The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2007-02-17
And how do I get to such a system? What parts? What drivers? I'm genuinely interested. "
Frankly, I have no idea.
What I do know is that on some systems KDE4 absolutely flies. Faster than any other desktop.
By no means is this the case for all systems, but it is so for some.
The thing is ... this fact alone exonerates KDE4. You can have a situation where fast software is slowed down by something else on a particular system, but you cannot have a case where slow software is made fast on particular systems.
Ergo, KDE4 itself is not slow. If KDE4 itself was slow, it would be slow everywhere.
Member since:2005-09-10
I have a year-old laptop with an Nvidia 8400 GS chipset. KDE 4 flies with this setup in all respects except window resizing when wobbly windows are activated. Note that maximize (vertically/horizontally) works fine, arbitrary resizing is ... well, too wobbly. But for anything else (desktop grid, expose like window switching, minimize animations, fade-ins/outs, flying dialogue windows) smooth, and fast. Fedora 11, kde 4.3 from kde testing repos.
One thing to note - it matters a lot which distribution you try and WHEN. For example, Mandriva usually finalizes its graphics driver stack (ATI & NVidia proprietary drivers) right before release. Now if you use an alpha version, or you mix & match packages from cooker, don't expect a smooth sailing.
That's one of the reasons I asked siride to at least clarify what distro he uses, for it can explain a lot of things. Instead, he is too busy spamming this whole thread with his whining about how QT sucks. I know I'm a bit harsh here, but after a point (lets say when his rants against QT reach 10%+ of all comments in this thread) I call this spamming, especially since he just doesn't seem to care much about any explanations. Like to the fact that NVidia actually acknowledged that the problem is in their drivers and not QT when we had a similar problems on NVidia cards a while back.
Member since:2006-07-27
Member since:2005-07-06
Basically, use an Intel chipset and your distro's drivers or an nVidia chipset with a recent driver. Many nVidia driver updates specifically fix KDE 4 issues, especially with Xrender. Your mileage might vary with ATI, but you'll be hopping around with the ati, radeonhd and fglrx drivers and stuff like Xv will still be broken or working poorly.
Edited 2009-08-05 22:13 UTC
Member since:2005-07-07
Try KDE on windows. The first app is a bit slow due to having to load all the KDE libs and to have to start dbus and such services. But after that, it's pretty good.
And on my system at home and on this laptop KDE is very fast. This laptop is a sony Vaio VGN-TZ31XN - 1.2 ghz dualcore proc, GMA950 grapics and 2 gb ram and 4200 rpm drive. In other words, nothing special.
Home system is dualcore 2 ghz Athlon 64 with 3 gb ram and Nvidia Geforce 6600 videocard. Again, far from special. Works perfectly fine, graphical effects are completely smooth. Ok, granted, since 2 days (X.org upgrade) X.org consistently uses 30-50% CPU. But this is arch linux, a new version will be here soon and I can handle this for a few days.
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Member since:
2007-02-17
The problem with doing this is that the KDE4 software is not slow.
KDE4 absolutely flies on systems where the graphics stack works properly. Fastest desktop there is.