Since the stream of news is still pretty much dry, I figured I’d throw in something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now, but really didn’t dare to: KDE4’s performance. Since experiences with KDE4 seem to widely differ between people, it might be a good idea if we, together, can find a common cause among those of us having problems.
Before we get into all this, I want to state that KDE4 is a very ambitious and revolutionary desktop environment. Where GNOME, Windows, and Mac OS X seem content to basically keep their desktop unaltered (since god knows how long), the KDE team took the bold step of starting from scratch, and to rethink all set conventions.
Yes, I consider KDE4 to be revolutionary. Where its competitors are all rusted-stuck in a particular way of thinking, a particular layout, a particular modus operandi, KDE4 and Plasma are free to be moulded into anything you want – as evidenced by how relatively easy it was to come up with the Plasma netbook layout.
Sadly, as with any new technology, there are problems, and in this discussion, that’s what I want to focus on. Specifically, I want to focus on the question of stability and performance. I’ve used every version of KDE4 since 4.0 came out, and all of them have given me considerable headaches in both performance and stability.
Applications randomly crashing, background services suddenly deciding to call it a day, Plasma copping out – I’ve seen it all. In my latest KDE4 stint, version 4.3, I couldn’t go a day without at least 4 random crashes. “Random” is really the key word here, as the randomness of it all makes it virtually impossible to turn them into bug reports – I can’t even reproduce the crashes.
The performance problems are probably even more troublesome, as you encounter those continuously. Especially in the area of responsiveness, KDE4 is lagging for me greatly. Resizing windows, moving them around, opening menus, playing with Plasma widgets – it feels like everything is covered in a thick layer of molten sugar. Opening applications does not really pose any problems, by the way – they open reasonably fast. It’s the GUI operations that are slow – not the applications themselves.
It’s been suggested to me countless times that my problems are caused by my hardware, which seems ever more unlikely an explanation as time goes on. KDE 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 were tested on my previous computer (Pentium 4 2.8HT, 2GB RAM, GeForce 6300 128MB RAM), while KDE 4.3 (and 4.4B2) were tested on my current machine, which is ridiculously powerful (AMD Phenom X4 4×2.2Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Radeon 3200HD).
Both of these machines simply cannot pull KDE4 along, and I find it hard to believe both machines are somehow broken, especially since they pull other operating systems without a hitch. Both of them perform excellent, without any lag or stickiness, when it comes to Windows 7 and GNOME/Compiz. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that Windows 7 has reached BeOS-like responsiveness levels (mind, though, that it takes BeOS only a fraction of the power to get there).
Basically, I’m interested in your experiences with KDE4. Do you experience any problems? What hardware are you using? Which distribution(s)? What driver version? Try to be as detailed as possible. I’ll start – I’ve already listed my experiences, so here’s a detailed overview of my hardware:
- Foxconn A7GM-S 2.0 motherboard
- AMD Phenom X4 4×2.2Ghz
- 4GB DDR2 RAM
- ATI Radeon HD 3200 (on-board)
- Realtek ALC888GR audio chip (on-board)
- IDE hard disk
- Benq G2410HD display
- Distribution: Kubuntu 9.10
- KDE SC 4.3.4 (also tried KDE 4.4B2; slightly improved performance, but can’t comment on crashes since it’s just a beta)
- Proprietary ATI driver version: 8.660-0ubuntu4 (from official repository)
With some luck, we might be able to determine some common factors among those with problems (or among those without, of course), so that those of us having problems might be able to do something about it. I really want to use KDE4 (I actually like it), but I won’t settle for mediocre performance and stability.
Rests me to say that this story is not about bashing KDE – I’m genuinely interested in finding out why I and others are having problems when so many others have no problems at all. I want to use KDE4, because it’s a great environment with new and revolutionary ideas, and it sucks that I’m being held back by something as silly as bad performance. I’m sure many others with problems feel the same way.
NVIDIA Driver.
The binary one of course.
The new Beta 195.30 improves things a lot but the stable one causes all sorts of issues. Just take the NVIDIA driver out of the loop yourself and see the difference since it causes crashes and performance issues with plasma.
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2149232
Edited 2009-12-27 14:25 UTC
Sadly, I’m using a Radeon chip.
Although blaming the NVIDIA driver is popular. My previous machine indeed used an NVIDIA chip, and even during the 4.1/4.2 days, people always told me “the next NVIDIA driver will fix your problems”
.
Are you sure it’s a Geforce 6300 and not a 5300? I can’t find any information regarding the former and if it’s the latter it’s no longer supported, you’re stuck using a legacy driver. So it’s probable the fix incorporated into the current drivers was never backported. This is assuming it is a 5300.
My motherboard has an integrated HD3300 that I’ve honestly never bothered using. I’ll try that out and see it how it goes.
Edited 2009-12-27 15:00 UTC
Yep but memory problems and some crashing issues mysteriously go away when you revert to the XOrg NVIDIA driver. KDE 4.4beta is running pretty nicely for me.
Here’s my specs.
KDE 4.4Beta2 – OpenSUSE 11.2 – Unstable trunk repos.
Intel Quad-core Q8400 2.66Ghz
ASUS P5QL Pro
4GB ram
NVIDIA 9600GT
I waited for KDE4.3 before I switched. Tried Kubuntu (jez, what are you doing!?) and Fedora. Stopped looking when I found OpenSuse 11.2. I was very, very impressed with it. My hardware is a Thinkpad T400 (intel graphics) so I guess my hardware is well supported.
It seems like it is very hard to package KDE4. I mean Kubuntu is really bad and fedora was just ok (for me). Maybe KDE should try harder at ship reasonable defaults? OpenSuse got it right though!
Perhaps I don’t “tax the system”, but I’ve yet to figure out what’s so horrible about KDE in Kubuntu (except translations, of course). For English users, though, what’s the horribly about KDE in Kubuntu?
I found kubuntu (karmic) buggy. Plasma crashing a lot (moving panels killed it). And it was slow. Unpolished. But to be honest I gave up quickly. Read other users comments about kubuntu below, I agree with most of them. Even Kubuntu devs acknowledge the problem with project Timelord.
Finally it was OpenSuse’s integration of Firefox, the improved Yast and defult configuration that made it painfully obvious that Kubuntu was lagging behind.
I consider myself a big fan of KDE, bordering to fanboyism 😉 I would really like Kubuntu to be a smash hit since I really like Debian based distros.
Anyway great that you like Kubuntu, the more kubuntu users the better.
If you have to ask you need to try a few minutes or hours with KDE4 on a well put together system. It’s like the difference between Debian+GNOME and Ubuntu. Theoretically it’s all the same, but when it comes to polish and integration and so forth the latter provides a better experience… only its worse for KDE4.
I think it might be the proprietary ATI driver. fglrx has had a litany of problems for a couple of years now. If I recall correctly, on one Phoronix benchmark a few months ago for a 2D function the proprietary driver was more than ten times slower than the open source driver.
So perhaps try the open source driver, xf86-video-ati. For Kubuntu Karmic, this driver is great for 2D but it does not have 3D functions. You will not get desktop compositing, but it should be very fast for normal 2D desktop rendering.
Having said that, all of my experience with ATI chips is using a video card. Your problems could possibly be due to using the integrated graphics on the motherboard.
Edited 2009-12-27 15:08 UTC
If Thom can wait for the current git version of xf86-video-ati to go mainline in his distro, then he’ll get very fast 2D, *and* compositing, *and* decent 3D.
Of course, the 3D performance will depend on the strength of the IGP, and what kind of OpenGL stuff you want to use on it. It won’t play modern OpenGL-intensive games (get a card for that), but for light use and older games, it should work fine, mine does(1).
(1) Using Dave’s drm-next on Linus’s 2.6, Xorg from git also, on a slightly overclocked HD3300 IGP.
Well THAT’S the problem! You are using an NVIDIA driver with an ATI chip!
I’ve been using KDE 4 since release 4.1 in Mandriva.
I’ve had a few crashes when I used alpha or beta releases but the final releases had been extremely stable on my machine. Right now I use 4.4 beta and it seems extremely stable. There are a few glitches here and there but there is so much goodness to compensate for them. I love KWin. It just works as opposed to Compiz.
The system is very fast and quite light on resources. At boot I get around 250 Mb RAM usage which is not bad. I still have the rest of RAM up to 2 GB left for other aplications.
Edit: I have an old dual core with an old nVidia 7600GT and 2 GB RAM.
Edited 2009-12-27 14:27 UTC
Your KDE4 works that good because Mandriva have a good KDE4 setup. That unfortunately isn’t true for more popular Linux distros like Ubuntu.
I tried using kde4 several times on Ubuntu and it always brought me trouble and headaches.
Well, it’s up to you. Nothing stops you from using Mandriva if you want a nice KDE experience.
KDE4 on Ubuntu is a catastrophe. From what I read they are patching KDE with rejected patches, take CVS snapshoots rather then published releases and don’t test there own stuff.
I compared Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and Karmic 9.10 and both are bad compared with Fedora, Mandrivan, Suse and Gentoo (heared Arch is great too).
Maybe its the debian base? I don’t believe in an accident any loner.
Edited 2009-12-28 18:11 UTC
No the debian release of KDE is pretty much unmodified it only has patches for compatibility. Kubuntu has all kinds of crap to “increase user-experience”. Some works out well, but they all add instability and quirkiness.
I’m running FreeBSD 8-STABLE amd64, KDE 4.3.4 out of ports on a Ahthlon X2, 8GB RAM and an nvidia card using the new amd64 drivers from nvidia. I’m using OSS for sound without PulseAudio kludging up the works.
It runs like a top. Windows open and close snappily, switching desktops is fluid and all the extra compiz effects work without a hitch. I’ve had issues in the past with Konsole or rxvt not running quickly, but every app I’ve opened so far seems to run great.
On a side note, once you pick the right theme and get some widgets installed it looks gorgeous and is close to Win7 or OS X in look and feel.
Since KDE 4.2, KDE runs like a top for me as well.
I am actually pretty excited, because just today I have got Kubuntu Lucid runing with the ATI open source 3D drivers.
Foxconn motherboard
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+
1GB DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO (PCIE card)
ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) audio chip (on-board)
SATA hard disk
CHIMEI CMV 938A display
Distribution: Kubuntu 10.04 (Alpha 1)
KDE SC KDE 4.4B2
Open source ATI driver version: xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.12.99+git20091125.0061c4db-0ubuntu1 (amd64) (from official repository)
Kwin version: 4:4.3.85-0ubuntu1 (amd64)
mesa version: 7.6.1~rc3-1ubuntu1 (amd64)
glxgears shows me 5000 frames in 5 seconds, which is easily as fast as I have ever seen this card render using the fglrx driver.
If I place my mouse over the desktop switcher plasmoid, and operate the scrollwheel on the mouse, I can watch the desktop cube spin very merrily indeed.
When I left-click on the title bar of a Konsole window full of text it goes semi-transparent (indicating that the window can be moved), and I can waggle the mouse left and right as quickly as I physically can and see the Konsole window vibrate in sympathy, while all of the text on the Konsole window as well as the text on the window underneath (I tested it over firefox) is visible and rendered OK.
This is all at least on par with the performance of any version of Windows on this same machine.
Edited 2009-12-27 14:53 UTC
I have a very similar configuration.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with 2GB RAM and Nvidia 7600.
Mandriva KDE 4.3 runs very smooth. Vista not.
Edited 2009-12-28 18:09 UTC
I’m also running FreeBSD 8.0 AMD 64 with 4GB of RAM, 3ware RAID1 and ATI graphic Card.
Kde 4.3.4 is working perfectly without any crashes.
It is my main work machine, very satisfied
I’m running KDE 4.3 on two computers:
Asus EEE PC 702
900mhz Intel Celeron
2GB DDR2 memory
8GB SSD
Intel Graphics
Kubuntu 9.10
Dell Inspiron 1545
2.0ghz T6400 Core2Duo
4GB DDR2 memory
320GB Sata HDD
Intel Graphics
FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE (running KDE4.3)
Both of these run flawlessly. Since 4.3 I have not had a crash that I can remember. Both of these laptops are used daily and I normally hibernate the EEE (its uptime is normally >20 days before I actually shut it down).
One thing I do want to point out if I have the 3d effects turned way down (basically off except for shadow effects) compared to a lot of KDE setups I have seen. The crashing mentioned in the article may very well be related to the 3d drivers in use.
I’ve been using KDE since 4.0 too and I haven’t have major problem with any of the releases. Yes KDE wasn’t good at first but since 4.3 It’s amazing. I absolutely love it and haven’t had a single problem with stability or performance.
And the 4.4 is way better than 4.3. Although still in beta stage Its completely stable for me. Ye i have some crashes in amarok, digikam and plasma but none of them was problem of KDE. I have a NVIDIA 5600 GTS card and never had any problem even with old and out dated drivers.
Edited 2009-12-27 14:43 UTC
Craptop:
Intel Celeron M @ 2GHz
1GB RAM
Intel 915G
KDE 4.3 runs fine, but the animations are fairly choppy. It’s also choppy in Compiz and Leopard too. If I set the animation speed to instant it’s fine. No stability issues.
Desktop:
Phenom II 920
2GB Ram
nvidia 9800GT
No performance or stability issues at all.
4.2 was the last version I had crashing with.
Edited 2009-12-27 14:45 UTC
I tried the 4.0 betas, final (horrible), various 4.1.x (still bad) and 4.2.x (finally getting there) series, and noticed it starting to get better. Slowly. Although it’s still not perfect, with the latest 4.3.x release in openSUSE, the number of bugs and annoyances has reached a new low (clarification: in a good way) for the KDE4 series. The number of major bugs has gone way down, and mostly minor bugs and annoyances seem to remain.
I want to have my internal system temperatures displayed as a widget on my desktop, and that little applet seems to have the most noticeable bug: it displays all temperatures with the designation of “°F,” but it’s actually giving the Celsius reading with a Fahrenheit sign. And yes–this is a problem to me because I use the Fahrenheit scale.
The good thing is, this (admittedly small) problem is the biggest “bug” I’ve encountered so far. Some of my problems are actually just annoyances; though right this second I can’t name any off the top of my head (I need some caffeine…).
Edited 2009-12-27 14:49 UTC
I think you might want to try this:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=92309
Using kde4 only since the karmic release but i didn’t had any crashes. Not too many 3D effects because i only have 1 Gb of ram, but i didn’t experienced any crashes with default effects.
Asrock Alive nf6p-vsta motherboard
onboard nvidia geforce 6150 se with 128 mb ram shared,
nvidia x86_64 proprietary driver version 190.42
amd athlon 64 LE-1620
creative audigy se sound – oss4 driver
1 GB RAM
Western digital SATA hard disk
Display: LG 19′ wide monitor, 1440×900 resolution
KUbuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 64 bit, KDE 4.3.4
Edited 2009-12-27 14:55 UTC
get some graphics hardware that has usable drivers… i run kde4 with both intel and nvidia, and ond intel it works fast, the same cannot be said for nvidia crap
Bullshit alert.
You really want the nvidia binary drivers (and nvidia card).
I even specced my next laptop (dell precision M2400) by the merit that it has nvidia quadro. You may go all touchy-feely about open source merits of ati/intel, but in the end of the day you want nvidia because it’s the only one that gets the job done today (in case you want a working system now, not by next christmas if you build X from git).
It’s bit of a shame, really.
Distributions are just now starting to be released with kernel 2.6.32
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05840
ATI open source 3D drivers, installed out of the box.
Nice. Very nice.
I’m not sure that this one works (because Debian is a bit slow to update X):
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05838
… but it can’t be far off.
Much, much better than any binary blob driver. Regardless of performance (which BTW seems pretty good for such a new driver), the fact that it is open source means (1) developers can fix it, and (2) since it is part of the kernel, it is automatically correct for the kernel. Sweet.
Nothing touchy-feely about this at all, the open source drivers are a definite win-win for both users and ATI.
Edited 2009-12-27 15:48 UTC
Don’t you think it’s a problem that KDE essentially requires one particular brand of graphics card and a fancy model as well, just to run smoothly? For all the flack Vista got, it would actually run smoothly and correctly on a range of hardware (although not as big as range as XP). There’s no reason why desktop effects should require a gaming rig, except that the KDE programmers suck. Compiz got it figured out, KDE and Qt still refuse to.
