Submitted by 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.”
Nice to see that project always being better and better
We wait for the KDE 4.3 release !
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.
Yes of course, for me. I am sorry for your pain. But not everyone feels KDE4 is worse than KDE3.
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
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
Are you talking about rubber-banding? In kde3 you can go to ‘Control Centre’ -> ‘Desktop’ -> ‘Window Behaviour’ and click on tab ‘Moving’. There you can select if you want to display contents of moving and resizing windows. This is not a new trick. I get your point about kde4 being slow on machines that don’t have fast GPU. But a fast GPU should not be a requirement, i.e. some people don’t want all the eye candy, they would rather have a basic and fast desktop. Anything on top of that should be optional. I think kde4 is trying to be so much like Windows Vista or Mac OS X, they have neglegted the basic philosophy of Unix – keep it simple stupid.
Edited 2009-05-08 13:54 UTC
Well if all you want is a Simple desktop I don’t think KDE is the desktop for you, it has never been, and it’s not what it aims to be. Use XFCE or one of the boxes instead.
I have a 2 years old computer and it runs KDE very fast. I’m happy KDE developers are using my GPU to make everything faster instead of leaving it there without doing anything because someone somewhere may not have a GPU. If you have old hardware there are options for you as I said above. Let the people who has more modern hardware have an option that uses all of this new hardware properly.
I didn’t say it was a new trick … I’m just pointing out that it is so. KDE3 used software rendering of the desktop, and KDE4 uses GPU hardware-accelerated rendering.
If you don’t have a hardware-accelerated graphics capability (a working GPU) … then KDE4 will be slow.
If, however, you do have a hardware-accelerated graphics capability … then KDE4 is quite fast.
This is probably by far and away the primary reason why the user experience with KDE4 apparently varies so much from system to system.
On the system I am using right now, which has a fairly modest dual-core AMD64 CPU, 2GB RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO graphics card, as I type this, KDE4 is faster than any other desktop system. It absolutely flies. It is noticeably faster than XP and GNOME on this same hardware.
About the only thing that would be as fast is a very minimalist lightweight desktop such as JWM (Puppy Linux) or LXDE. But they are not much fun …
However, I fully realise, YMMV. Not everyone has a system that runs well with KDE4.
Edited 2009-05-08 14:30 UTC
Intel graphics cards seem to be a bit hit & miss. Running Jaunty on work machine (Dell Optiplex something with crappy intel chip I can’t recall the model of right now), KDE is unusable. But so is Gnome unless you turn compositing off. On my home machine with nvidia card, everything is just zippy.
Intel graphics are in a transition stage right now, and they have had significant performance regressions of late. They weren’t that good to begin with.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_904_intel…
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzIyMA
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_intel_sha…
I think it all very much depends on the kind of graphics card that you use. So people say x is slower than y and others say it’s the other way around. The more features you use, the more drivers/hardware gets in to play.
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
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.
Amazing how you assume it’s KDE4’s/Qt4’s fault rather than KDE’s new tech exposing bugs in the lower stack.
Get the hardware drivers updated to suit the new tech, Nvidia 170.xx series were slow as hell and I can imagine others are too. If hardware drivers don’t update to accelerate Qt4 properly then it’s going to be slow.
I’m not sure what Qt4 is doing that requires mondo graphics cards and drivers, because I certainly can’t see it. And it doesn’t matter which backend I use: OpenGL, Raster or regular/XRender — it’s still slow. So clearly it must be finding the most inefficient and least likely to be supported way of doing stuff that was already fast before. I don’t see how that’s an improvement.
Not all Nvidia hardware is supported in the 180.xxx branch of their driver.
So people either have to upgrade their GPU or pass on KDE4.
That is true, but the 96.xx driver for legacy GPUs works just fine with KDE 4 too. So you can get drivers for any NVidia GPU newer than first versions of the GeForce2/Quadro2 chips, that are able to handle Qt4/KDE4 correctly.
Perhaps the 71.xx series of drivers can make those older cards work too, who knows? But those are 8-9 years old chips so perhaps the correct question would be, who cares?
Old (legacy) driver are in better shape than 170. Those bugs were regressions, not unimplemented features
If you have a nvidia card, that is probably the cause of it. Nvidia graphics drivers for Linux have been very broken for over two years, and it was fixed only recently. If you have a nvidia card, then unless you have updated the nvidia drivers for Linux in the last couple of months, that is almost certainly it.
KDE4 is very fast … PROVIDED that you have properly working hardware-accelerated graphics.
I have a Radeon card whose driver is supposedly done.
Compiz and Kwin use different methods to do hardware acceleration, so having one working does not guarantee that the other one is going to work. There is a lot written on the web about how to solve Kwin performance issues, just google around, or you could at least tell us what graphic card and drivers you are using so that we can try to help you.
I have a Radeon Mobility X300 in a ThinkPad T43. It uses the r300 driver which hasn’t seen much work lately because, as I understand it, there’s not much left to do.
