Guest post by KDE has announced its latest set of releases, providing major updates to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform. Version 4.8 provides many new features, and improved stability, performance and dynamic power management.
KDE has announced its latest set of releases, providing major updates to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform. Version 4.8 provides many new features, and improved stability, performance and dynamic power management.
Really glad to see stability and performance improvements listed as a goal in 4.8. I just wish they would dedicate a single release ONLY to stability and performance. Freeze all features and just concentrate on making the ones they already have work well without crashing or bogging down the system. Heck, *remove* some features if necessary to achieve it. Remember that stability and performance are the must-have features.
Edit: Oh, and by the way, a huge thanks to the KDE team for producing a product that still runs and acts the same even without 3D driver support. I HATE it when other systems require 3D drivers just to render menus or provide a bunch of superfluous effects.
Edited 2012-01-27 04:38 UTC
KDE already works perfectly well without crashing or bogging down the system.
It is just that KDE SC 4.8 does an even better job in this regard than previous releases did.
Your statement contradicts the KDE developers; clearly there was some code that was “boggin down the system” in some cases.
Indeed there was. The new code will be faster.
This does not mean that the previous code was unacceptably slow or overly bogged down. It wasn’t … KDE has been perfectly useable and more than acceptably fast and snappy for some time now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKII7Yb75XE
Kubuntu 11.10: “Right off the bat the first thing I noticed is that it is extremely snappy. Really, really snappy and responds extremely well. I was pretty impressed with just how smooth everything was.”
Edited 2012-01-27 07:35 UTC
So clearly for some people it is fine, and for some people it is not. That’s always the case; software tends to be judged by the worst-case though (as it should be), because those are the cases that still have to be fixed.
There’s no need to maintain that everything is perfect in KDE-land, there are sore-spots just like in GNOME or any other software project.
Sigh! Not this again.
If KDE is not stable and performing well on some rare systems out there, then clearly this must be due to some aspect of those systems that is different from the vast majority of systems on which KDE does perform extremely well.
Since KDE itself is the same on all systems, any such performance problem (if indeed there is one, as objective hard evidence is rarely offered) must lie outside of KDE.
The video drivers are the most likely place in which any such problems may lie. Wherever it is, it is not in KDE itself. If there was a problem in KDE itself, it would be a problem for everyone who runs KDE.
Edited 2012-01-27 08:28 UTC
Software is complicated and can fail in very interesting and diverse ways, especially something as big as KDE; it’s hard to get perfect.
Some errors will be due to KDE’s dependencies, some not, but who are you to say that they’re all due to dependencies? Good thing the KDE devs don’t think like you, nothing would ever get done. All bugs marked “Works for me — CLOSED”, that’ll work really well….
maybe you think that “crashing or bogging down the system” is the normal behavior so you don’t recognize it as such?
What exactly is the point of lying about how extremely fast, snappy and responsive that KDE has become now?
It doesn’t crash either. What is wrong with you? What is your agenda, exactly, to disparage the hard work and great success of KDE developers?
or maybe it’s because it doesn’t? I haven’t had any stability problems with kde4 for a long time now. Heck, I even have a 7 year old laptop (768Mb RAM) that runs it reasonably well. The only program I can remember crashing is Rekonq and it does indeed crash a bit more often than it should.
Rekonq hasn’t reached version 1 yet.
http://rekonq.kde.org/
Last Release
rekonq 0.8.71
Use it only with caution still.
Not having a 1.0 version number is no excuse for crashing.
On the other hand, Arora crashes about as much for me so maybe it’s a Webkit thing or something else.
We are close to releasing version 0.9
I hardly ever get a rekonq crash, would you mind telling me what qtwebkit/qt versions are you running?
Have you submitted any bug report?
Thanks!
rekonq: 0.8.0
webkit: whatever kde is using.
kdE: 4.7.4
kubuntu: 11.10
What sometimes happens is that rekong just crashes after a period of time but as I said the same thing happens with Arora.
I’m very happy with rekong overall though and the only thing I miss is some kind of bookmark sync.
No but I will the next time it happens.
You must be using qtwebkit 2.0. You’ll see a *huge* improvement whenever your distro updates to 2.2
And for the bookmark sync… it’s already there in Master
Try the latest technology preview if you want to test it!