I’m now running Windows 7 and haven’t looked back.
It doesn’t but it’s no small secret that the Linux graphics stack isn’t up to what Windows and OS X are.
NVIDIA doesn’t fix much rendering speed regression in the older GPUs’ either and split them up, calling the drivers Legacy.
Sometimes I do think NVIDIA come up with some new speed up for KDE4 and then say it only works with 200series GPUs’and above, just to try and force upgrades on Linux(the new beta does exactly this).
Edited 2009-12-27 18:51 UTC
KDE runs just fine on Intel graphics, and ATi graphics, using both the opensource ati driver and fglrx. I know, because I’ve used them both extensively over the past 3 years. However, I don’t use the latest/greatest/newest graphics hardware (the Radeon X1350 is an older AGP chipset on a PCIe board). As such, things run quite nicely, even with desktop effects turned on, and spread across two monitors (2560×1024 desktop).
You don’t. Desktop effects even runs on the Asus eeePC 701. Not super quick, but usably quick. Same with the Radeon 7000 (I turn off DE, since it’s just used for displaying video on my TV). Same with the Radeon x1350 (I turned off DE on there since I have no use for any of the effects).
You don’t need a quad-core CPU, dual-GPU setup with 1 GB of video RAM to run KDE4. Even with DE enabled.
Perhaps your definition of acceptable performance is different from mine. I had a ThinkPad T43 with a decent (for the time) Radeon X300 in it. It ran Compiz like a charm, but KWin could never quite get it. Qt4 was also on the slow side. Windows XP flew, and even Vista wasn’t that bad. So as far as I can tell, the problem was with KDE4. I isolated all the variables and that’s the only one that yielded a difference. I suppose if your hardware is fast enough, it will work anyways, but that’s hardly a good definition of performant. You should need a Radeon X1300 just to have a smooth desktop. My X300 should have been just fine for that purpose.
How much video RAM? Which version of X? Did you use the fglrx driver?
My card had 256 MB of video RAM, and ran great with the fglrx drivers for X 7.1. Did multi-monitor (2x 1280×1024) using MergedFB, and desktop effects were smooth. I used them for a couple of days, but found them more toy than useful, so I disabled them.
Wow. You’re completely clueless.
I have to disappoint you but there are more reasons than you just mentioned.
It is not the KDE team’s fault if drivers suck, or if features in x.org are bugged. [1] In some cases they were the first to use them on a large scale and then it simply took time for the others to catch up. Now you could argue that you should use a mass of workarounds instead, but isn’t that — all the legacy crap — what keeps x.org behind, isn’t that what troubled Microsoft for years?
I also do not understand what Qt has to do with it and probably you don’t know as well …
[1] That doesn’t mean that their code is perfect.
Qt has a lot to do with it because even without desktop effects, Qt4 was still slow on my machine. Qt 3.5 was just fine, as was GTK+ (relatively speaking…). So between Qt4’s slow performance and KWin’s slow performance, KDE4 was a nightmare for me. And that’s only in terms of performance. In terms of functionality and appearance, it was also on the crappy side. Overall, I’ve found it to be a disappointment. I know I’m not alone.
Also, I’ve heard the X developers say that KDE 4 has done some dumb things when using graphics card features.
Because Qt is slow on your machine you say that they refuse to do what compiz did? That is ridiculous. You mix so much here.
Also I’ve heard some KDE devs say that some x.org features are bugged and that they fixed it after a period of denial …
Btw. on the Qt problems you could try to use a different backend maybe that works out for you.
In any case I also find it disappointing that Linux appears to be so far behind in terms of the graphics stack, whose-ever “fault” it might be.
I tried different backends. I tried running different builds of Qt4 (4.5, 4.6, betas, alphas, trunk). I also used stable X.org drivers as well as from Git, including KMS and non-KMS, Gallium and non-Gallium, with all sorts of driver switches turned on and off. Didn’t matter. All I got was different levels of unacceptable performance for both Qt4 and KWin (which, since I didn’t make this clear, are two separate issues).
Weird enough Qt4 apps work just fine (eg much faster) on Windows and Mac. The problem is in X and its drivers, the linux graphics stack. Qt 4 does a lot more than Qt 3.x, in terms of animations, double buffering (avoiding flicker) and makes heavy use of hardware accelerated drawing. But if that hardware acceleration is actually 10000x slower due to stupid bugs in the infrastructure, you’re screwed… That’s why the RASTER (using the CPU) rendering is in many cases so much faster than using the GPU. Of course raster isn’t faster in everything – there is a reason rendering is usually done on the GPU. End result is that nothing really works very well – raster will never be good enough cuz the CPU isn’t designed for that, GPU is too slow cuz the drivers and graphics stack suck.
All I can tell you is that I used KDE3.5 and KDE4.3 both on my current machine and haven’t seen any noticeable slowdown. Actually, having upgraded to a better video driver, 2D has gotten *faster* for me, not slower. Note though that I’ve got most of the graphics effects turned off. That stuff (which wasn’t in KDE3.5) needs a GPU with good 3D support. If turning that off helps, then the problem is your video driver. Or there may be some other issue, like a problem with your distro’s packaging/building of KDE4?
KDE4 runs beautifully on a mundane netbook. Intel GMA 950 graphics, and Intel Atom N270 (1.60GHz) CPU, 1GB RAM … no problems.
KDE4 doesn’t need a high-powered graphics GPU, it only needs a GPU with a working driver.
To that end, don’t use the proprietary drivers. Even the barely-functional open source nv driver is better for nvidia cards than nvidia’s proprietary binary blob driver.
On the same hardware with working graphics (such as the netbook specifications above), KDE is faster than Windows 7.
Edited 2009-12-28 04:32 UTC
That really depends on the hardware and the driver version. The binary driver 185.18.36 works quite nicely with an nVidia 9600GT, Linux kernel 2.6.31, and Xorg 7.4, running dual monitors at 1280×1024, with desktop effects enabled, using KDE 3.4.2 via Kubuntu 9.10.
The problem with quantifying “hardware/software that works’, though, is the absolutely huge matrix for all the permutations of software version numbers (kernel, X, driver, etc) and hardware.
There probably are some combinations of proprietary driver version and graphics card that work just fine.
This maybe so, but as far as I can see, most people (whatever graphics they have) who are reporting bad or buggy performance of KDE are using a proprietary driver. It is quite possible that I have got this wrong, but that is the way that it seems to me on the face of it.
Edited 2009-12-28 06:19 UTC
Hmm, I run ATI’s legacy driver for my x2300 radeon mobility (far from fancy) on Kubuntu Jaunty. Performance is pretty fast, along with tearfree video. Right-click context menus have some tearing when called upon.
No, really. I don’t want binary garbage or anything from NVIDIA at all. It completely fails to get the job done.
As a user of the current git version of the FOSS radeon driver, I can say categorically that it has *plenty* of merits, and none of them have anything to do with ‘touchy-feely’. Its all about features & performance.
And as a former Nvidia customer whose card got EOLed out of their main driver, I can also say: ‘Been there, done that, no thanks.’
As long as I have a choice, I’ll go with the company that better supports, and integrates with, the OS that I use. And that is no longer Nvidia.
And that has never been the case and most likely never will be.
As far as the ‘integration’ goes, yes, but I was also referring to performance. There was a time when Nvidia was the only option for good 3D on Linux. Not only was their hardware better, but their drivers were too, and their Linux driver worked about as well as their Windows driver did.
Fortunately, for those who value competition, the graphics market got a new entrant, and a breath of fresh air, when AMD bought ATI and took ATI’s tech to the next level (their hardware is now kicking Nvidia’s arse, and their drivers are improving more rapidly).
And the fact that AMD is far more FOSS friendly than Nvidia has ever been, and likely ever will be, is just delicious icing on the cake…
What’s that, Intel? But they do crappy videocards…
ATi has left X1xxx and older owners out in cold lately, as 9.3 catalyst just does not support 2.6.3x kernels and Xorg 7.5.
On the other hand, I know people, who’s still running nVidia Quadro NV280 (PCI, not PCI-Ex) on modern distros.
I’m sure you’ve been confused somewhere (like, trying to use latest drivers instead of corresponding legacy branch). Hell, even Riva TNT2 M64 still can work.
Don’t know what you’re referring to here. My hardware is from AMD/ATI.
AMD/ATI is doing the same thing Nvidia is. Older stuff thats dropped from their proprietary driver is still supported by their ‘legacy’ drivers, and their FOSS driver. The difference is how far they’re willing to go to make the FOSS driver useful. Nvidia’s ‘nv’ is 2D only, and is FOSS only due to its license (otherwise its obfuscated/undocumented code that only the Nvidia devs really understand). AMD OTOH, will eventually support all of their old hardware in their new FOSS driver, which isn’t obfuscated and will be integrated into the kernel (KMS+TTM) and Xorg (driver+Mesa), and it will eventually support all the features of those older cards (2D, 3D, power management, etc). AMD’s long term plan for support of legacy stuff is centered on their new FOSS driver.
The same will soon be possible for older ATI stuff as well. Most of the new driver stack they’re working on now will come out with kernel 2.6.33 (part of it is in 2.6.32) and the next major release of Xorg.
Except Nvidia’s drivers (including the legacy ones) replace part of the Xorg stack (the 3D stuff). Once something enters the deep-freeze of ‘legacy support’ you’re not going to get much if any improvements, they’ll only do the minimum they have to to keep the legacy drivers working (keep them working with modern kernels), while all of their focus will be on the current stuff.
In contrast, AMD’s new driver stack is an integral part of Xorg & the kernel, rather than a separate binary blob that only comes from Nvidia (other than the card’s microcode, which is treated just like other firmware, and loaded from /lib/firmware).
AMD, rather than trying to replace parts of Xorg with proprietary parts, is working with, and fully supporting, the new FOSS driver stack (Xorg, with mode setting & memory management done in kernel space, & Mesa for 3D), so people with legacy hardware will still get the benefits of improvements to the rest of the code (especially improvements to the 3D code paths in Mesa).
This new driver stack will also be *truly* open, since the hardware has been, or will be, documented (AMD is still going back through the internal documentation for older ATI hardware and is releasing it once it clears their legal checks), the code is open (and not obfuscated) so there will always be more people than just AMD devs who can fix problems or even find ways to improve the code (one of the main devs working on the new driver stack, especially the radeon driver itself, right now is a Red Hat employee, not an AMD employee).
Its pretty obvious now who is being more open and more willing to work *with* the Linux community rather than just ‘tolerate’ it. No, I’m not confused.
Overall great – minor annoying issues
I’ve been using kde since 1.X. Ever trying other DEs and/or window managers but none ever came close to kde in terms of user experience, usability and features. The 4.X series is the best ever, since it provides me with great and modern looks, plus a plethora of features that make me more productive (yes, I use my computer for work). In my notebook, it runs well when all effects are turned on and blazingly fast when effects are off (much faster/responsive than gnome and faster than windows xp). However, it has some glitches or “issues†that cannot seem to be resolved and are recurring, sometimes going away, sometimes returning between releases:
– There is that of kwin loosing shortcuts (ALT+F4, ALT+TAB etc.)
– systemsettings not configuring kdm themes;
– the resizing of windows with some effects enabled is terribly slow;
– quickaccess gadget crashing plasma;
– dolphin getting stalled out of the blue for no reason and then, some seconds later coming back to life;
– random crashes that cannot be reproduced (not only in betas).
My hardware specs are mean:
ACER Notebook
Intel Core 2 Duo T5500
2GB RAM
Integrated Intel Grahics (X.Org X Server 1.6.5)
OpenSuSE 11.2 (factory, packman repositories enabled)
Custom kernel 2.6.32
KDE SC 4.3.85 (KDE 4.4 Beta2) “release 3”
How can you classify this as a “minor annoyance”? Are your standards different than mine? Random crashes – especially if they happen often enough to mention them – are the worst kind of annoyance to me. Reproducible crashes aren’t a problem; you can report them, and this being open source, they are generally handled quite well. In the meantime, you can avoid the crash because you know when it will happen.
Random crashes, on the other hand, can’t be reported, therefore can’t be fixed, and can’t be avoided either. They are the absolute worst thing in software.
Linux desktop software doesn’t collect crash dumps automatically when it goes belly up? If not, that’s something serious to write an editorial about.
It can – at least KDE comes with the tools for it which will appear automatically upon a crash. However not all distributions ship with the required debug packages. And the bugreporting/crashdata gathering process still leaves a bit to be desired.
I can classify them as minor because they do not happen too often neither affect my work in an irreparable manner. Gwenview crashes – occasionally- when I change from viewing a movie to a picture – not the other way around. Dolphin crashes sometimes during preview operations – not during serious file operations. 2ManDVD crashed or hanged arbitrarily but I do not use this app, I merely tested it. There are other examples; however k3b and kmail never crashed on me and I do use these applications a lot. Plasma is also very stable, and never hanged or rendered the system unusable. Firefox on the other hand …
um … linux desktop apps actually have names like “gwenview” and “dolphin?” ….
I’m sticking with Windows 7, thanks … with crazy-ass app names like “Windows Media Player,” “Microsoft Word,” and “Internet Explorer.”
“Microsoft Word” doesn’t mean anything. To find it on the menu, one first has to know that it is a Microsoft product, that it is part of something called “Microsoft Office”, and that it is called “Word”. Finally, when you wade through all these menu levels, and are brave enough to click on the “Word” menu item, only then do you find out that this program is actually a word processor.
In contrast, on the KDE main menu, under the “Graphics” category, “Gwenview” is the third item and it is described as an “Image viewer” right there on the menu.
On the KDE main menu, under the “System” category, “Dolphin” is the first item and it is described as a “File manager” right there on the menu.
On the KDE main menu, under the “Multimedia” category, “Amarok” is the first item and it is described as a “Audio player” right there on the menu.
On the KDE main menu, under the “Office” category, “OpenOffice.org Word Processor” is the last item and it is described as a “Word Processor” right there on the menu.
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot1.7-air….
KDE menus and the application names and descriptions listed on the menus are a great deal easier to decipher and use than most other desktop systems.
Edited 2009-12-28 16:13 UTC
UsingLinuxMakesYouSmarter(TM)
I’m with you. Random crashes would p*ss me off.
1st of all — and I think that was repeated over and over again in various threads since a long time — Ubuntu sucks balls for KDE software!!!
KDE software in Ubuntu is pretty much untested (half-assed backports etc.) and contains alpha or beta quality software and brands it as production ready (e.g. KPackageKit and PulseAudio).
So get a distro that doesn’t treat KDE SC like an unwanted stepchild. Get openSUSE, Mandriva, or whatever, but not (K)Ubuntu.
(BTW: “Project Timelord” was initiated, because the Kubuntu community even started to acknowledge that problem, but the first fruit of that initiative will be 10.04 and not any already released version).
2.) KDE has a dedicated bug squashing team: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=84473
Help those guys. Announce BugWeeks here on OSNews instead trying to do something similar yourself.
3.) Stop calling it KDE4. The rebranding took place a while ago. It’s KDE Software Compilation (for the whole package) or in this specific case KDE Workspace.
4.) This item will likely attract well known trolls like sbergman who turn this into a “Ubuntu with GNOME is god-like and KDE software is the lowest scum of the earth” flamefest. Great….
Edited 2009-12-27 15:32 UTC
I couldn’t agree with you more!. Specially regarding:
From my experience, openSUSE provides the best KDE experience of them all (see 11.2’s implementation).
Edited 2009-12-27 20:19 UTC
Other than translations, what, exactly, is wrong with KDE4 in Ubuntu?
I’ve been using KDE4 at works since KDE 4.1, first in Debian, and now in Kubuntu, and I’ve yet to find it “horrible”. Where are all the “OMG, how did this get in here?” issues? Am I just not using that one tiny app that everyone is complaining about?
Half our IT department uses Kubuntu, and none have complained about things to the extent that they want to switch OSes completely. The only things they complain about is the lack of software in older releases, and the requirement to upgrade the entire OS in order to get a new release of an app like Firefox.
You should learn to read before asking such questions. The answer is given right in the part you quoted.
You are just trolling. While I agree that Kubuntu has had its really bad releases. 9.10 is a good release and really fast and slim on my netbook.
And Kubuntu is not using Pulseaudio AFAIK.
