"After years of focusing on further improving KDE4 two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as long-time developer - and Plasma team leader - Aaron Seigo points out in an interview with derStandard.at/web, the source-incompatible changes shall be held to a minimum. Also calls Frameworks 5.0 only the "first step", new Applications and Workspace releases are to follow later, Seigo goes on to talk about the chances in the mobile market with Plasma Active and further areas of collaboration with the other big free desktop: GNOME."
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Member since:2009-06-30
KDE4 (I have version 4.6 installed) is still heavy on resources. I have a rather new laptop which can run KDE at a reasonable speed (still Compiz offers a smoother experience) but I don't use KDE in my daily work simply because I like the laptop to run cool and quiet.
Besides, OP (protomank) didn't question the usefulness of lower level abstraction layers (APIs) - these generally work well and are only a concern to developers anyway.
What he said is that Plasma is an overkill and doesn't really add much value, yet it takes valuable resources (of both developers and users). I couldn't agree more - every time I attempt using KDE4 I end up disabling 90% of effects and more obnoxious features and themes. That makes the environment quite usable but it raises a question why developing a panel, a couple of applets and still not very good menu and desktop search system, has to take so much time and CPU power. And why do I have to invest a better part of an hour or two to get it to what should be a default state for most users.
At the end of the day the only thing I want to do on my PC is running my applications and accessing my data. A desktop should make these tasks easy but other than that it should stay in the background as much as possible. The last thing I want is a desktop-star, continuously taking my attention from productive work to its bells and whistles.
Member since:2007-08-22
That is simply the nature of trying to track all information on the system - from the meta data to file names etc as you have to index, decode, etc all that information at least the first time.
Then again, you can also turn that indexing functionality off and not bother with it.
KDE 4 - especially KDE 4.6 - is very usable right out of the box. I use it on both Kubuntu 11.04 and Gentoo installations, on systems that are several years old and even keep quite a few of the effects turned on. The laptop I'm writing this from now (vintage 2008) has nearly all effects turned on; my systems at home not so much but still quite a few effects (they're considerably older - vintage 2003 and 2005).
Now I really like Plasma. I've never had much use for virtual desktops, but Activities make sense to me - I've got 4 going now.
Compared to using KDE3, KDE4 is a very different experience that really takes on a different mindset of working if you want to really get the use out of it. But, as of 4.5 or 4.6, if you really just want something like KDE3, then just turn off the indexing, set your desktop workspace to the Desktop folder, and you're good to go - virtual desktops and all.
Member since:2008-09-24
Member since:2006-05-23
... How? Seriously, we want to know how you can cram a full DE onto a machine like that. Is the start time the usual 20 second wait? Longer even? Does the kickoff menu take half a minute to pop up? Does X keel over and die all the time?
I'm not trying to troll here, honest. It's just that I've never seen KDE4 being anything other than a pig, especially with startup times. It does in fact use a little less RAM than KDE3, but lower RAM usage is not the be all and end all of performance. So if you know a way of making KDE4 usable on really low-end machines like your Pentium II, please, don't clam up about it!
Member since:2009-04-23
Yeah sure... your netbook has a GPU and either a 1.6Ghz single or dual core cpu and at least 512Mb ram... perhaps you should reread my post KDE3 does run on alot crappyier hardware hardware that is is respectively also a lot cheaper and energy efficient.
lemur2 ... sigh clearly you have no idea who you are talking to and the lengths I will go to run run what I like 
KDE 3.5 on Gentoo on an 800Mhz Crusoe runs nicely with jumanji as my browser or opera. It has some opengl acceleration but its pretty minimal.
I find it a valid critisism because there is no reason many of the features of KDE4 cannot run on older hardware... I triple boot XP, Gentoo and svn builds of Haiku OS on the subnotbook I was referring to and the latter has lots of impressive features that even KDE4 lacks like window stacking and tiling that makese sense super fast file searches that doens't bog everything down with nepomunk and clucene based text searches that are also impressively fast.