Regards
I don’t agree. Every time I’ve tried various versions of KDE 4 they have been a bit glitchy and slow. I hope 4.8 is better.
KDE4 is not at all glitchy or slow on the vast majority of systems (millions upon millions of them).
If you are running the exact same KDE4 code as everyone else is on their systems, and it is not at all glitchy or slow for them but it is for you, then clearly this must be due to some area where your system is different to all these others.
Hence your system’s problem is not in KDE4 itself. It probably lies somewhere in the drivers.
Edited 2012-01-27 08:48 UTC
I do not use KDE so I cannot comment on stability. The primary reason that I do not use it though is because I find it bogs down my system. It is easily the heaviest of the desktops (eg. KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, stand-alone WMs). I have tried every version up until 4.7. I will give 4.8 a try as well at some point.
I am glad it works for you but, given the relative performance of KDE, I do not think that you can objectively call it snappy.
I posted the objective evidence here:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?504838
Kubuntu 11.10: “Right off the bat the first thing I noticed is that it is extremely snappy. Really, really snappy and responds extremely well. I was pretty impressed with just how smooth everything was.”
These are not my words, but they do agree with my own experience of Kubuntu 11.10, which uses KDE 4.7.2.
I can indeed call KDE4 snappy. Objectively, I can call it snappy. Extremely snappy and responsive. I agree wholeheartedly with YouTube poster MrGizmo757, KDE4 is indeed “Really, really snappy”. There is hard video evidence to prove it.
How “objective” can you get?
You don’t believe MrGizmo757, perhaps you think he may have somehow faked it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AIgyGmHH50&feature=related
Perhaps then you should listen to YouTube user delt0delt0 who shows the same conclusion as MrGizmo757.
They both show video of Kubuntu 11.10 running KDE 4.7.2 extremely snappily. If KDE4 itself was broken or bogged down, neither of these videos would be possible to make. Yet there they are.
tanishaj:
… then you are hardly in a position to make a comment on it, are you?
KDE 4.8 (which is to be used in Kubuntu 12.04 LTS) will be even snappier.
Enjoy, everybody.
Edited 2012-01-28 04:11 UTC
Unfortunatly, i understand where the “kde is not snappy comments come from”.
The same KDE release in the same machine, same configurations but :
Funtoo :
Super snappy… its kwin effects gallore … it feels like it doesnt even use 10% of the video card.
Opensuse ( latest and previous ) :
Super slow … with compositing enabled is just barelly usable.
I have to use an special user openbuild service X/Mesa/DRM repository to make it “normal” speed.
This “unsnappiness” is completly KDE unrelated, but KDE “karma”,”fame”,”opinion” suffers from it
“Super snappy” (relative to the performance of other OSes on the same hardware) is a good way to describe KDE4 in my experience.
I haven’t tried OpenSuse very much … it was OK-ish on the one system on which I did try it, but Kubuntu was better on that same system. Because I haven’t tried it that much I can’t really comment.
However, I wish to say, extensive kudos to you for realising that, since KDE is indeed extremely snappy and responsive on most systems, then wherever it happens that KDE is found to be “unsnappy” it actually has nothing to do with KDE itself.
If KDE itself were slow and bogged down, it would be slow and bogged down everywhere. There could be no systems at all on which it was extremely snappy, as its is normally reported to be in reviews.
It would appear that so very many OSNews readers are completely unable to appreciate this simple point.
… either that, or they do appreciate it, and they just don’t want anyone else to.
Edited 2012-01-29 06:03 UTC
I do like openSuse though, kudos to them for the great distro.
That said, my thoughts :
* It is something in the graphics department of openSuse. Only gpu/graphics are slow and worse have a little of corruption on them (glitchs sometime appears). I dunno why this happens, simply managing driver and X / Mesa versions is not enough, as opensuse is using a more or less recent X/Mesa/Driver stack.
* Even if its only graphics performance and the rest is very fast … everything will look horrible slow. No matter how fast the underlying system is running, if displaying / moving / animating a window is slow, it looks like everything is damn slow.
I would really love for openSuse to fix this, as its one of my favorite distros. Problably is something related to my video card model and its rare, so its not getting attention.