No, I’m not. Kubuntu is a bad distro and quite a few people agree with me. Check the comments and especially check Kubuntu’s own “Project Timelord” announcement.
“Sucking balls” is not a very good description of what ails something. KPackageKit is not a KDE thing, and I’ve yet to find a KDE user that even considers using it, and neither is PulseAudio, that’s a horrible thing in general.
So, again, where does Kubuntu do things so horrible?
Seriously, are you that impaired of reading? I wrote much more than that — in the part you quoted!
Dude, I don’t know in which reality you live.
You wrote that you have yet to find someone who even considers using KPackageKit and then you ask what’s wrong with Kubuntu?
Kubuntu uses KPackageKit as default package manager!
Before KPackageKit there was Adept which was even worse.
But hey, why not quote Kubuntu’s own “Project Timelord” announcement? Let the Kubuntu project speak for themselves how they see their own quality:
“There is a general lack of Quality Assurance on uploads to both development releases and on backports of KDE packages to stable releases. File overwrite errors are too common in both cases. As a potential issue, we also have a collection of patches for most of our core KDE patches. These patches may or may not be of good quality, depending on the patch.
Another issue that seems to pop up is that some KDE modules are not compiled with all the functionality they are capable of. (…) These tend to be forgotten about too easily.
(…)
[Kubuntu-specific] applications lack polish, however, and usually are not integrated well at all with the surrounding system. Many of these applications seem
to mostly be ports of Ubuntu tools, which tend to be dialogs launched from the GNOME settings menu. These tools are launched as separate windows from the host application, causing needless clutter.”
Quotes taken from http://people.ubuntu.com/~apachelogger/Timelord/Project_Timelord_An…
Project Timelord was announced November, 2nd — after the 9.10 release: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/timelord
Edited 2009-12-28 03:55 UTC
I’ll give Mandriva a try over the new years weekend so we’ll see about that. Tried openSuse with 4.1 back when but it still sucked balls, especially the horror that is Yast.
This item is to about bugs, it’s about how to make it better.
It usually takes a while before people get used to incredibly retarded names.
Nothing so far.
I have no idea what you were trying to say.
It doesn’t matter whether we like the new branding scheme or not. It’s in place now.
Wrong.
Except I’m not a robot. I’m not going to specifically sit down and devote time to memorising a new convoluted branding scheme that few people here on OSNews understand yet anyway. When I say “KDE”, everybody knows what I mean. The new names – not so much.
For the same reason, I’m currently contemplating banishing camel case as well, because I’m tired of typing in arbitrary bullshit like iPhone and ThinkPad.
You can’t order people to learn your new arbitrary naming scheme right away. Overtime, we’ll adapt.
Edited 2009-12-28 10:54 UTC
I’ve had the most problems on ATI cards, though not recently. I use the binary blob, which seems to work better for most people.
But Kubuntu 9.10 with KDE 4.4 beta 2 seems the most responsive. it’s damn stable except the new features, of course (being beta).
Thinkpad T61, nVidia Quadro NVS 140M, almost all recent beta and stable proprietary driver releases tested. Mostly tried Kubuntu packages, with couple of tries with Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE and Debian.
As far as I can see, Plasma performance is good overall, Kwin is the biggest problem. It gets slower progressively after some period of use, specially when windows are being resized and minimized/maximized. It’s very annoying, forcing me to go back to GNOME/Compiz which perform quite well.
You know, if KWin really bothers you, you can run the plasma desktop with compiz instead.
I have been running KDE as my primary desktop since 4.1. There have always been minor annoyances but every release has gotten better. For instance KNetworkManager is now polished, Amarok is getting there (still lacking filter by ratings).
As far as visual, 4.4 Beta are much nicer looking when compared to 4.3 or Windows.
I have been using a 4+ yr old T42 laptop with minimal hardware. I do not run any of the flashy desktop effects because my priority has always been better battery life. The GUI is not any slower than KDE 3.x or Windows on this laptop.
I would be curious to find out what you think of the GUI with the desktop effects turned OFF.
There have been a lot of complaints about Kubuntu – especially the latest release being very buggy and crashy in general. I would suggest trying any other distro. If you still have the issues then there may be something more serious going on but I highly suspect this will solve your problems. Unfortuntaely Linux has been getting a very bad rap due to problems in ubuntu/kubuntu in general lately.
I use fedora with KDE 4.3. I have no such issues. I have also tried opensuse 11.2 and it has also been fine for me. I have also heard good things about mandriva. I am genuinely interested to see if you suffer any of those problems with those distros. At the very least it might make it easier to track down.
It would only take a moment of your time to try a live cd and see if the same issues persist.
absolutely true, a lot of bug in the buzilla for kde are specific to *buntu… not able to reproduce it on opensuse, fedora, mandriva…
if you want to test kde, stay away of *buntu
Archlinux with KDE 4.2 run very well on my very low performance Asus EEEPC 701..
Unfortunately, I stopped using it because I think kde guys lost a great opportunity to do a great new desktop when they start returning all those damn options and buttons and UI hell that old kde users was used to..
I hate that complexity mentality that lives among some kde people, and even if I love Qt, I’m sticking with gnome.. Gnome it’s not great, and gtk has some very annoying bugs, but at least it isn’t an UI nightmare
Seriously, 4.0 was clean enough and 4.3 offers too many buttons and such? Could you provide examples, I can’t really think of anything except maybe the plasma panel configuration bar…
Hmm, in 4.0, only a few programs were ready, and they were very good and simple, like Dolphin or Gwenview.
As soon as other apps started appearing, I thought they would continue the same way, simple, easy to use, but it was the contrary. People started complaining and bitching “where are my 55 buttons on screen??”, and monstrosity applications like KTorrent and Kopete were the common thing.
Seriously, just compare KTorrent with uTorrent for mac and you will understand what I call “ui nightmare”:
<a href=”http://www.filecluster.com/reviews/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/utorr…
<a href=”http://ktorrent.org/images/screenshots/KT-normal-o-status.png“>…
I can only agree, many apps written by the KDE community are still an UI mess. Gwenview and dolphin are still pretty OK, I’d say but yeah. KTorrent offers a lot of functionality and has a more complex UI. Granted, KGet can also download torrents and does it with a much more basic UI but I guess that’s no excuse.
Let’s hope some devs can clean up stuff one day, eg ktorrent would probably appreciate mockups or ideas which don’t remove functionality but clean up the interface…
I started with KDE 4.2 on Gentoo. It was okay. I didn’t try to do much with it, but it was fast enough. Then came 4.3. After that, everything was painfully slow. It would take minutes for the K menu to come up, and K3b would take minutes to open a file dialog. I reported the bug, but no one else could reproduce it. Then it dawned on me.
KDE and KDE apps store a bunch of stuff under “~/.kde4”. So what I did was go in there (and ~/.kde and ~/.kde4.2 because I didn’t know what was what) and delete everything except my keychain.
Voila. Tout était rapide de nouveau.
I’ve experienced this with LOTS of application and OS upgrades. Some preference file or metadata format or semantics has changed, and this causes the newer version to misbehave. Deleting all those files made everything use the defaults that the devs are using (because devs never seem to test upgrades!) and stopped making things slow. It also resulted in updates to the appearance that did not take effect due to the contents of old preferences.
BTW, I have a 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad with 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 and a RAID1 of 7200 RPM drives. Things like KWord take a fraction of a second to load and be ready. Actually, the slowest thing is KDE startup and shutdown, although that’s always been the case. Everything else is screaming fast. Including KDE. My graphics card is a lowly Radeon X1550 (RV516LE) on PCIe. KDE (or maybe X.org) refuses to do compositing with it, which perhaps is one reason it appears fast; it can’t do any of the fancy stuff.
Edited 2009-12-27 16:31 UTC
I installed Slackware 13 two days ago, which ships w/ 4.2. I’m not impressed. Many configuration options that existed in 3.5 are hard to find or non-existent. The KDE software, the quality of which I usually praise, is extremely buggy, and in some cases unusable. After a bit of tweaking I have it working _roughly_ like 3.5, but I’m seriously considering downgrading to 3.5.8.
I’d recommend you to update to 4.3 first. Quite a lot of features were added from 4.2 to 4.3.
3.5.8? Ain’t the newest KDE3 version 3.5.10? Why downgrade to an even older version, instead of the very latest KDE3? And while IMO KDE4 is still not quite there yet overall, I agree with the above poster: try KDE 4.3. It might suit your needs already. For me, it’s pretty usable as it is, though certainly not flawless (openSUSE’s implementation). If it’s not good enough yet, it looks like KDE4 will definitely reach maturity by 4.4 or 4.5.
You probably want 3.5.10
I’ve tested KDE SC 4.2/4.3 on a machine with a nvidia chip and I’ve run into some bugs.
Right know I’m using KDE SC 4.3 (kde-mod) on Arch Linux in a HP530 notebook, Celeron CPU, Intel graphics, 2gb of RAM. Flawlessly over the las 2 months.
I think the key here is that KDE4 stresses a lot the graphic driver, so a good driver is the key.
Sorry for my english =)
Edited 2009-12-27 16:56 UTC
I have tried KDE4 every now and then because I keep hearing people praise it like the second and third coming packed together, but.. Well, it sure looks good, and I liked how the animations were smooth as butter and usually well-thought out.
The annoyances with KDE4 however much outweigh the eye-candy; every single thing is over-engineered, there’s sometimes menu entries twice or thrice in the same application for the exact same thing, and buttons for them too. Then the addition of kitchen sink everywhere, the handling of plasmoids etc, and the generally unstable behaviour of it all just makes KDE4 a rough ride. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, but I still managed to crash various parts of KDE4 every now and then. The most annoying part being the panel, of course.
Basically, it just doesn’t suit me. It looks better than GNOME, by far, and I hope GNOME will catch up soon (unlikely as it is. They’re SLOW at doing anything about the looks.) But I like GNOME’s feel, missing redundant (personal opinion, I know someone will nitpick about this) menu entries and buttons, rather good defaults etc. It just feels good.
That sounds incredibly odd, do you have an example?
Never seen anything like it, expect in the application launcher as an result of having more than one KDE version installed. Giving double up of some applications. It have the sound of an installation issue, duplicate or broken config files perhaps.
Its odd to me too. The only thing I’ve ever seen like this is that the Menu Updating Tool will sometimes create redundant entries for the same app in the same location, which I suspect only happens with updating between KDE versions and keeping your old config dir, so you have new items that are slightly different in some detail data (descr, exec cmdline, exec options, etc) from the old one, causing the tool to think they are ‘different things’ and keep both.
KDE users call those things *features*.
This is why KDE and other DEs exist, because what *you* consider to be features in GNOME, are what *I* consider to be annoyances.
Choice is good…
From Thom’s description of persistent problems with responsiveness, it sounds like a combination of bad X11 drivers combined with bad setup of the same. The NVIDIA drivers had verifiable issues earlier(acknowledged by NVIDIA), and the ATI seems to have some too. It also seem to vary greatly over different driver and hardware versions, making the mess complete. In addition default configuration in some distributions(and/or driver installations) are far from optimal, and cause many of the problems. In those cases the distributions fail to deliver good defaults, manual tweaking of the xorg.conf file is unfortunately the only option to get correct performance.
The big amount of random crash issues, sounds more like bad packaging and perhaps distributions including of unstable applications. My experience, running self compiled from SVN since 4.2, have shown very few such crashes. Omitting some caused by SVN checkouts with clear bugs, and those sometimes happening to application running while recompiling everything, the rest is about 1-2 crash every week. Not too bad, considering that I use Konqueror as my main browser(Other browsers crash too, so it does not make much difference. But then you can’t blame KDE on those:-).
As for performance, it’s quite usable with some slowness at times depending on load. But I run on low end hardware, and XP does not fare any better.
The specs:
Athlon XP 2400+(2GHz)
1GB RAM, where 128MB are used by the GPU.
GeForce4 MX Intergrated GPU, with legacy 96.34 driver.
Yep, NVidia acknowledged in the past their drivers didn’t implement the by Qt heavily-used XRENDER accelerations. Actually the latest beta (190.30something if I recall) mentions specific KDE 4 improvements again so there still seems room for fixing in NVidia drivers…
My experience with KDE4 is that the distro you try it with will make a big difference to your opinion.
I was a fan of Kubuntu in the days of KDE3, but when they switched to KDE4, I found it a terrible experience. True, KDE4 was still quite new back then and things have improved, but I’ve tried it again more recently, and I’m still less than impressed. The Kubuntu team seem to have made no effort at all to customise KDE4 in the way they did for KDE3; they’ve basically just slapped a default KDE build onto an Ubuntu base and called it Kubuntu. Not good enough. I found recent Suse versions to be similar as well.
But the one distro I have really enjoyed using KDE4 with has been Mandriva. It seems like they’ve made a real effort to work with the software, understand where its strengths and weaknesses are, and build a distro that actually makes KDE4 into a useable desktop, rather than an unstable special effects showcase, which is what everyone else seems to want to do with it.
I’ve been using Mandriva with KDE4 at work for the last six months (I’m a programmer), and it’s been as good as or better than the older KDE3-based Kubuntu release it replaced in most respects.
Been using 4.3 on an old Arch desktop; 2 GHz K7 Athlon, 1 GB ram, nvidia 6600 GT using the nvidia driver.
It’s probably the best desktop I’ve used to this point. The eye candy is noticeably smoother over 3.5.10, especially if you used SuperKaramba in any capacity. Shouldn’t have waited so long to jump but bad reviews stopped me.
While KWin doesn’t have as many visual plugins as Compiz does yet, I find that the config menus are better laid out, presenting options for things like screen edge actions graphically instead of textually.
It’s a great start and I think by the time 4.5 comes out KDE will be far beyond what they had with the 3.5 series, and be well positioned to take full advantage of the system-on-a-chip computers that will all have very fast integrated graphics accelerators.
Part of the “problem” in kde4 vs kde3 is icon loading. In kde3 all icons an applications needed are loaded at startup, while in kde4 they are loaded on demand. This makes opening menus etc feel slow.
Well, speaking of icons, at least Oxygen has another problem which is related to the way they have been designed. At smaller sizes, the icons become fuzzy and indiscernible blobs, as if the designer simply resized the full-size icons, instead of properly designing them for each size.
Of course, other icon sets may not have this problem.
Oxygen ships special small versions of many icons, and our designer Nuno works hard to improve coverage. If you can help, he will gladly accept your offer.
I think that maybe due to some interpolation issue between the icon, not the icons themselves.
If you reduce the size of the panel with icons in, you’ll see they change to suit their smaller size below 28 pixels. This shows they were designed for a big size and small size(look at the dolphin icon change to show more detail at a smaller size).
Can you provide some examples? If you are talking abut the icons in the panel there are no miracles if you render an icon of any of its sizes it will become blury… they are pixel perfect if its scaled the pixel perfect lines will allays become blurry, oxygen icon sizes are 16×16 22×22 32×32 48×48 64×64 128×18 and 256×256. For most of the icons we did a different icon for each size. (because of that oxygen is a 256 mb monster)
I didn’t mean the icon thing as a really big problem – most likely, it’s just a matter of taste. Oxygen is a beautiful icon set, I just personallly do not like Oxygen at smaller sizes.
Fair enough
we do our best.
I tried KDE 4 from the moment it was available to its latest release and this on a variety of setups. Some had Nvidia cards, some had ATI cards and some were notebooks with budget 3d chips. Every time, the OS was absolutely awful. It looked great and seemed pretty useful for a moment, and then it crashed. I tried it again, it crashed again for no reason. I tried it again, it continued to crash. I don’t know what the zealots are holding on to, but the fact remains that KDE 4 is insanely unstable. It makes me laugh every time some fat guy with a beard and a stained t-shirt tries to convince me that Windows is unstable and that Linux operating environments are flawless when neither Windows Vista nor Windows 7 has ever caused me a problem whereas every variation of Linux has given me nothing but grief. Acknowledge that KDE4 sucks, fix it, make it work for EVERYONE and THEN start boasting about how great it is. Until then, clean your t-shirt, shave your beard, move out of your mom’s basement and stfu.
It makes me laugh every time some skinny guy with no beard and a clean t-shirt tries to convince me that Linux is unstable and that Windows operating environments are flawless when no Ubuntu version has ever caused me a problem whereas every variation of Windows has given me nothing but grief.
