KDE SC 4.4 Released
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 9th Feb 2010 19:06 UTC, submitted by diegocg
KDE And there we are, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, formerly known as, well, KDE. Major new features include social networking and online collaboration integration, the new netbook interface, the KAuth authentication framework, and a lot more.
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rockmen1
Member since:
2006-02-04

"That is entirely true - at least, if you use one of the open-source drivers. If you do, modern X is actually quite nice. It does a pretty good job configuring itself, and you can re-configure it on the fly: mucking about with xorg.conf usually isn't necessary. In fact, many modern distributions no longer include xorg.conf files - for example, Sidux Linux 2009.4 and Slackware 13 don't. The biggest problem right now is simply the limited nature of the open-source drivers: they don't provide full functionality on many platforms, requiring use of the closed drivers - which are not nearly so well integrated with X, don't support many of it's shiney-and-new features, and aren't as stable. I installed Sidux Linux at work recently. Out of the box, it used a newer X. It had no xorg.conf file. It came up flawlessly, recognized both my monitors, etc. Except... for whatever reason, the open-source NV driver appears to allow the multiple desktops of a dual-head system to have a total area of all of 1280x1280. And, apparently, GLX was using MESA (in software). To get real hardware-accelerated rendering, not to mention to be able to use my dual-head system at a higher resolution than 640x480 a piece, I had to install the proprietary nvidia driver. This was... not nearly so pleasant an experience. Hello (creating and) manually editing an xorg.conf file, and spending several hours on cryptic X errors. But the difficulty in using the closed drivers isn't really the fault of X's maintainers, and will be less and less of a concern as the open drivers improve. The X experience is generally pretty good on platforms that the open drivers support, and that list is growing.


My Arch Linux system has a low-end ATI graphics card. Arch Linux has kernel 2.6.32, so that the new open source xf86-video-ati driver is included. With my card, this driver installs and configures automatically, out of the box, with 3D hardware-accelerated compositing automatically enabled. Mesa is not rendered in software but in hardware, all of the Kwin effects work straight away, and the desktop is very fast.

Xorg is fine with the right drivers. "

"Fine" is far from great. I got compile 2.6.33 kms + mesa 7.7, with HD4770, the frame rate of kwin desktop effect dropped significantly when 6+ windows are opened.
Top cmd shows X of a 50% CPU usage with E5200, compare to my Mac and WIN7 of only 20% even when dragging a window around.
There are much place for X to improve.

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