In terms of performance and memory usage , KDE is very very good. Actually , since i have a very weird KDE desktop configuration ( systray and menu are on the dashboard ), if kde was slow everything would be ruined ( dashboard does dim screen and blur… and i go there alot of times. if it was slow it would greatly effect my usage ).
Kudos also for the nepomuk and strigi guys. My only grip now is : Why not export tags and ( some , only whats possible ) nepomuk info into files extended attributes. My work and backup partitions are both linux filesystems, so i would never lose any information.
Yep.
And it would be perfect if they can make it lightweight as in KDE3, and reduce memory consumption.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKII7Yb75XE
According to this reviewer, who offers video hard evidence in support of his statements, KDE4 is easily lightweight enough to run very smoothly, even on low-resource systems such as netbooks.
“I was able to install this on a 900 MHz netbook”.
Edited 2012-01-27 07:47 UTC
well it’s intriquing.. Mine is asus 1215B (E-350, 2GB).
archlinux 32bit KDE 4.7.3 on it, and it’s not so fast. But then, maybe the video card’s the problem.
This tired old bellyache again? You should check out the new razor-qt desktop then… It was designed just for those who can’t let go of KDE 3.x
http://razor-qt.org/
Edited 2012-01-27 11:34 UTC
I ain’t can’t let go KDE3. Re-read my post, please?
And yes, I’ve checked razor-qt. It sure is interesting. Memory footprint’s low too, but still not that user friendly.
I didn’t misunderstand anything. One constant I always find in comments regarding KDE 4 is always the same folks who bitch and moan that KDE 4 is slow; it’s a resource hog; it’s glitchy. These are CLEARLY people who can’t let go of the fact that KDE 3.x is over and haven’t actually used (as in every day) a recent KDE version post 4.2. They repeat this tired old FUD time and time again and frankly there’s no merit to these claims. I agree with Lemur. I’ve been using KDE 4.7.x on a chintzy little netbook and it runs circles about the anemic Windows 7 Starter that shipped with the netbook with full 3D accelerated desktop effects enabled and all my standard programs. It’s time to get over it already.
Hear hear.
Well said.
KDE4 is modular, so to some extent, it is lightweight, if you only want a base-install and a few extra applications.
Even a default Windows XP installation is several GB in size, so KDE4 is lightweight compared to that.
Edited 2012-01-27 13:34 UTC
Lightweight in memory consumption/ memory footprint/ how much KDE use the memory. Not the harddrive.
KDE4 runs sweetly on a netbook machine with 1GB RAM and a mere 900MHz CPU.
It will run OK on a machine with only 512GB RAM and, say, a 750MHz CPU, but I would not expect much on a lower spec machine.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/TYPE-Pentium%20III~*~…
A system with the Pentium III (Coppermine) CPU, or anything after that, should be just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Coppermine
“From December 1999 to May 2000, Intel released Pentium IIIs running at speeds of 750, 800, 850, 866, 900, 933 and 1000 MHz (1 GHz).”
Just to be safe … use it on any desktop machine made in this millenium, but not the previous millenium.
Edited 2012-01-28 04:38 UTC
My KDE4 mem when booting to KDE 4.7.3 is 4xx MB. I’m afraid it’ll not enough if it just 512MB mem (unless you kill akonadi & nepomuk). Barely usable. It’ll run slowly cause then have to use swap space.
When you just have 512MB mem, when booting to KDE, Try to you open firefox with 4-6 tab, a couple of program and you’ll run out of mem.
I really like KDE, but their mem footprint is worse with each release. Memory’s cheaper now doesn’t meant KDE have to throw all the memory they can use.
512MB would be a minimum. If you want to run KDE yet you have only 512MB RAM, either buy some more (it will be worth it), or make sure you pare KDE down to the minimum settings.
Also, here are some tips:
Simple Tips for Speeding up KDE / Kubuntu
http://www.numango.com/5527_simple-tips-speeding-kde-kubuntu.html
Having said that, really, buying a bit more memory is really the easiest and most effective way to to go.
I ran KDE4 versions prior to 4.4 on a 450mhz P2 with 384MB ram After my P4 system died. It an as fast as KDE 3.5.x and alot snappier over time than the XP partition. And it ran very well on an old P3 700mhz 256MB laptop that I played with.