Different things work for different people. No OS will ever please everyone. That is why we have choices.
Acknowledge that Windows sucks for some people, and works fine for others, and KDE4 sucks for some people and works fine for others. Until then, get rid of your grudge against beards and dirty t-shirts.
(Note: I personally agree that KDE4 needs a lot of work. It has been stable for me, and the performance is alright, but it takes minutes to load and exit. And I can’t stand that. I used to use KDE3, but now I use GNOME on Ubuntu and I am fairly happy with it. Every Windows computer I have ever owned has had lots of minor issues and inconsistencies that would sometimes drive me crazy, but it was livable. I like Macs, but they are too expensive and I don’t really like the UI.)
Edited 2009-12-27 21:06 UTC
I’m still using KDE 3.5 here. KDE 4 was just slower than 3. Once KDE 4 reaches the performance of 3 I plan to switch.
I understand the newer versions should offer significant performance improvements. Is this really not the case?
I too have been holding with KDE 3.5 I have been using KDE since v 1 and have always embraced the new versions. Upon the release of 4.0 the lack of features that I was used to in 3.5x had me downgrading to Mandriva 2008.1. I have tried every new release of KDE 4.x and still do not wish to convert yet. Even KDE 4.3 still is not developed enough in my opinion. Can you autohide the panel yet? Because if you can then I cannot find out how. I just don’t see 4.3 as a complete DE yet. Until the feature set that is present in KDE 3.5 is implemented in 4.3 I do not think I will be switching.
Yes, and it’s not even hard. Right click on the panel and chose ‘Panel Options’->’panel settings'(If it’s locked, obviously you need to unlock it). In the configuration select ‘more settings’ and there select ‘auto hide’.
Not much different from any menu driven interface in use, so it seem you have not tried to find it very hard.
Edited 2009-12-27 21:30 UTC
I always measure OS performance on the weakest PC that I have, then it’s most fair, me thinks.
So there’s what I have: Athlon XP 2400+ 2Ghz CPU, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9600 XT. Not a high end system by any means today.
Windows 7 and Vista is running on it but not at usable performance (I love flash-like responsiveness
)
So I’ve been running XP.. Old, but fast, and stable (with updates and antivirus, etc.)
This year I’ve tried three KDE4 systems: Kubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010.0 and openSUSE 11.2.
What can I say – Kubuntu and Mandriva is _unbearably_ slow. Slower than Vista/7.
openSUSE, on the other hand, flies! I don’t know what kind of software magic/voodoo opensuse developers used, but KDE 4.3.2 is even faster than XP! And that’s with ATI open source driver.. amazing
—
RimZi
They have at least 1/2 dozen shamans on-staff chanting level 17 performance spells over the sources 24/7.
Vista and 7 will run just fine on an athlon 2ghz. If it doesn’t feel responsive enough then turn off aero and animations.
Hi, using ThinkPad T61p here. Great hardware, blazingly fast with KDE3.5. I’ts now pretty much acceptable with KDE4.3.
I’m now tracking 4.4beta on OpenSUSE and it’s getting better by the minute. I obviously have stability problems, since using a beta release, but 4.3 begins to be quite stable (I didn’t say production ready for the masses).
Anyway, I don’t think we’ll ever see a snappy and lightweight desktop as in past KDE releases. The memory footprint of KDE4 workspace is still quite impressive on every installtion I’ve seen.
By the way, tried Kubuntu a couple of times lately, and I must say the OpenSUSE KDE4 experience is way better at the moment.
Kudos to the KDE people anyway for the impressive work and for bringing us the most technologically advanced desktop environment on earth.
JMTC, Javier
the next version will fix all your problems
why is everyone laughing
I started with KDE 4.1 on Debian, and things worked ok. Was enough issues with various apps and plasma to keep KDE3 as my default desktop.
Moved to KDE 4.2 on Debian at work and FreeBSD at home. Worked well enough that I removed everything KDE3 except KPDF (printing issues with Okular on FreeBSD) and K3B.
Moved to Kubuntu 9.10 at work, with KDE 4.3. Upgraded to KDE 4.3 at home with FreeBSD 7.2.
Hardware I’m running KDE 4.x on:
Asus eeePC 701 4G
Intel Celeron CPU @ 600-900 Mhz
Intel onboard graphics
Kubuntu 9.04
KDE 4.2
desktop effects and most animations off
Toshiba Satellite laptop
Intel Celeron CPU @ 2.8 GHz
ATi Radeon 7000 onboard graphics
Kubuntu 9.04
KDE 4.2
opensouce ati driver
desktop effects off
Home desktop/server combo
Intel P4 @ 3.2 GHz
Intel onboard graphics
FreeBSD 7-STABLE (as of this week)
KDE 4.3.4
desktop effects off
using ZFS, acting as NFS/Samba share for house
old work desktop
Intel P4 @ 3.0 GHz
ATi Radeon x1350
Debian Etch then Lenny
KDE 4.1, 4.2, 4.3
fglrx driver then ati opensource
desktop effects enabled
new work desktop
AMD Sempron @ 2.8 GHz
nVidia 9600GT
Kubuntu 9.04, now 9.10
KDE 4.2, 4.3
binary nvidia driver
desktop effects enabled
Have not had any issues with KDE4 since 4.1. UI responsiveness is nice and quick. 3D effects work smoothly (when enabled). Since moving to 4.3 no random app crashes, and the ones that used to were “initial KDE4 releases” of software (ktorrent was the worst for this).
The only apps I have issues with are Google Chrome and Chromium on Linux. Pre-beta versions would causes desktop effects to go crazy. Post-beta versions have issues with some SSL sites.
All the centralised services and app integration in KDE is what keeps me using it. Being able to edit files on remote servers, transfering files between servers, access data remotely, etc. Basically all the KIO slaves that make the network transparent, and blurs the lines between “my system” and “remote system”. Along with Klipper, KWallet, and key-chain (not KDE specific), I just can’t work in non-KDE environments.
No more Gnome for me….I love KDE4 in Mandriva. It is beautiful and rock stable and a little different than the other KDE4 available.
Mandriva forever…
-2501
I used KDE for many years, and tried each new major 4.x release as it became available. Really, the only success I have had has been KDEmod on Arch Linux, and with that only the 4.3 version has been an acceptable replacement for the 3.5 series. At this point, I think that KDE4 is good enough for daily use, but there are still some minor issues. I want the ability to map the application menu to a right click button (which I hear is on schedule for KDE 4.4), and the whole interface is still somewhat sluggish compared to Gtk apps or even Qt3 (Intel graphics). This is a two year old 64 bit laptop with 4GB of RAM.
My only other gripe is that the entire plasma desktop can be brought down by installing a bad widget. There should probably be some separation between the panel/desktop and the other widgets; the ability for one bad applet to bring down the entire environment happens far too often and is reminiscent of Windows 98’s “Active Desktop.” Nothing that can’t be fixed by running plasma-desktop again, but I cringe at the thought of this happening to a new user.
I bemoan the lack of themes and I still have a bunch of GTK apps that I love to use, I still use and LOVE GNOME, but I must say that as far as themes go, qtcurve is fast becoming my favorite, it does everything that I think clearlooks set out to do years ago but better.
As far as stability and usability, I barely use ANY Plasma apps and I’m rather simple when it comes to requirements for a desktop, but KDE 4.4 BETA2 is par excellence.
4.2 was the first truly usable version, 4.3 got a lot better but I still noticed slight annoyances that drove me away but I think that 4.4 has the right mix, hard to define fully what it is but it’s quick, responsive and pleasurable to the eyes. I’ve had a couple plasma crashes (which I’m sure are being worked on) and Chrome doesn’t work quite that well yet but I see that they are REALLY getting somewhere.
I think that GNOME devs have a lot to look over with KDE4 when they get going with GNOME 3. There are a lot of lessons to learn so maybe GNOME was right all along in waiting and letting KDE take the brunt and lead car position in innovation LOL!
Well, I have Linux in my box:
– ASUS m3a78-CM
– AMD phenom X4 cores 2.2GHZ
– 4 Gb RAM
– ATI RADEON HD 4350
– and other cool things ….
but i had a lot headaches with the performace, I think sometimes install windows because the performace and the stability don’t deserve that box, the problem isn’t only KDE is a generally problem with the hardware support from the kernel. I tried Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and a lot distros and the problem is the same, this problem has me sad because I love linux and all that free software is.
“problems are caused by my hardware”
You see Thom, that’s a myth, it’s not true. It’s not caused by the hardware, it is the software. Now people would expect me to back my argument otherwise I will get -100. Since I am not the only one experiencing sluggishness, this confirms there is something wrong here. If this sluggishness is only caused on certain types of hardware (which would make it indeed a hardware issue) then perhaps KDE should make a list of “supported platforms”.
When I say sluggishness, I do *not* refer to the type of sluggishness that you get when you don’t have the right graphics drivers installed + LCD monitor combo. The type of sluggishness I refer is the one you get when you move toolbars, clicking on menus, dialog boxes pop ups etc. The whole thing looks as if was melted cheese with saus or it is floating on water. It is simply *not* snappy and solid! With Windows and Mac OS X and even Haiku, the whole thing looks as if it was made of bricks! You move a toolbar, you get a popup and the whole thing is super solid.
“when so many others have no problems at all”
These “so many others” people are either people living in denial — they know it’s broken but they just won’t admit it, have never touched a commercial product to see how things need to behave or they simply lack the skills.
This is just my opinion and I am sure many of you will disagree with me.
Yep.
In my experience, the main performance problem with KDE 4 (and most of the stability problems, come to that) are actually caused by drivers.
I’ve used KDE 4 on two different machines, one of which has been heavily upgraded over that time.
On my laptop (a 2007 Core 2 Macbook with Intel GMA something-or-other) KDE 4 is very fast and stable. On the same hardware it feels at least as fast and responsive as Mac OS X. The only part that ever felt sluggish was window resizing, and that seems to be fixed with KDE 4.3 (or at least, the one that’s shipped with Kubuntu 9.10).
On my desktop, it’s a completely different story.
Initially, the desktop had an Athlon 64×2 (can’t remember the model number – 4800 or so?), and an nVidia GeForce 7600 GT. Gnome was alright, but KDE 4 was pretty much unusable. Not only was it insanely slow, but it crashed. A lot. With compositing disabled, opening windows or menus could cause the entire X server to crash. With compositing enabled, it crashed less often, but was even slower.
I upgraded the video card to a GeForce 9600 GT. KDE 4’s performance and stability was unaffected, but Gnome became pretty sluggish and unresponsive.
Successive updates to the nVidia driver made an enormous difference. As of the last version, Gnome was only slightly sluggish. KDE 4’s performance started to match that of Gnome, and all of the crashes disappeared. With the latest drivers, both were usable, but neither was fast.
On the same hardware, using the Xorg NV driver instead of nVidia’s binary driver, both Gnome and KDE are very fast and responsive.
I then upgraded to an Intel Core i7. This made an enormous difference to the nVidia binary drivers – they are now easily as fast as the Xorg drivers. On my machine, Gnome is nearly as responsive as Windows 7, and KDE 4 actually feels far more responsive.
The only slightly sluggish thing in KDE 4 on this machine is windows resizing with compositing enabled. With compositing disabled, it’s as fast as Windows 7’s window resizing.
I’ve also briefly tried KDE 4 (off a LiveCD) on a machine with a low-end ATI card. I can’t remember which drivers I was using (I think the Xorg ones didn’t work, so it was probably ATI’s binary drivers), but KDE 4 was very fast on that machine too.
Who on earth are you arguing against? I haven’t seen a comment saying that the reason is because the hardware isn’t good enough.
I think you are getting confused because sometimes people refer to the hardware when complaining about the drivers for that hardware. E.g. “stay away from ATI hardware, it’s bad on linux” means the software drivers are bad on linux, not that the actual hardware somehow magically becomes worse.
Always been snappy for me, even since 4.0. I’ve had some problems but snappiness and speed has never been one of them.
Your overconfidence in commercial software is touching but simply not in touch with reality.
Also, just because someone else doesn’t have a problem it doesn’t mean they’re in denial or unskilled.
By that logic, since I’ve had at many points in my life had problems with Windows performance the logical conclusion is that everyone who doesn’t is either in denial or not skilled enough.
You know, that do sound about right now that I put it like that.
While there are a gazillion bugs in KDE 4 and there are many KDE 4 features that just don’t work right and there are tons of interface inconsistencies (since, in all fairness, the UI is now a custom applet)… the biggest issue is that KDE 4 is NOT a follow on to KDE 3. It’s something entirely different.
KDE 3 was a great product, it died. And now we have something totally new, but it’s just not as good.
Thom, in your current system you should consider the open source ati driver (a very recent build, or directly from git).
In my previous system I had no issues with KDE SC 4.x series. Maybe some random crashes, but where very random. Never pointed it to neither KDE nor drivers since I was using a half damaged GPU for like 1 year, until it finally died. I had at first bad KDE performance, but after some KDE and driver revisions, it got to a good state.
Mobo: ASUS P5PE-VM
Cpu: Intel Core Duo 1.66MHz
Video: NVidia 7600GT AGP
Memory: 2 GB RAM
OS: OpenSuse 11.1
Driver: Nvidia Proprietary rev 180.x
After my card burned, I got a new board, card, memory and faster cpu and remade my system. The card I got is an ATI 4800 series card. The binary driver only works on some distributions, and fail in others either to Xorg 7.5 or kernel 2.6.32 changes. Currently found a very stable (some minor graphic corruption), but very responsive desktop under Fedora 12 and the mesa-driver-experimental driver. The non experimental (and default) one gave me constant kwin crashes and no 3D effects.
Mobo: Gigabyte EP43-UD3L
Cpu: Intel Core Duo 2.4MHz
Video: ATI 4850 PCIe
Memory: 4 GB RAM
OS: Fedora 12
Driver: mesa-driver-experimental (opensource)
Sadly, founding a stable distribution is more a trial and error experience these days. For example, OpenSuSE 11.2 fails miserable to start from a LiveCD with my Radeon system, but works with my dad’s Nvidia one. While they cannot test every possible hardware combination (even Microsoft can’t), is so hard to test something as important as the video, when most people is probably using one of the big three (Nvidia, Ati, Intel)?
has a known performance issue with resizing/minimizing/maximizing windows. Try the no-backfill patch to the xserver to work around it, or you could try the oss drivers if you are willing to use beta software. I don’t think they’re really any more buggy than fglrx is, though.
For my laptop, 4.3 was the first version that ran well. I upgraded the whole distro at that time, which means I got a new KDE, xserver, nvidia driver, qt, and other system libs at the same time, so it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what was causing the issue. I suspect it was the old nvidia driver, though, since I had run beta QT + KDE on the older distro and it was still slow.
As for the bugs, does the crash handler not come up with the backtrace? Have you tried more than 1 distro? I remember you said you tried Fedora with 4.3, and I think the GNOME desktop isn’t exactly stable on that distro either. I’m not trying to give KDE a pass, here, but I’m not having any of these stability problems you are and it would be nice to narrow down exactly what the cause is. (OpenSuse here)
Edited 2009-12-28 02:20 UTC
I’m running Gentoo Linux: ~arch
AMD phenom 2 (too lazy to look up the ID) and radeon 4650
using radeonhd, with two 22 inch lcds over DVI
(I really want to believe in the AMD sponsored driver, and artifacts were worse when I tried radeon recently)
Most of my complaints are probably easy to pin on the video driver and Kwin effects. Mostly Artifacts, when a lot of applications are open the windows will fail to repaint when scrolling…
My biggest beef honestly, is the krandr tool. xrandr command line works great, but krandr can’t be convinced that my second monitor can do anything except mirror. AND as soon as I launch krandr it will (without asking) set my second monitor to mirror the first one.
I’ve used Linux for 8 yrs. But after a messed up backup recovery where half of the files turned out to be corrupt and my experiences with KDE 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 I was fed up with Linux and bought a Mac. I’ve never regret my decision: Mac is just the better Linux, it offers the flexibility of Linux without the compatibility, graphic performance and desktop stability issues.
Hi, I’m a PC…
Look I think Linux sucks as a desktop OS but I don’t understand why you would call the Mac equally flexible. You sure as hell can’t download OSX for free and then install it on an ARM board for use in a toy robot.