Support for the r300 graphics chips has been dropped by ATI proprietary driver for Linux recently. If you have installed a recent Linux distribution (say Jaunty) then you may have stepped backwards a bit.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_legacy&…
I don’t use the proprietary drivers, I use the open source ones from Git. I don’t use Ubuntu either. Like I said before, the open source drivers are plenty fast for xcompmgr and compiz as well as Qt 3 and even the latest GTK+. Qt4, on the other hand, has been getting progressively slower with each new release.
Try march version of fglrx, it should be a lot better than the OSS r300 driver.
KDE 4.2.2 runs faster than kde 3.5.10 on my old 450mhz pentium2 with 384mb of ram and 64mb radeon 8500 with arch linux and slackware.
Try running a less bloated distro.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you should really try out the latest nightlies! They’re awesome! 😉
I’m currently running CentOS 5.3 and have been looking for a KDE 4 repository. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one out there. The best I could find was kde-redhat which, with the testing repository, got me up to 3.5.10 (which is pretty nice).
I’ve been using KDE 4 in openSuse and I really like a lot of the features. It’s great to see that they’re continually improving it. I just hope to see it on CentOS/Red Hat soon.
A couple of people have managed to build KDE 4.x on RHEL5 (and CentOS5), but it required a lot of changes to core RPMs – which AFAIK prevented the KDE-redhat team from releasing KDE 4.x to RHEL5.
On the other hand, RHEL 6 is long over due (Currently its scheduled to land in Q1/10) and given the fact that it should be built around F10 (F11?), it’ll include KDE 4.2.x or even 4.3 out of the box.
– Gilboa
Thanks for the info. Red Hat customizes their stuff enough that I guess it’s not surprising that it’s an incredibly difficult install. I guess I’ll have to wait until 6 (or maybe I’ll switch to openSuse…)
Actually, the problem is not RHEL customization, but RHEL shipping old versions of key packages. (E.g. qt, kernel, dbus, etc)
– Gilboa
I loved KDE 1, 2, and 3 but I don’t care for 4 at all. I have many systems that run 3 fine but 4 is a total dog. I am not going to buy a new graphics chip for a desktop environment it doesn’t make any sense. This is the same issue I had with Vista if my machine could run dual monitors 1280×1024 under XP and Linux with KDE 3 but can’t run Vista or KDE 4 well that is crazy. I have an older non dual core 3ghz chip 4gb of ram and a 256mb video card. I can understand the latest 3D game not running or running slow but if I can do video editing on this system on the older OSes I shouldn’t have to shut everything down to run a newer OS.
I have an older Powerbook that runs OSX 10.4 just as well if not better than it did OSX 10.0 so it is entirely possible to code these newer desktops to work well with out adding crazy requirements to the system.
Unlike the case for Vista, 3D Graphics chips from circa 2003 have more than enough capability to run KDE4 at better-than-other-desktops speed. That is six years ago.
If your system is older than that, then you probably will have a poor result from KDE4.
In order to avoid the Windows tax, I generally buy a motherboard upgrade kit, a graphics card and a blank hard disk when I want a new machine, and I put it together myself. My current system, which is about two years old now, and low-end specification when I put it together, I paid about $200AUD for the upgrade kit, $80 for the blank hard disk and about $50 for the lowest-spec graphics card that I could find that had a 3D GPU. I already had the box, keyboard and monitor.
$50 for a low-end ATI Radeon 2400 Pro graphics card (and I needed some type of graphics card anyway) doesn’t seem to me like a bad deal to be able to run kDE really fast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R600#Radeon_HD_2400
I recently tried KUBUNTU Jaunty. KDE was all good but then suddenly KWin started to crash, just like Explorer.exe. It would crash, and then reappear. After this, enabling and disabling native Compiz, the Alt-Tab key stopped work literally, and there was nothing around Kubuntu forums or around the net that would solve this problem. Changing icons/mimetypes for an specific file also was not possible: fixed for 4.3, meanwhile let’s just stay like dumb-headed Nautilus. Acessing a samba share also revealed issues: Files wouldn’t get copied to my ext3 partition, instead, a virtual link would be created there, disappearing right after having the windows machine turned off.
I MEAN… WHAT THE HELL…
Sorry, no KDE. And I still have to mention why buggy applications make the cut over others just because of the “K”. Konqueror over Firefox, KMail over Thunderbird, and the fact that every GTK+ application will look at the same time “different” and “ugly” than KDE-4 applications. But then you have the KDE-3 applications that will go through the same issue. Ah incompatibility drives me mad.
One of the biggest problems in Linux desktop must be this: inconsistency. Applications work great, but somehow they manage to have their own idiosyncrasies.
Everyone and their mother knows Kubuntu is like the worst Kde disto ever. Anyone with problems with KDE under Kubuntu is told to use distro that cares about releasing proper packages.
Or to compile the code from truck/branches like on my laptop. Is is easy and much, much more stable than Kubuntu packpages.
http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4