WOW. That is very good indeed. I suppose it depends on exactly what you want to run.
I believe there is a package called “kubuntu-netbook-settings” or something like that that selects a whole raft of settings in one go to yeild good performance on low-resource systems.
But even then your experience stated above is one of the best experiences of KDE4 on low-resource systems that I have heard of recently.
Glad to hear that
.
From my testing, KDE3 still feel snappier than KDE4. XP is OK too (run it from VM). The problem with XP (and all windows) is when you install many programs/apps, the system will be slower. Then, if one wants to use blazing fast XP, they must fresh install it, haha..
Thank you for this link. I’m going to try these tips the next time I have a look at KDE (when Ubuntu ships 4.8).
I’m one of these “many users” the article cites that experience very poor performance of KDE (it is by far the slowest and power hungry desktop on my laptop) and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was caused by some misconfiguration or weird defaults.
Whether I make a switch to KDE is a different question. I’m extremely happy with my Xfce desktop and thelast time I tried KDE I was unimpressed with its features (those I needed were poorly implemented, the ones I didn’t need were plentiful and enabled by default).
Yeah, I know..
I’m a bit crazy about optimization
I works. When my laptop died this spring, I went back and used my former laptop with 512MByte memory and ran KDE 4.6 on it. It worked just fine, just as fine as KDE3 had run on in the days.
Worked fine for me on a 2.8 GHz Celeron laptop with only 512 MB of RAM, running KDE4 plasma-netbook interface. Could run Firefox and even watch youtube videos (until a certain Flash upgrade hosed the box and the reinstall never ran Flash properly afterward).
Yes, desktop effects are turned off (the onboard RADEON 7000 GPU doesn’t support them), nepomuck/akonadi are turned off (it’s an HTPC, no need for strigi or mail storage), and it tends to only run 1 app at a time (Dragon). But KDE4 runs beautifully on it, and it’s very usable. It was our main TV show/movie access for several years, starting with KDE3, then upgrading to KDE4.2, then 4.4, and I think it was running 4.6 by the end.
There have been several comparisons done by KDE developers that show KDE4 using less memory than KDE3 equivalents.
Considering I can run KDE4 plasma-netbook interface on a laptop with only 512 MB of RAM, watchign XviD videos in Dragon, using Phonon-VLC via PulseAudio, accessing files over wifi via NFS, without dropping frames, tells me that KDE4 is not “resource hungry” or “bloated”. (Kubuntu 10.something with KDE 4.4 or 4.6. The laptop has since been retired and replaced with a Windows XP station running XBMC, but it served us well for many years.)
KDE is developed by hundreds of volunteers, working on their own prefered directions.
There’s not, and there could not be a ‘management’ to drive the development process. KDE could not force a ‘stability release’ among its developers.
However, ‘stability and performance’ is the path kde is actually taking. In the past few releases, most of the effort has been put into polishing various parts, not adding new features.
why not … wait that might require some discipline.
Evolution doesn’t require discipline, or any kind of organisation or overview, or even any notion of purpose or intent, in order to produce complex and high-performance organisms.
FOSS development progresses in a process described as a “meritocracy”, which in some ways is quite similar to the processes of evolution, which in turn has been summarised as “survival of the fittest”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Open_Source
Edited 2012-01-27 08:45 UTC
But software isn’t an animal …
Edited 2012-01-27 09:56 UTC
True. However, FOSS software development IS a process where there are successive generations (called versions), each one made with largely the same defining code (not DNA but source code) inherited from its parent code of the previous generations, but with incremental small changes which subsequently continue on in the code through later generations only if that code is the best fit for purpose.
Whatever works best, survives to the next generation, and continues to survive in subsequent generations as long as it remains the best.
This is the process of evolution, essentially. The parallels to the process of biological evolution are significant.
Edited 2012-01-27 10:46 UTC
This is arguable at best.
So why was all the KDE 3.5 code chucked out the Window when they moved to 4?
And evolution doesn’t produce the best results. It produces results which are “good enough”.
Edited 2012-01-27 11:19 UTC
No it was not. That statement is pure nonsense.
KDE 4.0 retained easily 80-90% of the KDE 3.5 code. One of the larger parts of the 3.5 code that was scrapped and rewritten was kicker and kdesktop, and that was hardly more than 1-2% of the code. So a far way from chucking all code out the window. Large parts of the code was virtually unchanged, only adapted to changes in the underlying Qt libraries.