The kernel and many other parts of the OS are OSS, so you can do with whatever you like whereas you can’t do whatever you like with the GPLed Linux. You can’t fork a closed source product!
Regarding flexibility”:
You also can’t download Linux and let your grandmother install Google Chrome on it whereas with Mac and Windows the chances are much higher that it would work. Basically you have just to click the “install” button on the Google Chrome site to install this browser. With Linux you have to “vi /etc/apt/sources.list” … and if you grandmother figures out how to quit vi, the next version of Ubuntu will be released. Well you can also use the GUI stuff to add a repo, but what’s about the GPG keys of the repo source…
You see, when different ppl talk about “flexibility” they might mean different aspects.
Sure you can.
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?platform=linux
Just download the package (.deb file), and then double-click on the downloaded package file. gdebi will run and it will be installed for you. The Google Chrome repository will be added (for the purposes of future auto-updates) automatically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdebi
Nup.
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/08/adding-repositories-to-synaptic/
Not one mention of vi. All GUI package managers include dialogue boxes via which one can add extra repositories.
BTW, you can also get Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxChromiumPackages
If you are going to criticise, please try to keep the criticism to something current, and lets not mention things that haven’t been necessary for over five years now.
Edited 2009-12-28 10:04 UTC
I was about to say – edit sources.list for Chrome?
Chrome is just a .deb/.rpm download away, with the only possibly confusing thing being the fact that you have to choose between .deb and .rpm, and 32bit and 64bit – but then again, Windows software usually comes in a number of variants too.
… with mac, you can go to a store, buy a copy of the os, install it on any computer you want, and be sued after.
pretty cool hey?
Using gtkperf, I get the following:
Radeon driver … 3D graphics driver, kwin compositing desktop, Rv610 GPU:
GtkPerf 0.40 – Starting testing: Mon Dec 28 15:24:18 2009
—
Total time: 18.03
Same driver, kms disabled (note that audio driver did not work with kms disabled):
GtkPerf 0.40 – Starting testing: Mon Dec 28 15:29:49 2009
—
Total time: 22.33
Same driver, kms disabled, desktop compositing disabled:
GtkPerf 0.40 – Starting testing: Mon Dec 28 15:31:58 2009
—
Total time: 7.61
Same driver, kms enabled, desktop compositing enabled:
GtkPerf 0.40 – Starting testing: Mon Dec 28 15:36:17 2009
—
Total time: 26.33
Same driver, kms enabled, desktop compositing disabled:
GtkPerf 0.40 – Starting testing: Mon Dec 28 15:47:54 2009
—
Total time: 7.70
It seems that enabling kms helps, but having kwin desktop compositing enabled has a significant performance hit on other applications.
I’ll investigate trying it with compiz instead of kwin. I’ll post back again when I figure out how to do that.
PS: Here is my first hint of how to do it, and a demo of how KDE should run:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G69uDOgXdOY
Very snappy and responsive (either one).
Edited 2009-12-28 05:30 UTC
Unfortunately, GtkPerf is useless to measure performance. A desktop’s performance is not measured by how often it can redraw a simple control in a tight loop.
Nevertheless, a desktop graphics system and its configuration (incorporating GPU, card, driver and Xorg and WM software stack) which takes less time to render the GtkPerf tests is surely faster than another such system and configuration which takes longer.
Your tests are correct. There is indeed a performance hit on 3D with ATI when KMS is enabled. Dave Airlie from Red Hat is working on getting this fixed.
In Fedora 12, 3D support for ATI with Radeon is still considered experimental for this reason. You will have to install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package from the repo.
Arch Linux has recently moved kernel 2.6.32 to core.
http://www.archlinux.org/news/477/
I have just now got this installed along with KDE 4.3.4. Kwin desktop compositing now works on this machine with a FOSS driver for the ATI graphics.
Very, very nice (so far).
Sidux (based on Debian Sid) has now also moved to kernel 2.6.32 and KDE 4.3.4.
http://sidux.com/index.php?module=News&func=display&sid=567
Edited 2009-12-31 13:39 UTC
Sure, something got faster. However, if it doesn’t translate into a faster experience for the user then it doesn’t matter either.
That’s the main problem with GtkPerf, you can’t be sure it will mean that the interface has gotten faster under real-world conditions.
That’s the same reason no one uses glxgears for benchmarking, it’s useless. You use a game, or something that represents the way the graphics card is actually utilized to benchmark 3d performance.
I’m not blaming KDE SC, or Linux at all. If you see closely, video chip makers have been kind of lazy lately. And many problems have affected Windows too.
1. ATI big list of unsupported cards (both Linux and Windows). Anything 2 or 3 years or older is basically unsupported no matter the platform.
2. ATI driver quality. They even release a hotfix the same day they release the official driver to fix some (last minute????) bugs. To me looks like rushing the drivers to hit a release date.
3. Nvidia first v185 driver which due to an error prevent installation of 6000/7000 family GPU’s (all platforms affected).
4. Intel drivers, which gave a lot of trouble, and not so good performance for a while.
5. Hardware features unsupported for months sometimes. All makers have been in this position a couple of times.
And who we have to blame… ourselves, the users.
As long we keep buying the latest video cards as soon they left the production lines, we will have the crappy performance, incomplete features, unstability bugs related to rushed production.
I see you made no mention of the unstable abi issue. Maybe if the Linux devs didn’t have a quasi-religious view of open source drivers the video card companies would provide better support.
Here’s the kernel dev’s message to hardware companies:
Open your drivers or we’ll f–king break them.
Oh and I just downloaded an Ati driver for a 5 year old laptop the other day and it worked in Vista just fine. No compiling needed, just click-click-click done. Remember according to Greg KH and others having a stable abi is nonsense even though Windows, OSX and Solaris all have one.
Edited 2009-12-28 08:20 UTC
Hardly. The kernel dev’s don’t necessarily want hardware companies to open their code.
The kernel developers know far more about the Linux kernel than any hardware company does.
What is wrong then with the hardware companies just providing programming specs for the hardware to the Linux kernel dev’s?
Like this, for example:
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
This information isn’t giving away AMD’s IP in any way. It is just programming specs (as in … “in order to enable this function, set this register to that value”). No other company is going to be able to make a competing chip using just this information … but by using these programming specs the Linux kernel devs sure are (and have been) able to write a better Linux driver than the hardware companies themselves can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon#FOSS_drivers
PS: This one is the driver that has recently been included in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel.
It is a win-win. ATI/AMD get a decent 3D-capable Linux graphics driver for their chips. ATI/AMD don’t have to maintain it any more. ATI/AMD’s customers running Linux are happy. They win. They are henceforward far more inclined to specify ATI/AMD graphics for their machines running Linux. ATI/AMD are happy.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzc3NQ
Everybody involved wins.
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
No valuable IP given away.
Edited 2009-12-28 09:06 UTC
I can’t believe that got modded down. It is precisely on topic, and backed up via links to solid supporting facts.
My but some OSNews readers are precious.
Anyway, from the grandparent post:
Backwards, as usual. Totally backwards.
If some hardware companies didn’t try to keep secret their non-critical programming specifications for their chip-sets, the Linux developers would provide far better FOSS drivers for that company’s chip-sets.
Complex chip-sets are just too hard to reverse engineer.
Oh they don’t? Who made this statement then:
Releasing a binary driver for every different kernel version for every distribution is a
nightmare, and trying to keep up with an ever changing kernel interface is also a rough job.
Simple, get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we
are talking about GPL released drivers here, if your code doesn’t fall
under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, you leech
The Linux kernel devs not only refuse to provide a stable abi but they also provide a document telling hardware companies that they don’t actually need one. I think it is pretty obvious that they want hardware companies to open their code.
Asking that question doesn’t change the fact that hardware companies want to release binary drivers. Whether or not it is to protect IP doesn’t matter.
It’s their hardware, they hold the cards and Linux devs have made it clear that they prefer poor hardware support to binary drivers.
Linux is hostile to binary drivers by design. The Linux devs don’t care if this pisses off hardware companies because at the end of the day the devs care far less about getting Linux on the desktop than you. It’s a hobby for them and they could give a shit what hardware companies think. That also means that they don’t care if any of their tinkering breaks your working hardware. They just don’t f–king care. I wish more people realized this.
What part of “necessarily” didn’t you understand?
The Linux kernel developers would prefer to write the drivers on behalf of companies, from programming specifications provided by said companies.
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/free_drivers.html
“Yes, that’s right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do.
All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be good to have so that debugging doesn’t have to be done by email, but if necessary, that can be done.
In return, you will receive a complete and working Linux driver that is added to the main Linux kernel source tree. The driver will be written by some of the members of the Linux kernel developer community (over 1500 strong and growing). This driver will then be automatically included in all Linux distributions, including the “enterprise” ones. It will be automatically kept up to date and working through all Linux kernel API changes. This driver will work with all of the different CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
As for support, the driver will be supported through email by the original developers, when they can help out, and by the “enterprise” Linux distributors as part of their service agreements with their customers.
If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device’s specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF’s Tech Board to provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled.”
However, if companies don’t want to do that, then the other way in which a driver for the company’s device(s) can be included in the kernel is for the company to release their own code under the GPL.
The first approach (get the Linux devs to write the driver) is what ATI has done. This is the preferred approach. Much easier for the companies, and no IP need be released to other companies about how to make a similar device.
Intel, for example, use the second approach. Intel write their own drivers for Linux, and release them under the GPL. To me, this doesn’t make nearly as much sense.
No, most of them don’t. Most companies now are taking either of the first two options … either get the kernel devs to write the driver for them (easiest), or write their own driver and release it as GPL (more work, less likely for the code to be accepted into the kernel).
Yep. What is wrong with that? Binary drivers are poo.
Happily, since I don’t buy nvidia graphics cards, or broadcom wireless devices, I don’t ever have to use any binary drivers.
The converse of this is that nvidia and broadcom have restricted the market of people they can sell devices to … and to what end? What has nvidia gained by not releasing programming specifications to Linux kernel driver devs as ATI/AMD has done? I can’t see a single thing nvidia can have gained from this.
Yep. This is one of the main strengths of Linux.
You are a very strange person.
The Linux driver devs are sitting there, begging for work, begging to write drivers for companies for free, with their stated intention I have outlined in bold above.
Here is their website:
http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/foswiki/bin/view
They are offering to do all the work for companies, and support the companies device for years into the future, they have written hundreds of drivers for a large numebr of different companies, all for free, and you conclude that they don’t care?
You are an utter loon. A bona-fide fruitloop.
Edited 2009-12-28 16:53 UTC
You’re calling me a loon for pointing out the current stalemate between hardware companies and linux advocates like yourself? We can all see who the nutter is here with your needlessly long defenses of Linux even when you agree with the basic premise (Linux is hostile to binary drivers by design).
Here is the stalemate in simplified form:
Linux kernel devs: Open your drivers or we’ll f–king break them.
Hardware companies: We don’t want to open our drivers.
Loony Linux advocates like you who have zero influence on hardware companies: JUST OPEN YOUR DRIVERS THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT WILL MAKE THEM FOR YOU THERE IS NO REASON TO KEEP THEM CLOSED BLAH BLAH BLAH!
This has been going on for over 10 years. People still have problems with kernel updates borking proprietary drivers. Go yell at a wall some more about how hardware companies shouldn’t use binary drivers. Yelling at walls seems to be a wise strategy.
If you ever go into business here’s a tip for you: don’t tell potential partners what their needs are. Work to meet their needs while working on your own. Don’t show up at a meeting and give a needlessly long speech on how their needs are illegitimate.
The Linux devs have chosen ideology over marketshare. Deal with it and stop trying to convert everyone. Linux on the desktop has been at 1% for over a decade and the the kernel devs could give a shit if it remained at 1% for another decade. They don’t share your evangelical form of Linuxology. There’s a recent video of them laughing about ‘the year of the linux desktop’ which shows that you take Linux more seriously than them.
Edited 2009-12-29 03:22 UTC
Sigh! You have got it all completely wrong, once again.
If the Linux kernel developers write drivers, that is not at all the same thing as hardware companies writing drivers and then “having to open their code”.
Are you nuts or something? What is so hard for you to grasp?
If Intel write a driver, that is Intel’s driver. It is totally up to Intel if they license it as open source or closed source. as it so happens, Intel have chosen to release their driver code under a GPL license, so that code can be bundled with the Linux kernel … but it is still Intel’s code.
If a company such as ATI release programming specifications, and some open source programmers such as Novel for radeonhd, or Red Hat for the radeon driver, or even the Linux Driver Project take those specifications and write a driver for ATI chipsets … then that new code belongs to the authors of the code, and not to ATI.
In this way, you can have a closed source driver (called Catalyst, or fglrx) belonging to ATI, and an open source driver, called xf86-video-ati (in this case written by Red Hat), which works with the exact same chipsets, co-existing at the same time.
End users then have a choice of which driver to install and run.
There is no pressure on ATI to open source their driver code.
The xf86-video-ati driver for ATI’s graphics GPUs that has recently been included in Linux kernel 2.6.32 is not ATI’s code.
Here is the place where the development of the xf86-video-ati open source driver code is coordinated:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/
This is NOT an ATI site, and those authors are NOT ATI employees.
Here is a review of 2009 for the ATI closed-source driver for Linux:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_2009_year&nu…
Different driver, written by different people, owned by different organisations, but both drivers work in Linux for the same graphics cards.
You can have only one of these drivers installed. Pick one. They are not the same code.
Their is no stalemate. If companies want a driver for Linux for their devices, there are no less than 3 ways that can happen:
(1) the company writes its own code and licenses it as a closed source driver, or
(2) the company writes its own code and licenses it as an open source (GPL or BSD license) driver, in which case it can be included in the kernel, or
(3) the company provides programming specifications, and open source programmers write an open source (GPL or BSD license) driver, in which case it can also be included in the kernel.
In some cases, more than one of these options have been followed for the exact same devices.
Do you finally understand, now?
Edited 2009-12-29 05:28 UTC
Just an FYI, or a nitpick if you already know this, but some of the initial code for the new FOSS radeon driver was in fact written by AMD employees (3 different devs), and some of them are still involved, just not necessarily writing a lot of code themselves anymore.
This doesn’t change your argument at all of course, because the code they wrote didn’t come from fglrx, and AMD didn’t do this because of ‘pressure’, but because they *wanted* to, for the reasons you outlined earlier: AMD sees the new FOSS driver as the best & smartest way for them to support most of their Linux-using customers, with fglrx being provided for the rest, mainly their corporate/institutional clients who have different needs.
Just in case you didn’t know…
Fair enough.
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/
Alex Deucher currently seems to be an ATI employee, joined ATI late in 2007 AFAIK.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjIwNg
Dave Airlie is with Red Hat (Australia) AFAIK. Matthias Hopf works on SuSe Linux, and so is a Novell employee AFAIK.
As I said … xf86-video-ati is not ATI’s code. At best it can be said to be community developed.
As for the Catalyst driver (fglrx), however, now THAT driver code definitely is ATI’s code.
Edited 2009-12-29 10:12 UTC
You keep repeating available options to companies that we are all aware of.
Those options don’t change harsh realities that have been the same for over a decade:
1. Some companies don’t want to release open source drivers or OR provide specs.
2. Some companies only provide limited drivers or specs and are only interested in providing quality drivers if they are in binary form.
3. Some companies provide an open source driver initially but don’t update or support it.
There is a stalemate in that not all companies are willing to meet the terms of the Linux devs while the devs are not willing to meet the needs of hardware companies. Hardware companies prefer to release binary drivers on their own websites, period.
Every year working hardware gets broken by Linux updates and this is one of the main causes. I went over the last Ubuntu update and all the resulting hardware breaks on my blog to show people like you who live in denial of driver issues with Linux.
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2009/11/zdnet-ignores-ubuntu-910-upgrade…
Linux is designed to be a pain in the ass for companies that want to release binary drivers, ergo Linux is a pain in the ass for most hardware companies. That’s not a wise strategy if the goal is market share.
If Linux was a company it would have 10,000 extremely dedicated p.r. employees, 3 interns in marketing, 1 in interface design and a dozen executives who play golf half the time and laugh about how they piss off their business partners.
Then why do you keep getting it wrong?
