acer AspireOne (Atom 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM) and besides the somewhat slow boot, it runs exceptionaly fast *with* the 3D desktop effects *enabled*.
I have also compared the memory consumption of a clean install Ubuntu 9.04 vs Kubuntu 9.04 and the later consumed a couple of tens MBs LESS. That was a surprise for me as I have always been thinking that KDE was heavier than Gnome. Now I wish someone would care to do some proper benchmarks and publish the results for all to see.
Personaly I have recently switched from Gnome, which I have been using since Fedora 6, to KDE 4 and so far I am more than happy about it.
Edited 2009-05-08 13:23 UTC
RE[2]: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by lemur2 on Fri 8th May 2009 13:17
in reply to "RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2007-02-17
"2. So I compiled everything 32-bit on the same platform. Managed to get kde-4 up and running and it wasn't pretty. I mean it was so hideously slow, it was painfull to look at. ...
3. Finally I tought, I'll give it a go on i386. Got it up and running on dual 1GHz Pentium 3 machine. No crashes thankfully, but it was still hideously slow. I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.
3. Finally I tought, I'll give it a go on i386. Got it up and running on dual 1GHz Pentium 3 machine. No crashes thankfully, but it was still hideously slow. I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.
I have put Kubuntu 9.04 on my Acer AspireOne (Atom 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM) and besides the somewhat slow boot, it runs exceptionaly fast *with* the 3D desktop effects *enabled*.
I have also compared the memory consumption of a clean install Ubuntu 9.04 vs Kubuntu 9.04 and the later consumed a couple of tens MBs LESS. That was a surprise for me as I have always been thinking that KDE was heavier than Gnome. "
KDE4 will "win" over GNOME provided your system has a graphics GPU. The better the GPU and driver, the more pronounced will be the advantage to KDE4.
The Intel graphics found in most netbooks is not that flash, but nevertheless it IS a hardware-accelerated graphics GPU with a working driver. I would expect KDE4 to have a small but noticeable speed edge over GNOME on such a system.
Caveat: Because KDE4 expects its font rendering and drawing to be hardware-accelerated, it actually does attempt to do a lot more font rendering and drawing. As an experiment, re-size a Konqueor window on a KDE3 machine, and then do the same on a KDE4 machine. On KDE3, an outline of the Window at its new size will be drawn until you let the mouse button go, when the complete window is re-drawn at its new size. Once. On KDE4, the windows is continuously re-drawn over and over at differing sizes to "animate" the re-size operation.
If the graphics is not accelerated ... KDE4 will appear to run much slower as it does a lot more window re-draws.
Edited 2009-05-08 13:35 UTC
RE[2]: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by Lennie on Fri 8th May 2009 15:48
in reply to "RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2007-09-22
RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by lemur2 on Fri 8th May 2009 13:13
in reply to "But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2007-02-17
I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.
Horses for courses.
KDE4 is faster than KDE3 or just about any other Linux desktop ... PROVIDED that you have a graphics GPU with a working 3D and openGL driver. Hardware graphics acceleration must work.
That is its design. It uses the GPU to speed up all kinds of display-related operations, including font rendering and anti-aliasing. If your system doesn't have a working hardware-accelerated graphics GPU and driver, then KDE4 is not for you.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/09/on-kde4-performance.html
KDE4 is not bloatware, but it is all about accelerated graphics performance. If you don't have accelerated graphics, it won't perform.
If your system does have a working hardware-accelerated graphics GPU and driver, then KDE4 is the bees knees of Linux desktops right now.
Edited 2009-05-08 13:22 UTC
RE[2]: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by siride on Fri 8th May 2009 14:49
in reply to "RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2006-01-02
I have a card that runs Compiz just fine and xcompmgr/kompmgr blazingly fast, but KDE4 is PAINFULLY slow. Every time I try it, it's still slow. I don't need to upgrade my hardware, they need to fix whatever crap they are doing that slows everything down. Heck, even without compositing enabled on KDE4, things are still slow, even apps that weren't laggy while running KDE3. I don't even know how they manage that.
And Qt4 is much slower than Qt3. With Qt3, I can smoothly resize windows both with and without compositing enabled. With Qt4, even without compositing, resizing windows is glacially slow and you can see the widgets struggle to re-lay themselves out. It's pathetic, really.
RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by Phucked on Fri 8th May 2009 20:58
in reply to "But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2008-09-24
RE: But is it any better than 3.5.10?
by sbergman27 on Tue 12th May 2009 04:01
in reply to "But is it any better than 3.5.10?"
Member since:2005-07-24
It's funny, every time a new version of kde-4.x comes out, people say, hey great news, you just wait until the next version. Then the next version comes out, and it's again, wait till the next version comes out, then it's going to be REALLY good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you should really try out the latest nightlies! They're awesome! ;-)
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2007-04-20
It's funny, every time a new version of kde-4.x comes out, people say, hey great news, you just wait until the next version. Then the next version comes out, and it's again, wait till the next version comes out, then it's going to be REALLY good. It's getting a bit tiresome hearing these prophecies. I don't know what everyone is getting excited about, I've tried kde-4.2 and it was awful, in terms of looks and performance.
My main complaint about kde-4 is that it's too big and slow to be usable on slow hardware. I run Sun Ultra 10, which has 440Mhz CPU and 1GB or RAM. I use it as my main desktop machine and it's sufficient for most of my needs. So,kde-3.5.10 runs just fine on this machine, I tried kde-4 and this is what I got:
1. QT4 wouldn't build on sparc64, QT4 executable kept crashing during the build with 'Bus error' which indicates 64-bit bugs in their code. I submitted bug report to Trolltech with a back trace, and was told that basically they could not be bothered to look into it, because sparc64 is not one of their supported platform.
2. So I compiled everything 32-bit on the same platform. Managed to get kde-4 up and running and it wasn't pretty. I mean it was so hideously slow, it was painfull to look at. Then I tried running Konqueror, which crashed right away with 'Bus error', so another 64-bit bug in C++ code. I went to kde mailing lists, telling developers about the problem and submitting back traces where Konqueror was crashing. Waited for weeks and nobody was interested in replying to me or sending me a patch for testing.
3. Finally I tought, I'll give it a go on i386. Got it up and running on dual 1GHz Pentium 3 machine. No crashes thankfully, but it was still hideously slow. I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.
I don't know about you guys, but I won't be coming back to kde-4. I'd rather learn X11 and write small and fast desktop environment from scratch.