So why has it taken almost 3 years to get back to what KDE 3.5 could do?
Since it does a whole lot more than 3.5 ever did. So obviously some of the functionality from the few discarded % of code, have had less priority to be added back.
Seriously, KDE SC is something like 4-5 million lines of code, do you really think the KDE developer(they are not that many) designed, developed, tested and debugged all that code from scratch in the few years since KDE 3.5? For most, in their spare time at that.
It’s true that the KDE developers are awesome, but they are not quite on that level of super humans.
http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributors
450 active developers (up to 2009) is “not that many”?
Really?
I haven’t even accounted for the Qt developers, which is an independent project.
Many of those developers do not contribute to KDE SC, they work in other parts of the KDSs repositories like extragear, koffice/caligra, kdevelop, webdeveloper and translators. Others, while active produce very little code.
And regardless, 450 developers are not that many in the context of design, develop, test and debug 4-5 million lines of code from scratch in the few years since KDE 3.5. Which was the silly statement I was addressing.
KDE 4 passed KDE 3.5 capability years ago, and it passed KDE 3.5 performance shortly after that. Where have you been?
Obviously not evangelising software that less that 1% of all computer installs on the planet … Find another cause!
Lets see I recently emigrated to Spain after being head-hunted to work in Gibraltar. I am now writing my own website analysis software which I will be releasing midway through this year (which will be under a license that is not libre in anyway).
Yet evolution has produced results (organisms) which are far more complex, functional and more efficient than anything remotely equivalent on this planet that has ever been designed (i.e. machines).
Edited 2012-01-27 13:20 UTC
Yet at some point you actually make decisions about code should be structured … this sounds awfully a lot like design
😐
That is so inaccurate, it could almost be called an outright lie.
There was a lot of (logic) code shared from kde 3.5, but the vast changes between Qt 3.x and 4.x made it worthwhile to improve on aspects of kde 3.
The only major element that was outright new was plasma.
Software is an unruly beast.
Indeed, discipline is an issue when you depend on volunteered work spread around the globe.
However, you have to understand that KDE includes many many sub-projects. These sub-projects are in different status and their own developers and maintainers know the necessary steps for their own projects better than ayone else. So even if KDE ‘could’ force a feature freeze on a specific release, that wouldnt make any sense. Those parts which need polish are already being polished.
Edited 2012-01-27 09:09 UTC
I think KDE is stagned (no really big new features since 4.2) and even after 8 sub-versions, it doesn’t make me exited about it.
I’m more eager to put my hands on razor-qt 0.5 than in KDE 5.
KDE 4 series has become alright, despite some crash here or there. But the lack of new themes on par with Oxygen are the huge low down. We have some poor polished QT themes, but nothing really better than Oxygen, which can be very tiring – all the grey gradient with those ridiculous rounded buttons for its style…
The lack of an specific font seems to be being worked out, but my bet it’s that is going to be a little better than GNOME’s Cantarell. From a first impression, Ubuntu’s fonts remain the best typeface, IMO.
To KDE team: More [embedded] themes and styles, before going to 5 series. Please.
Edited 2012-01-27 21:16 UTC
If you feel a bit “adventurous” you can try the bespin themes.
I now it is also grey, but I like the “bespin detour”, inspired by enlightenment detour theme.
Don’t know what happened between Thomas and the design team of KDE (he was directly involved on themes creation in the beginning of KDE4 series), but his engine and the themes it support seems to be some of the best on kde-look from the aesthetic point-of-view.
kde is hideous and the people making it have no taste is what you’re saying. judging from the screenshots it appears you are correct
http://linuxlibrary.org/reviews/kubuntu-11-10-review/
“A masterpiece in asthetics”. “Polished KDE Plasma desktop”. Clearly the appeal of the look of a desktop OS is something that is purely subjective. Opinions differ wildly.
In light of this, I feel it is always good to have a spread of opinions posted, and then let people decide for themselves.
Another view:
http://www.renewablepcs.com/about-linux/kde-gnome-or-xfce
“KDE is more polished in appearance than GNOME, Xfce, or LXDE”
Everyone has a different opinion. By no means is it a prevailing view that KDE is hideous. Quite the opposite, actually, is the opinion often expressed.