You said that FOSS people want companies to open their code. The truth is actually that FOSS people want to collaborate to write their own code. The only thing they ask for from OEM companies is programming specifications.
You are horribly out of date. Most systems these days can run Linux without any proprietary binary drivers at all.
Nvidia and broadcom are the only really major hardware OEMs who still “don’t want to release open source drivers or OR provide specs”. Their loss (of market to sell to).
Nvidia and broadcomm, yes. Who else?
Your list of upgrade problems for Ubuntu 9.10 is miniscule compared to Vista upgrade problems.
The goal is not market share. The goal is software freedom.
It is companies that want market share.
Considering the overall market (not just the desktop) in which companies might sell hardware devices, it would actually be a good move for companies to ensure that their hardware works with Linux, and the appropriate drivers can be shipped with the kernel.
Many companies, such as ARM, ATI, Intel, Realtek, HP, etc, etc have realised this now.
Linux isn’t a company. It isn’t even an OS, it is a kernel.
Edited 2009-12-30 06:51 UTC
Well, in that case could you please bitch a little about all those companies that contribute to Linux but whose biggest profit margins are coming from this evil “proprietary” software? Who are patenting the shit out of everything, despite of supposedly being the friends of this software freedom [sic]?
Actually, if the goal is software freedom, why you need to advocate Linux in every article? If you switched to say Haiku or OpenSolaris advocacy for a while, I could take you a little more seriously.
Classic.
Does OIN ring any bell?
Yes, nt_jerkface, you’re just as much of a loon as your nick suggests.
Video card companies are in the HARDWARE business. They sell chips on cards. The “oh, we have to hide our software interfaces” mentality is moronic. It would be like the auto companies hiding the octane specs for their engines, the rim sizes for the tires, and obfuscating the entire dashboard. For what f–king purpose?
I’ve never once heard ANYBODY say, “Oh, I need to go buy a new NVidia device driver.”
As HARDWARE manufacturers, it’s in their best interest to make available to the Linux community the same information software interface data that they make available to their own software people who write drivers for windows. And no, publishing that information does NOT give any other graphics company suuuper-duuper KGB-CIA-MI5-Mossad sekritz. Revealing the existance of a function does not tell anyone else how to lay out the circuitry.
So yes, you’re a freaking loon. And a douchebag.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Sometimes however when a hardware company even releases drivers as GPL, it will take years to get them into the kernel. Look at the Creative Labs X-Fi series of cards, of which sound support has just been added to the kernel at the end of 2009. Creative released the drivers as GPL back in mid 2007. It just takes the kernel devs too long to get common hardware working, even with the specs released or driver in hand.
There’s also the problem of submitted drivers being limited in scope and slower progression of drivers in the tree.
Just because you pressure a company into releasing an open source driver doesn’t mean they have to release an optimized or fully functional driver. I’m come across quite a few Linux printer drivers that didn’t report ink tank levels. Wireless cards with older protocols have also been a problem. Hardware companies often respond to the unstable abi with:
Here’s a shitty GPL driver we created for you guys. You can update it yourself and don’t expect any support. Now f–k off.
No they didn’t. They released a closed-source, 64bit-only driver for Linux in 2007. The GPLed source code for a driver wasn’t released until Nov 2008.
And that code was in such a horrible mess, it wasn’t until May 2009 that something was developed that could be merged into the Linux kernel as an ALSA module.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X-Fi#Linux_support
Except that CL’s stuff isn’t ‘common hardware’ (its proprietary, non-standard, and with the advent of on-board audio, its no longer in wide use), and they didn’t release useful documentation on X-Fi until Aug 2008, and even that wasn’t ‘complete documentation’ by any stretch of the imagination since some features of the X-Fi cards are still unsupported on Linux due to lack of documentation (their own open-source driver didn’t support those features).
The issue was not with the Linux devs, the problem here is a company that just doesn’t give a damn about its Linux users.
I stand corrected. I had my dates off.
You mean it wasn’t until 2009 that it was looked at period.
It may have been lacking features, true. As far as it not being common, it is hard to buy a machine that is worth a damn without an X-Fi card in it. Most of the time On-Board audio, which has been a round for a very long time, is sub-par. On-board audio is useless when you actually want to have good audio.
They released a driver, under the GPL, which is more than most companies do. I would say they do care. If you want a company that doesn’t care at all we can blast Hauppauge for that, not creative.
From what I’ve read, the problem was with the code itself, i.e., it was ‘ignored’ for a good reason.
It wasn’t until additional code/info became available, originally from the OSS driver system (because the commercial company behind that signed an NDA with CL and was thus able to see more of the internal docs), that the ALSA devs were able to put enough of the puzzle together to make a working driver.
I guess this depends on whether you’re an audiophile or not. For a lot of people, onboard stuff like HDA-Intel is more than good enough (works fine for me, anyway).
Depends on the quality, and most importantly, the **clarity**, of the code (see Nvidia’s undocumented & obfuscated ‘nv’ Xorg driver as a counter example).
CL dumped that code basically because they didn’t want to have to deal anymore with all those ‘annoying’ Linux people asking for support.
There is a world of difference for example, between what CL did and what AMD/ATI is currently doing to support their graphics hardware in Linux: specs, docs, non-obfuscated example code, active technical support (for the non-AMD devs working on it), and they even had 3 of their own devs do some of the initial heavy coding of the new ‘radeon’ Xorg driver just to get it bootstrapped and going – and at least one of them is still involved in that development. Now *that* is what you call ‘active support’.
Got me there. I’ve got one of their cards, and if it weren’t for the kind folks behind IVTV who reverse-engineered it (with no help from Hauppauge), I wouldn’t be able to use it now. So yeah, I have to agree that Hauppauge is even worse.
Gentoo System. Nvidia GPU.
I had dolphin crash once when I dismounted a FUSE mount that pulled the rug out from beneath it’s feet. And the KBluetooth packages is a bit unstable. (It is still somewhere between alpha and beta stages though) Otherwise no problems.
I do think that the vast majority of issues users experience tend to stem from decisions made in the design and construction of the distro used rather than the KDE project itself. Not to say that KDE doesn’t have bugs to fix, but KDE just does not get as much QA attention in ditros that focus primarily on the Gnome desktop.
http://www.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk Asus a2 Adapter http://www.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk/laptop-ac-adapter/asus/a2.htm>…
* knetworkmanager does not work with my mobile broadband. nm-applet does so it’s not a networkmanager problem.
* knetworkmanager need to get more intuitive and…you know…just better in general.
* for some reason, at one time kopete thrashed the disk for 15 minutes rendering the system unusable. Havent happened since though.
* kopete doesn’t scale avatar pictures to a reasonable size in the popup.
* using a proxy autoconfig script results in horrible performance in konqueror and other apps using it.
I dont have any general performance problems though nor have noticed any problems with KWin.
Oh, forgot two things that really bugs me:
* There’s no obvious way to disable the touchpad scrolling.
* There’s no way (at all?) to disable the “mousewheel will switch workspace” feature of plasma.
Edited 2009-12-28 12:52 UTC
knetworkmanager (the version in Kubuntu 9.10) won’t connect to wireless networks protected by PASSWORDS, either. It can handle unprotected networks and hex keys, but not passwords.
As far as I determined before switching to Fedora 11, the problem is with knetworkmanager, not Kubuntu.
Fedora 11 uses nm-applet in KDE, because it actually works. Kubuntu should have too; I guess that part is their fault.
Hmm…that seems to be fixed now since I can successfully connect to the WPA2 shared passphrase network at work.
But yeah, using nm-applet is the only really good solution.
Well, that’s good. It HAD worked in Kubuntu 9.04 so I assume they just got (and stuck with) a buggy version.
I’m using KDE 4 since alpha, now with 4.4 beta2, without any glitches/crashes.
Debian Squeeze/Sid/Experimental
Linux 2.6.32 – with fglrx for 3D
HP Pavilion DV5-1240BR
AMD Turion X2 2.1Ghz RM-72
ATi Radeon HD 3200
3gb RAM / 250gb HD
I’m waiting for 3D support in opensource radeon driver.
3D support for open source radeon driver is already included in your kernel (Linux 2.6.32).
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_32
Supported features are here:
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
The Radeon HD 3200 has an R7xx chipset.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_700_chipset_series#780G.2F780V
I know that is already supported.
But I mean “real/full/without glitches” 3D support. Sorry, was my mistake.
Edited 2009-12-28 11:51 UTC
No problem.
This driver is working for me, but only just. KMS on boot is flaky, and the video is setup correctly only about 75% of the time. For the other 25% of the time, I only have to re-start the X server at the login screeen, and normally that fixes it.
Having said that, once the Xorg server has started correctly, and KDE 4.4B2 is up and running, it works without crashes or other problems.
I am running Kubuntu Lucid Alpha 1. Since this is still very much an Alpha, this type of instability is only to be expected. It isn’t very far off at all.
Performance is roughly what you would expect for a proprietary driver this card. Performance should improve somewhat for kernel 2.6.33, which includes support for interrupts for R600/R700.
It should all be perfectly fine and usable by April, when Kubuntu Lucid is due to be released.
I first tried 4.0 which was really slow on my system especially the rendering(geforce FX 5200). then 4.1 which rendered crappy and was pretty slow loading the desktop. 4.2 was alot better but still not good enough for my taste. It had alot of plasma crashes. 4.3 was pretty stable but still felt sluggish compared to gnome. By they are getting there.
E5200
Radeon HD3600
Arch 2.6.33-rc2
kdemod KDE SC 4.4 beta2
mesa 7.7
xf86-video-ati
2D drawing is instantly fast. Resizing has no any delay.
3D drawing is good, but far from great performance.
Another machine in office.
Kubuntu 9.10+KDE 4.4 Beta2
sucks a lot! I have no clue why KDE is so slow.
Almost certainly the office machine’s performance problems comes down to the video card and drivers.
However, for the first machine:
Radeon HD3600
Arch 2.6.33-rc2
kdemod KDE SC 4.4 beta2
mesa 7.7
xf86-video-ati
This combination has the opensource xf86-video-ati drivers, presumably with interrupts supported. You are a bit of a whiz to be able to get that running, I’m impressed.
2.6.32 gives me a corrupted screen. I have no way out but to try the newest stack.
I just updated to KDE 4.3.3 on my Gentoo installation a couple of days ago, after years of being a happy KDE 3.x user.
Hardware is a Macbook Pro, late 2007 model, with NVIDIA and proprietary drivers.
I was worried before, given all the horror stories I’ve heard, but so far I am very happily impressed. It works like a charm and I see no performance problems (Still have to try compositing however).
Only thing I miss is a networkmanager interface, but I will probably switch to wicd
My experience with KDE, Gnome or XFCE always sends me back to a real desktop OS like windows. I find them buggy, slow, fails to respond to user actions in enough of a manner to let me know it’s even DOING anything (usually resulting in me launching five or six instances of the same application thinking it didn’t even START) and most always leaving such a sour taste in my mouth from the most basic of functionalities missing I always compare it to going back to windows 3.1, which to be honest had more functionality once you added LFN support.
Mind you, I’ve been running two displays since windows 3.1 with a targa board, three displays since System 7, and four or more displays since Windows 98, so under linsux my chances of desktop compositing effects is zero – and I actually use my desktop computer for actual work instead of just dicking around on the command line to get the most basic of functionality (like say, having the headphone jack work or wireless after it wakes from sleep) working. I wanted to be still doing that crap, I’d still be running Xenix on a Trash-80 Model 16.
I still feel that the majority of problems with the WM’s in *nix have NOTHING to do with the WM’s themselves, and everything to do with the limitations of the various X11 implementations. X was NEVER meant to render on the machine the server is rendering, and everything that’s been done to make it ‘better’ have been little more than hacks to bypass how X is supposed to work in the first place. I often wonder why none of these WM’s or projects like Compiz don’t finally bite the bullet, say **** X and backwards compatibility to it and build their own damned video stack to run atop. Then you could run X11 atop that – why not, it worked for Apple! (Not that I know many OSX users who bother with X11 apps now that there are enough viable native ports)
Though I do always ask why it is that the various WM’s suck so bad. KDE seems to be interested in ‘reinventing’ shit that works just fine as is, Gnome seems interested in bullshit eye candy effects to hide the fact whoever designed it is color-blind, and the lightweight WM’s like fluxbox make the windows 3.1 program manager and file managers look outright robust – disturbing since said WM’s are three to four times larger than Win 3.1 was in it’s entirety. It’s really kind of sad when XFCE is the shining gem of the group given how it LOOKS good, but has completely convoluted methods of doing the simplest of things like adding/removing menu items.
Oh, and for those of you with nVidia issues, my advice is the same as windows – **** the 19X series of drivers and go back to 186.xx. It has been my experience that the entire 19x series of drivers from nVidia regardless of platform break too damned many things. On windows it breaks games like King’s Bounty or video playback in Dark Engine games, while on Linux it means compiz effects can crash X, mouse cursor artifacts (shades of a hackintosh!), and wierd ‘pauses’ where the system sits there not redrawing the screen for god knows what reason (even though stuff is still running fine in the background) – it was the only way I was even able to get all four of my displays to show up, kind of sad when I’ve got a pair of GTX260 in SLI backed by a 9800GT for the extra displays… (which on windows that 9800 kicks ass as a physx card)
I agree with your X comments. I have always thought it would be cool if someone said “Shred the network utility! Let’s just make a damn fine window-layer for local desktops and leave it at that”.
Except that it wouldn’t gain you anything. Oh well, if randomly dumping useful features because you think it will help makes you happy, go for it.
You can pry the networked bits of X out of my cold, dead fingers.
Just because you don’t use the network features on your home machine doesn’t mean there aren’t 10s of thousands (or more) people using the network features of X at work.
13,000 students use it everyday in our school district, for instance.
Besides, X already uses non-networked code paths on local stations, so why pick on something you don’t use, or know anything about?
Do that, and you’ll break apps left and right which rely on the ability to talk to the desktop layer through a network socket.
Your logic is like a bedbound person saying that stores should stop selling shoes, because he/she personally sees no use for them, even though everything that comes to him is aided and abetted by the fact that everyone else’s capabilities being improved by the fact that they can wear shoes.
It is hard to say anything meaningful about a post that compares favorably win 3.1 or windows 98 to a current linux distribution.
You are either clueless or a troll. I choose the latter.
To everyone:
I’d choose the Windows 98 GUI or Windows 95 with IE4 desktop update *any time* over KDE, GNOME, XFCE or anything the Linux desktop has ever produced. Why? Because it works one would expect! It might be a bad OS but the general user desktop experience is simply great. KDE and GNOME are full of flaws. Even the most simplest basic things are broken or do not behave one would expect! If someone challenges me to list flaws, please stop because I do not wish to criticize free and open source software.
Edited 2009-12-28 20:52 UTC
Oh come on. List the flaws!
Here are some of top of my head:
KDE 4.4 Beta: (and the Beta tag attached to the version number is no excuse as if they can’t get copy/paste right…..anyway)
I opened up a text editor, selected some text and selected copy, closed the editor, tried to paste it somewhere else and guess what? It doesn’t paste, the clipboard was empty!
So I open up the text editor again, do the same step again but without closing the text editor’s window and it works! Yay I can paste! Oh wow, so in order for me to copy/paste plain text, let me repeat ‘plain text’, I have to have the window I copied text from open? Hurray! Welcome to KDE 1.0.
Yes, yes I know that little app that runs in the system tray that keeps clipboard history but we shouldn’t need anything like this. This clipboard functionality should be within the core of the windowing environment. Regardless what widgets and GUI tool kits you use, it should be global! May be it is but no one’s using it. I am not an X.ORG coder.
Have you ever developed for Windows? You know, regardless what data is on the clipboard, it is available everywhere! Text or graphics, it is available and this is because Windows has a core, base and rules that all frameworks on Windows follow. Regardless what you use, the clipboard is available. It is little things like this that make me dislike KDE and GNOME. Regardless if you use .NET, Borland VCL or MFC, it is there – yet they are all different (but really they are not)! This is how X.ORG should be.
Not too long ago, content copied in app written in toolkit X was not available in toolkit Y and probably these problems still exist.
Next, I try to drag an icon on the panel, it allocates space for me automatically (this was actually a surprise) but nothing happens. Try again but nothing again. I cannot drag the icon on the panel….Shush, it is beta!! I have heard this so many times and why I keep arguing about it? I truly doubt it will ever get fixed.