KDE 3.5 is nice and I like it but I would have liked to have seen an IMPROVEMENT without degradation in performance and no it wasn't too much to expect KDE developers themselves have as time passes even fixed some of the performance regressions they have introduced like the data base backends for plasma I believe it was was quite io bound for no real reason things like that add up massivly especially in a huge project like KDE and throwing cycles or disk io at a problem is not a solution.
Member since:2010-05-16
The third and final WWDC product I want to talk about is - of course - OS X 10.9 Mavericks. While iOS 7 was clearly the focus of this year's WWDC, its venerable desktop counterpart certainly wasn't left behind. Apple announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the first OS X release not to carry the name of a big cat.
We already talked about iOS 7 yesterday (after a night of sleep, it's only looking worse and worse - look at this, for Fiona's sake!), so now it's time to talk about the downright stunning and belly flutters-inducing new Mac Pro. As former owner and huge, huge, huge fan of the PowerMac G4 Cube - I haven't been this excited about an Apple product since, well, I would say the iMac G4. This is the Apple I used to love.
Apple held its big keynote event thing at WWDC earlier this evening, but since I was away with friends I've had to read up on it later in the evening. The company announced iOS 7, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and they gave a preview of the new Mac Pro. Especially the Mac Pro impressed me, and while iOS 7's new Holo/Metro-inspired theme looks messy and garish to me, I do commend Apple for finally breaking the mold. This news item will focus on iOS 7 - I'll dive into the Mac Pro and OS X 10.9 tomorrow (it's late here now).
And yes, the PRISM scandal is far, far from over. More and more information keeps leaking out, and the more gets out, the worse it gets. The companies involved have sent out official statements - often by mouth of their CEOs - and what's interesting is that not only are these official statements eerily similar to each other, using the same terms clearly designed by lawyers, they also directly contradict new reports from The New York Times. So, who is lying?This story is getting bigger and bigger. Even though most Americans probably already knew, it is now official: the United States government, through its National Security Agency, is collecting the communications and data of all American citizens, and of non-Americans using American services, through a wide collaboration with the large companies in technology, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. Interestingly enough, the NSA itself, as well as the US government, have repeatedly and firmly denied this massive spying on Americans and non-Americans took place at all.Ah, patents - the never-ending scourge of the technology industry. Whether wielded by companies who don't actually make any products, or large corporations who abuse them because they can't compete in the market place or because they're simply jerks, they do the industry a huge disservice and are simply plain dangerous. According to The Wall Street Journal (circumvention link), president Obama is about to take several executive actions to address patent trolls - which may seem like a good idea, but I am very worried that all this will do is strengthen the positions of notorious patent system abusers such as Apple and Microsoft.
With version 13.05, the developers of the Genode OS Framework take measures to ensure that Genode continues to scale well with a growing number of users and the steadily broadening platform coverage. Further highlights are the improved SoC support for Exynos 5, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi, i.MX, and new components for realizing headless systems.At the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took the stage to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. While most of the interview can be replicated by picking and reading 10 random Apple fanblog stories - there were still a number of very interesting things that warrant some closer scrutiny.
So, the Xbox One disaster continues. Microsoft's policy for dealing with the used games market has reportedly leaked - and it's a clear and direct attack to destroy the used games market. Prices for used games will be set at the retail value of a new game, and retailers have to hook into Microsoft's computer systems and comply with Microsoft's terms and conditions.At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
Member since:
2007-02-17
This is all mere unsupported allegation. I run KDE4 on a recent but low-end, under-powered, low-RAM netbook, and it runs just fine. I have encountered no hardware that used to run KDE3 well that cannot now run KDE4 just as well.
Indeed there may well be old hardware out there with no GPU, a slow CPU and a lack of RAM ... but such hardware will not run ANY recent full-featured OS well. If you have such hardware you have no hope of running KDE4, GNOME, Windows 7, Mac OSX Lion or whatever on it, something like Puppy Linux is probably your only choice.
My question for you is this: why is an observation that there happen to be some older machines still out there which will not run KDE4, GNOME, XFCE, Windows 7 or Mac OSX well in any way a valid criticism of KDE4 in particular?
Hmmmm?