GNOME:
– Second clicking on an icon does not rename the icon.
– Going into properties, rename the icon and hit Enter and the dialog box is still open. I mean come on, seriously?
– Have a few widgets on a dialog box, 80% of the screen taken. Ok don’t take this literally but you get the point.
– Dragging icons on the panel, icons are not aligned automatically. You have to manually drag and align icons to fill spaces etc.
– Toolbar icons and text, text is not aligned on the middle of the icon. The text is either too much to the top or too much to the bottom. As if someone just dropped it there without paying too much attention on neatness.
– Icons sizes and spacing is not equalized
Edited 2009-12-28 23:23 UTC
Sorry, but all of your arguments are not valid since they’re all windows default behaviour.
If you’re using KDE/GNOME/XFCE, please read their User Guides before saying that something is not “the way you like or that you’re used to”.
As you’ve been probaly sometime on a school and learn that clipboard “ON WINDOWS” behaves this way, you should learn about Linux and its WMs before being a troll
Oh my god….are you serious? This is what is wrong! This is the exact behavior one gets when someone tries to provide healthy and constructive criticism. No one cares. So if you don’t like it, don’t use it. Wow, great customer service.
And is there a reason why this is the Linux way? No seriously, what is the reason? I truly want to know.
1. Are they lazy and can’t be bothered
2. They just prefer this way over the other
3. Technological limitations
So what you are saying is, making things awkward and ilogocal to use is the Linux way? Making things work not the way one would expect is the Linux way? Ok ok, now someone will tell me off. “Awkward for me” – yes, indeed because I am a Windows user and aren’t Windows users your audience?
99% of the time when I rename a file I simply second click.
100% of the time I drag icons to the taskbar and spaces are automatically done for me, icons are moved, all equal spacing.
100% of the time when I hit, “Enter” the dialog box closes. Isn’t this logical?
Clipboard, do people seriously suggest I need to keep a window open in order for the clipboard to remember what I just copied to it?
No, I should not have to learn the Linux way of doing things! You are targeting Windows users. Want to defeat the enemy (Windows)? Become the enemy! Be like Windows, work like Windows, behave like Windows (in relation to desktop only).
No ‘we’ aren’t.
If Linus had wanted to do this, he would have made a Windows clone instead of a Unix clone.
That is fundamentally illogical. If someone were willing to ‘become like their enemy’, then their enemy wouldn’t have been a true enemy to begin with.
Do democracies need to become dictatorships in order to defeat them?
To me, you sound like someone who just wants a free-as-in-beer clone of Windows, in which case you should be looking at something like ReactOS rather than Linux.
If Linux actually did this I wouldn’t be using it, and I suspect that plenty of others (especially the Linux devs themselves) would agree with that. Most of Linux’s popularity stems from its Unix heritage, and thus the fact that its *not* Windows.
Please ignore the Linux zealots who are obsessed with Windows (unfortunately, every OS has its fan boys who take things too far), I suspect that a majority of Linux users, and almost all of its developers, don’t actually care about Windows (beyond the necessity of interoperating with it), and emulating it, especially, is the last thing they want to do…
Everything is awkward the first time you come across it. Or, did you know how to use Windows within 30 seconds of seeing it the very FIRST time?
Really? Even when the Windows default was switched to single-click activation, which meant you couldn’t click on it a second time to rename it? Wow, you’re magic! You beat the system.
Your method only works for systems configured for double-click activation.
Really? I’ve yet to see a Windows taskbar that allows you to drag icons onto it. Windows 3.x didn’t have it. Windows 95 didn’t have it. Windows 98 didn’t have it. Windows ME didn’t have it. Windows 2000 didn’t have it. Windows XP didn’t have it. Haven’t used Vista much so can comment on it. Haven’t used Windows 7 much so can’t really comment on it, although reviews I’ve read seem to imply that it can finally do what you want.
Oh, you mean the extra Quick Launch Toolbar that can be added to the taskbar, but isn’t there by default in some themes? Yeah, you can drag icons to that, just like you can drag icons to the extra Quick Launch applet that isn’t there by default in KDE 3 or 4.
Don’t see what the difference is. Seems to me that every version of Windows 9x/2K/XP/Vista works the same as KDE 3 and 4.
Depends on whether or not the OK or Apply button is the active, highlighted button. Just like in Windows. Sometimes hitting enter will apply the changes and leave the dialog open, sometimes hitting enter will close the dialog. Works the same on every OS.
No, people are saying the you should learn how a system works, instead of assuming things work exactly like Windows. In other words, to keep your mind open to new ideas.
Exactly. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. You don’t go to India and start shooting cows because “that’s how things are done in Texas”. You learn the local laws, rules, and traditions, and you adapt.
Or, you could look at it from the flipside. You want to join the Linux-using masses? Maybe you should learn the Linux ways of doing things.
Klipper is part of the standard KDE 4 desktop, and it’s enabled by default. Unless you ran into a bug preventing it from starting, you must have disabled it.
So… You disabled the part of the system that provides clipboard management, and then wondered why it didn’t work?
Erm… That’s not how Windows works anymore. The Windows and X clipboards work pretty much the same way. The only difference is that the clipboard manager is part of the desktop session in Windows, while it’s a separate application in X (Klipper, in the case of KDE).
Behaviour of the clipboard in X is well specified, and has been for years. All toolkits (except possibly extinct ones) are interoperable, even including things like Wine.
Sure, the implementation details are different, but both systems work equivalently. So what’s the problem?
It is global. Maybe it’s something inte beta but it sure is global in 4.3 and every non-beta I’ve ever used. It sure is global in X in general.
Again, maybe it’s the beta because dragging icons works just fine in 4.3.
So basically your complaints are about two issues that may be down to the fact that you used a beta or that you did something wrong. Wonderful.
Lets not give the troll any more food.
Hey I already asked not be challenged, but I was. This is not my fault and why does it hurt so much when criticism is provided?
Do you not agree? Prove what I say is wrong. I can back my arguments up especially for GNOME. But this is typical for open source fans. Pay attention, I said “fans”, not “fan boys”.
Once you run into someone you disagree with you turn the matter into a personal attack by calling someone names such as a “troll”.
All I did is I listed what is wrong and now if you want to take it offensively, I am sorry you take it that way.
In relation to KDE, I did not disable anything and Klipper should not be required to remember clipboard history. If it is, perhaps it should be turned into a service.
In relation to the dragging icons part, lets wait until the final.
So do you always see people that do not contribute as waste of time? Then the rest of 1000s of users must be the same.
Don’t you want feedback? I have provided my feedback.
I am not arguing anymore and believe it or not, I do not like MS or Apple either. I just judge things realistically.
Edited 2009-12-29 04:58 UTC
Ah yes, because you compared current DE’s unfavorably to Windows 3.1 but didn’t want to go into details because “you don’t want to criticize OSS projects”. I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or what.
I don’t, I’ve never had those problems and as others has also said the clipboard is global.
Originally you didn’t list anything at all, just made an unfavorable comparison that wasn’t constructive. Yes, that’s being a troll.
What feedback? Blanket statements like “Windows 3.1 was better” is hardly constructive.
Ah yes, because you compared current DE’s unfavorably to Windows 3.1 but didn’t want to go into details because “you don’t want to criticize OSS projects”. I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or what
Ok, I might have went too far with that one. When I made that statement I specifically had a few things in mind:
– Drag/Drop and icon into the panel: spacing being done automatically for you (Quick Launch). Not the case with GNOME. KDE? Kind of getting there.
– Copy/Paste any data globally (already discussed). Yes, Klipper might have crashed or not even started. Point given.
– Second clicking an icon should let you rename an icon (GNOME, not sure about KDE)
– Hitting Enter should close the dialog as it should default to “OK” and not “Apply” (GNOME)
– Icon text should be on the middle of the icon (GNOME)
– Widget spacing should be narrower (GNOME)
I did not criticize actual apps as I reckon they are very good – both KDE and GNOME. However, the points I made above bother me.
Edited 2009-12-29 05:53 UTC
Out of curiosity I just tried on my KDE 4.3.4 on Debian SID and I saw no problems at all about “spacing” or whatever: I just dragged and dropped the icon to the panel and “et voilà !”, the new Icon was just there.
Well, at least you accepted you were wrong here
Why so? Because works that way on Windows? or why? Anyway I (again) tried that on my KDE and it was as simple as second click and the option “rename” was there! surprise!. However, that’s not the point, the thing is that linux (actually, *nix) has a different aproach than Windows to many things. Keep that in mind!
Again…why? I prefer the dialogs to default to “No”. Who is right here? Nobody! The devs discuss about such things and they come to an agreement. I may or may not like all of them but I have to accept them (this is one of the things I love about KDE, that let’s you easily change almost everything to your liking… but that’s another story
)
*Again*, why? Because it’s the way you like it?
Do I bother to say *again* or *why*?
If I recall correctly, some have tagged you as a “troll” in this discussion. That my be because you only say things as “this should be that way” without getting into *why* should be as you are saying.
For example: (not to argue, just an example)
– Icon text should be on the middle of the icon because it lets you have more icons on a toolbar (opposite to “text alongside icons”).
This way others my understand you and even counter argue with something like “icon text should be alongside the icons because widescreen monitors are very common and we have more “wide” space”.
See the difference?
I believe he meant that, once an item is selected, clicking on it again should allow you to rename it.
Windows (Explorer) and Mac OS X (Finder) both do this. Whether or not this behaviour is a good idea is debatable.
On the one hand, it’s a useful shortcut if you know about it. It’s also somewhat consistent with the behaviour of some applications (spreadsheets, for example), even though other applications tend to use a double click.
On the other hand, it has a whole heap of problems. First, it’s not obvious (discoverable). Nobody is going to guess that you can select an item, wait a moment, and then click it again to rename it. Secondly, the gesture is far too similar to a double click – it’s too easy to accidentally open the file instead of renaming it, or to rename it instead of opening it. Remember than many people have trouble with double clicking. Finally, there are perfectly good keyboard shortcuts for this functionality – F2 on Windows, Enter on Mac OS X.
In the case of Windows or Mac OS X, the usability issues aren’t strong enough to warrant removing it. If you don’t already know about it, you won’t encounter it. Even if you do, it’s not destructive. Aside from a possible moment of confusion, there’s no harm done.
In KDE’s case, it’s obvious why this feature isn’t present. In KDE, clicking on a file doesn’t select it. Instead, single clicking on a file opens it. To select a file, you have to click the little plus icon in the corner. Since clicking on a file opens it, regardless of whether it was already selected or not, it can’t be re-used to rename the file.
As to whether this single-click behaviour itself is a good idea… that’s debatable as well. Having gotten used to it, I much prefer this behaviour. Getting used to double clicking things again was much more difficult than getting used to never double clicking.
At the moment, I actually have Windows 7 configured the same way KDE 4 is – use checkboxes for selection, and single click to open. Windows XP had a single click to open option, but it was so badly broken that it was nearly unusable – not only did it automatically select anything you moved the mouse over, it waited for half a second before opening anything anyway, just in case you double clicked on it instead.
As for Gnome (Nautilus)… I have no idea why this feature isn’t present. It makes about as much sense there as it does in Windows or Mac OS X.
I believe he meant that, once an item is selected, clicking on it again should allow you to rename it.
I do believe so too, though that does not make his opinion/argument any more meaningful. Just because he is used to that, or he prefers such, doesn’t mean it is a needed functionality. And as you said, it is not easily discoverable and most likely not that useful to most people.
Just as an example, I myself always use the F2 shortcut on Windows and Linux to rename files and Enter on Mac in the rare occasion that I even open it up. I like it that way, it’s my personal preference, but I am still not coming over to KDE threads whining and trolling about how they should make it work similarly. No, I am not claiming my opinion is any superior to their opinions, and both ways to do the renaming have their place in the desktop landscape.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, especially with the inconsistent way it is handled in KDE 4.x. Even if you configure System Settings to use double-click activation, all file dialogs are single-click activated. Makes it very hard to select a range of items (Shift+Click) or an assortment of items (CTRL+Click). Very, very, very irritating.
Ok I agree, I should have backed up my arguments. I will pay attention in the future.
– Second clicking an icon should let you rename an icon (GNOME, not sure about KDE)
Well, because both Windows and Mac OS X do it and a lot of people are used to it. I almost never right click and select rename and press F2. Aren’t KDE and GNOME targeting Windows/Mac OS users? It does not hurt adding an extra option with an option of disabling it for people that do not want it.
– Hitting Enter should close the dialog as it should default to “OK” and not “Apply” (GNOME)
Again, because Windows does it and KDE and GNOME are targeting Windows audience, or at least people are being urged to switch to them. One should not be urged to switch to something if it doesn’t behave as one would expect. I really do want to make KDE/GNOME my default desktops but little things like this prevent me so. I am sure I am not the only one but again, it is my opinion.
– Icon text should be on the middle of the icon (GNOME)
I actually meant alongside as you have stated but what I meant is, the text alongside is either too much to the top or the bottom. Look at the GNOME’s desktop toolbar for example, you have the three menu items “Applications”, “Places” “System” and then you have the shortcut icons for apps. If you compare the text such as “System” next to the the icon, say “Firefox”, the text “System” seems too much to the top. The text should be centered based on the location of the “Firefox” icon because it looks neater and other apps do it too. For example the Bookmarks toolbar in FF. You have the icon and then the text alongside but the text is centered. The ‘valign’ property is not set to ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ it is ‘middle’ so it looks neat. The text does not look too much to the top or bottom if you know what I mean.
– Widget spacing should be narrower (GNOME)
Netbooks and laptops. Sometimes one has to decrease font size in order for the entire GUI to fit in the screen.
Edited 2009-12-29 20:18 UTC
All I have to say is that Windows is NOT the epitome of usability and design. Thus, it should not be used as a blueprint for other GUI environments.
Besides, at least in KDE, it’s a simple matter of changing the mouse/keyboard behaviour in the System Settings to use the Windows layout. After that, everything acts pretty much the same as Windows.
The default should NOT be to copy Windows, but to offer the choice of Windows-like behaviour. Otherwise, people will never unlearn their bad habits that Windows has ingrained in them.
Education, understanding, and knowledge are always better than rote memorisation.
If Klipper was indeed running, then it’s possible that you found a bug. Klipper is a default part of KDE, should be running by default, and should have prevented the problem you were having.
That leaves three options – it was disabled (either through user action, or a packaging bug), it wasn’t installed (either through user action, or a packaging bug), or it wasn’t working (Klipper bug).
Since you’re using a beta, have you considered looking into the problem, or filing a bug report as appropriate?
It’s not global in X itself – the clipboard protocol is asynchronous, so if an application quits, it takes the clipboard contents with it.
This problem is fixed by using a clipboard manager. They either make a copy of everything copied onto the clipboard immediately (to provide clipboard history, usually), or when an application quits.
In Gnome, where it’s handled by gnome-settings-daemon, while in KDE it’s handled by Klipper. I believe that XFCE handles it too. Other environments can just run another clipboard manager if they need to.
Hmm…yes, right you are. If you quit the app the clipboard content goes away. Havent used plain X in a while though and it does work globally in every DE I can think of.
I get the same problem with GNOME too. PITA it is!
That’s how the X clipboard works, and has nothing to do with KDE. The X clipboard is just a protocol for one app to tell another app about what is selected, there’s no storage of the contents. If the “copy” app is closed, there’s no way to know what was highlighted.
However, if you have Klipper running, then KDE takes control of the clipboard, and things works the way you want. Been that way since Klipper was created, and is the reason Klipper was created (along with keeping a history of the clipboard contents).
Don’t blame the system if you don’t understand how it works.
It is global … the clipboard protocol is part of X. You just don’t understand it, and want it to work the same as Windows. Well guess what, X came out first, so who really got it backwards?
Except that only 1 thing can be in the clipboard. Klipper lets you keep an unlimited number of items in the clipboard (it’s a configurable amount). So which system is backward now? Windows can only keep 1 thing in the clipboard? How horribly antiquated.
Learn to use the system, learn to expand your thinking. Don’t expect everything to be like Windows. Seriously, Windows is not the pinnacle of programming or end-user experience (have you even tried to use the “Control Panel” in Windows 7?).
You know, I find it fascinating how many Windows zealots that feel compelled to spew their drivel in every thread about Linux on the desktop.
You’re just as bad as the Linux zealots you always keep whining about.
If you don’t like it, fine, but shut up. No one cares. You’re not contributing anything constructive to this discussion.
So if he made a comparison to OSX he would be an Apple zealot?
The real zealots are people like you that can’t stand criticism of Linux. Many of us are former Linux users that once gave Linux a pass with the expectation that a lot of these problems would be fixed by now.
With the success of OSX it is getting harder to defend Linux when Apple has shown us how Unix can be properly transformed into a desktop OS.
You don’t like criticism of Linux. Well too bad, this is OSNEWS not linuxlovers.com.
wow…so 0.1% of Windows users are former-linux users.
In contrast, nearly 100% of Linux users are quite familiar with Windows (and oftentimes, far more familiar with its buggy, annoyingly inconsistent interface due to half-assed implementations of ideas that they shoddily borrowed from other OS’es).
So, your point is what, exactly? (other than at the top of your head).
If I wanted the Mac interface, I would go out and buy one. Personally, I think it’s too simple-minded. It’s dumbed-down for anti-technical artsy-fartsy types, who couldn’t comprehend a symbolic link even if you gave them a stack of illustrations made up as full-page, 3-d ray-traced, color glossy jpg or even quark express files.
Translation: “I expect inconsistancies and buggy, arbitatry interfaces, and when I don’t get it, I stomp my feet and hold my breath until I turn blue”
Go walk down a pier until your hat floats.
I used to experience random crashes with KDE back in the KDE 3 days. KDE 3.5 started to improve, then the improvements went out the window with KDE 4.
If you want stability just do not use KDE.
While I find it interesting that KWin is continuing on even with the Compiz window manager is strong as heck on ubuntu, I STILL can not get wobbly windows with it. That being said, I think the goals and intentions of KWin are admirable, but there are still several hiccups that need to be smoothed out. On both Mint and Jaunty, Compiz effects were just stellar on both my laptop and my desktop, but openSuse with KDE4.3 just WONT DO WOBBLY WINDOWS or the cube for switching. No, I don’t want to install Compiz, I just want KWin to work the way it is supposed to. Things like that make KDE4.3 a real buzzkill for wanting to promote it within my local user community. No wonder they want to stick with GNOME…
GNOME to me looks dated, even with compiz effects. KDE4 is just damn dead sexy and aesthetically a bit more pleasing and way more modern than many non-OSX GUIs when it works. But though the looks and ease of use are definitely getting better (esp from 4.2 to 4.3), feature party with and integration of KDE 3.x apps is still weak. As an example, KDevelop4 is stagnant and KDevelop 3 integration is choppy and crashy with KDE4. Amarok 2 finally is usable in 4.3 but skinning still leaves much to be desired, it is just ugly, and I have more crashes than when I use Amraok 1.3.
I want to like KDE 4.3, I really do, and am continue to support them out of respect for the greatness that was 3.5 and hope for I know they can accomplish as their developers are definitely passionate. I still use it as my primary desktop, warts and all and report bugs and make suggestions when I can. And it is DEFINITELY beautiful.
…JM2Cs….
I admit to not using KDE since 4.1 (on Opensuse) and that lasted 2 days before I went to back Gnome, but a project for next year when I have time is to setup Freebsd with the latest KDE on my PC
However, that KDE Kicker menu I cant stand, how many of you KDE users use it? Do you grow to like it?
Guess what, you don´t have to use it. With a simple right-click you can change it to a more traditional menu.
Or you can try lancelot:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
As mentioned, it’s incredibly easy to switch this out for several different alternatives.
It’s OK, as long as you use it the way it’s meant to be used. If you’re trying to navigate though the menus then it is a disaster, but it works well enough if all you do is place your 10 favorite apps on the first tab and use the textbox search function for everything else.
I have a dual vertical taskbar setup where my left side is full of application launchers, so I rarely have to enter the Kicker menu.
I do have a few issues with the kicker
1.) it scrolls in a little window that pops out. I know it’s not the same, but it feels like those scrollbars-within-scrollbars UI concepts that are so terrible. You’re trying to save screen space on something that only takes up space when you need it.
2.) it’s easier to drill down the menu than back up, because you’re replacing the upper layer with a small button.
Fixing those basically ends up going back to something more like the KDE 3 (and Windows) taskbar… Or I could envision a two-column popout that just defaults to take up the entire adjoining side of the screen; one column for the categories and the second for the contents of the category. Lancelot is ALMOST like that, but leaves LOTS of blank space.
Finally,
3.) I can never remember what goes in system, settings and utilities. konsole in particular seems like it should go under ‘utilities’ but it goes under ‘system’. I just make a launcher for it.
#3 has been a problem prior to KDE4 though.
Edited 2009-12-28 23:14 UTC
I didn’t like the new Kicker menu at first but it has grown on me. Now I actually prefer it to the old menu.
Kicker is a KDE 3.x application. Kicker’s replacement in KDE 4.x is the Plasma panel.
The default menu normally shipped with most distributions is called KickOff.
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/desktop.php
I personally don’t like it at all. One of the first things I do is replace this with Lancelot menu.
http://maketecheasier.com/lancelot-an-alternative-kde-menu/2009/10/…
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
For me, Lancelot menu is by far a better menu system for KDE4.
I select the option in the Lancelot Launcher Settings that is called “show categories inside the applet”. This gives one three or four separate menu icons inside the panel, and does not show the categories to the left edge of the menu window itself.
Here is a screenshot:
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/KDE4_desktop&Qif=Cahkra-ArchLinux-…
I have three menu icons showing at the left-hand edge of the panel at the bottom of the screen. The menu window that is displayed is the result of clicking on the left-most icon in the panel. This window is showing only the “Applications” category. Compare this to the following screenshot:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot1.7-air….
in which there is a set of vertical tabs on the left-hand edge of the menu window with which one selects the various menu catrgories, making this configuration more like KickOff.
KDE4 is great in that it gives you all of these options, and you can set it how you like it. On other contemporary desktops, the menus layout is typically far more rigid.
Sorry, bad link. Corrected link is here:
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/KDE4_desktop/Cahkra-ArchLinux-KDE-…
I switched my menu over to Lancelot. However, I find that I launch 95% of my apps via KRunner (the “Run” command), which I have set as Win+R. So much faster, as I don’t have to use the mouse.
Win+R, fir+enter starts firefox. Win+R, kon+enter starts konsole. And so on.
I tried KDE 4.0 the minute it got released, on a test machine – quad core xeon from Dell, 6GB RAM, not sure about the rest, Opensuse 11.0. I had a few crashes, no wait, not crash, but a freeze of the entire system when I closed the kwrite editor from the X button – I didn’t find anything that made sense at this time. But besides the early day crashes, overall it’s not looking good – I simply think that KDE4 is ugly. The overall performance was bad, I was waiting for 2-3 seconds for a simple window to pop up, and so on. So, I decided not to switch, and stayed with 3.5.10 ever since – works like a charm. I don’t think that I will be migrating my office setup as well – I just don’t think it’s worth, also having in mind that I have numerous modifications to the current system, it’s just too complex to get it working again with KDE4. Surely, a bold move as the author said, but you can’t make everyone happy
On some machines around, I’ve seen colleagues using it with no issues, besides a few color lines at the top of the screen sometimes, NVIDIA driver is good to blame here.
The problem is that Aaron Segio is more interested in “making something new” and fancy eye-candy (a dreadful term which only encourages the spread of the disease) than in “making something that works and is useful.”
KDE 4 would improve substantially if Segio and half the devs who bought into his twisted vision just dropped dead.
He claimed that they ‘couldn’t port” desktop icons to KDE 4…but on his blog, he was proudly proclaiming to the other devs that, after great effort, he had RIPPED THAT FUNCTIONALITY OUT.
The problem with KDE 4 has been the rampant dishonesty coming from the devs since day 1. Sad to say, because I loved KDE 2, and I love KDE 3. KDE 4 is obfuscated, and the implementation of useful functionality takes massive begging and pleading to the devs — “if you want it, you have to tell us what’s missing!” … as if they were all had never seen, let alone used, KDE 3. I can hardly wait for KDE 5, and the chance that actual adults will be at the core of that team.
I have a laptop with a GMA950 and a desktop with a Radeon 1800XL. In terms of KDE4 performance, the Intel chip blows the ATI chip out of the water.
KDE4 on the Intel chip is fluid and fast. All the effects work, the work well, and they do not lag or anything. The experience is the same across distros.
With ATI animations are choppy, random freezes occur, and some effects just can’t be used. Some distros will get the experience close to working well, others are a total mess.
I would ask Thom to try KDE4 out on a good distro (Fedora/Pardus) with an Intel chip, and see if he can get a good experience out of it.
Intel and KDE 4.3 have an interesting issue where activating a tooltip will erase the area where the previous tooltip showed up. It’s a known bug they won’t fix because apparently it’s X.org not behaving as defined. The workaround is to activate desktop effects, but you can turn off all the actual animations.
Stop using Kubuntu and stop thinking that Ubuntu derived distributions are what you need to be using like a sheep. Use OpenSuse or preferably Mandriva. If you’re getting random crashes that you say you’re getting then it certainly isn’t a widespread problem that can be traced to KDE 4 itself.
I found OpenSuse to be among the buggiest. For example, maximizing a window on ATI froze the system nearly 30% of the time.
I’d say ignoring Kubuntu, its probably the buggiest.
I have been running KDE4 since KDE4.0, in Gentoo terms running ~arch for my KDE4, using whatever is the latest NVIDIA binary drivers, on several 64bit machines, 1 laptop with Gefore Go 6150, and 1 desktop with variously 6800, 7800, 9800, 220. Both are dual core machines with 2Gb RAM.
The desktop machine runs 24/7 (mythtv), the laptop being the machine I do my day-to-day surfing/work on.
In both cases, the machines have been solid and stable. I have a fair few of the desktop effects turned on.
Maybe the fact that Gentoo compiles specifically for the machine it is being run on, and in my case compiles with a very sane set of CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS, but I have never had any issues with stability or performance.
I do have 1 laptop with and ATI Mobility 200, single core processor, and 2Gb RAM, using the kernel KMS and the latest xf86-video-ati drivers, and it works happily, with very few issues.
BTW, QT4.6 has made a massive difference in terms of performance, things are just snappier!
I usually use Fluxbox, but like to try out the major window managers/desktop environments. I just finished giving KDE4 several weeks. It ran well on my laptop, a dual-core Sony running Slackware 13. I upgraded to 4.3 for about a week. Coming in with no long-term knowledge of any previous KDE, but having tried a bunch of its competitors, I was impressed with KDE, but I don’t think I’m going to find it a must-have. Just like XFCE, Gnome, E17, etc., it all comes down to a panel (or two) with a task bar, some launchers, a systray, a menu and a clock. Sure, you got your modules, and plasmoids and whatnot, but in the end, you set those things and go back to work. KDE4 ran the eye candy smoothly on my integrated graphics, but after a couple of days the novelty wears off and you forget to watch the genie effect when you minimize a window and you might as well be in a lighter environment.
So right now I’m back to Fluxbox to see if I miss all the bells and whistles. So far, not too much. Maybe I have unusually simple requirements, but all I really need is the application I’m working in and a system monitor (for which I usually use gkrellm).
Some months ago I didn’t have a very good feeling about Kde 4.2 … good but not really comfortable. Anyway I made a new Funtoo installation with a good make.conf and kde 4.3.3; now the slowness is over.
I believe KDE 4.x is the first real opportunity for
Linux to succeed on the desktop. It could easily
double the amount of users, if done carefully.
I’ve started my adventure with kde 4 since 4.1 on Pardus 2009 .
Then enviroment was unstable , crashes happens often and ram-consumption was considerable .
But now version 4.3 is stable , most bugs were solved , ram consumption was reduced , and it’s possible for normal worki with 1gb ram and intel gma
Specs:
Fedora 11 x86_64
Asus P5N-T Deluxe MB (780i nForce)
Intel Q9450 Core2Quad @ 2.66Ghz
4GB 1066 DDR2
dual nVidia 8800GT (running in non SLI mode for stability and dual screen)
3.5 TB of local storage, 1.5TB external
KDE 4.3.4
nVidia 190.42 binary blob
Performance wise I have very little to complain about, actually it beats the crap out of both Windows 7 and MacOSX Leopard! However both Dolphin and Amarok do crash @random, especially Dolphin which is rather annoying
But on the other hand it was only once that Dolphin crashed during some large I/O and I had to 1 stop the file transfer because it stalled and 2 fire up good old midnight commander to do the job right.
I do have some Fedora specific problems:
– Nepomuk/Strigi enabled by default but you have to compile the packages that actually make it work yourself!
– KPackage crashing alot and telling me to reboot as soon as it starts to download the updated packages!!!
– SELinux preventing removable storage to get unmounted properly, wtf!!
– Other stuff I’m sure is just as annoying but that I somehow forgot about
All things considered, I do consider KDE 4.3 to be stable and fast enough for daily usage. It only has those rough edges that seem to come along with the Linux desktop, time and time again….
Consering your performance problems, I do believe you have some problem with your hardware setup, not KDE itself. Probably the Ati blob, what happens if you turn off the desktop eyecandy?
I use Mandriva 2009, and I have had no problems at all with KDE4.2 (I think it is). A very nice combination of the old and the new in my view, with the old style menus (which I prefer) and the various plasmoids available. After trying Kubuntu I would say stick to a distro which treats KDE as a 1st class citizen (Mandriva, OpenSuse, Mepis, Slackware…).
I had a few troubles with the video driver (ATI) at first, but I downloaded the September release and everything has worked fine since.
I think i am a lucky guy. I use openSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3. I use KDE and openSUSE in a production environment. I never had a crash of my plasma. I am using a Siemens esprimo with an amd 3500, 1 GB ram and nvidia 6200 dual vga. Two monitors are connected.
On an average working day i have following programs started:
virtual box (vmmachine XP) firefox 3.5,
at least 10 consoles connected to unix machines,
ssh dolphin connections to linux machines
several kwrite sessions
Extra plasmoids: clock, ftp, cpu, my documents,
6 workspaces,
two activities,
3d enabled,
wallpaper slideshow enabled.
I had a fedora 11 internet pc with kde4.2 and this pc crashed once a day. When i installed opensuse 11.1 everything worked fine.
Maybe there is a something with your kubuntu.
Can you do your tests with other linux distros?
I have almost the exact same hardware as Thom… though with different software. I get excellent performance on almost the same machine. So I have a feeling its one of two things you have Thom.
1) Kubuntu. Its notoriously buggy KDE packages may be the source of your daily crashes. I’ve run KDE 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and the various patch releases for *months* without a crash. Yes thats right, months. I’m using Arch Linux.
2) FGLRX. Its crap. Seriously, buggiest driver possible to use. If you want 3D wait a little bit, get an older radeon card that has FOSS 3D already, or get an NVIDIA card. In any case use the ATI driver, xf86-video-ati in archlinux. I use xrender for kwin compositing and it works *perfectly* with better performance then the nvidia card with the nvidia driver I use at work.
Given the two suggestions above I’m sure your issues will disappear if you
* Use the FOSS ati driver
* Use a distro that is known not to have buggy KDE packages. Its so well known bugs from Kubuntu are often simply attributed to Kubuntu instead of KDE itself.
I would like to endorse this also.
Right now, I am running Arch with KDE 4.3.4 (the default KDE, not KDEmod), which has just moved kernel 2.6.32 to core.
http://www.archlinux.org/news/477/
Because my system has a low-end ATI card (specifically a HD 2400 Pro) I have a composited 3D KDE desktop out of the box (the xf86-video-ati FOSS 3D driver is default with kernel 2.6.32).
It is very stable, and blazingly fast. Hooray for the good guys.
So the only nitpick I would have with your comment is that by using the “ATI driver, xf86-video-ati in archlinux”, Thom wouldn’t in fact have to wait any longer at all. It is the default right now.
Just install Arch (2009.08 will do), then “pacman -Syu” will update to kernel 2.6.32 and working 3D-capable xf86-video-ati driver.
(Apparently the IRQs will not be enabled until kernel 2.6.33).
Edited 2009-12-31 03:55 UTC