Edited 2012-01-28 07:04 UTC
some links nobody has read doesn’t convince me or the billions of people not using kde that it is attractive or otherwise any good
Some irrelevant complains from an irrelevant commenter like this does not convince me and other people who use KDE everyday that it is beautiful and powerful.
So, if you so openly admit that – just like most people – you are not convinced by tales of KDE beauty and power (I can’t not agree with you) …then why use it, daily at that? (and again, gloating about it publicly)
Some peculiar form of masochism, maybe even outright punishing yourself for some reason?
Edited 2012-02-03 00:01 UTC
What screenshot?
the screenshots in the links in the story you are replying to
Ah, I thought you meant that the OP had a screenshot.
Hideous? You sir, have no taste.
Taste is an opinion not a fact.
Personally I think “Windows Standard” (Win 2k theme) on Windows XP with cleartype type turned on was theme for getting stuff done.
I personally think the spacing of all the elements are off and inconsistent. I am sure you can change it but that really isn’t the point. First impressions count.
Edited 2012-01-30 13:09 UTC
QtCurve is still around and far superior to Oxygen, but I don’t know if the guy’ll keep updating.
This KDE4 user recommends the “h2o” theme.
http://asininetech.com/2012/01/27/why-kde-is-the-future/
Perhaps that would be worth a shot for you?
Edited 2012-01-28 07:36 UTC
He’s not talking about Plasma themes (of which there is certainly no shortage) but widget styles.
Well, apart from the transparency & style different in the taskbar, I don’t see any changes on the window title button styles and the boring flat gradient gray.
I have the opinion that Oxygen could reach perfection if:
1) Window buttons were like in gnome-shell’s adwaita, with a corresponding color when you hover the pointer on them.
2) Dialog buttons abolish the icons.
3) Possibly not include or turn off icons on menus for the KDE UI, but not for applications, at a first glance…
4) Bigger dialog buttons would help too. I think they are too small. (and no, I won’t try Qt emulation of GTK).
5) An intermediate cursor size in oxygene cursor theme – there is default (small) and big, which is really huge IMO. There should be an intermediate size between these two.
Edited 2012-01-28 22:21 UTC
Change the colors to something other than grey?
But yeah, there seems to be a bit lack of themes but since I like Oxygen it’s not something that bothers me.
Bespin and qtcurve are still around though and they’re quite configurable.
Personally I am not all that fond of the Ubuntu font but to each their own.
I am yet to see on this entire forum a single post that you agree with.
So?*
Why does he have to agree with anybody? As long as he argues his point…
*(even if it were true)
I am yet to see on this entire forum a single post where you are not trolling or being intentionally inflammatory.
My trolling seems to be working, specially for you. Wherever I throw a bait, there’s always you to catch it. Good job.
Being intentionally inflammatory that is what the internet is for. Have a problem with fire? Stay away from it. Who here could be more inflammatory than argue against any point of view? You’re from the team too.
As far as I am concerned about inflammatory, you also do the same kind of thing, that is for sure.
Unfortunately, doing themes in Qt, complex one that manage color configuration, animations, shadows, good AA is not trivial stuff… And requires 2 things, Good designers, and better Coders.
Note that Oxygen Is AFIK the only QT, GTK, GTK2 theme that exists, and that loses no reconfigurability or significant features in any of the engines…
Its not the most exiting theme in the world, it was design to last the entire 4.x series, far more than any KDE theme until today. and doing that without becoming annoying or distractive wile pushing the frontiers of what we do and how we arrange apps in KDE…. I must say that I believe Oxygen to be a massive success, Never in KDE history as a theme lasted this long and pleasing so many, and at the same time being so discretely innovative in the amount of things a theme does in OSS.
With the advent of QML and QML components that might change… But don’t expect anything revolutionary, in terms of volume of themes, Good configurable themes are still alot of work, specially if they are meant to be colorable..
Soon we will start talking about KDE 5.0 and what needs to be done for that, honestly Wen i started This fantastic experience I said I would only do the 4.x series and im not sure what will happen next, but I hope its something Fantastic.
Overall I’m incredibly happy with of he job we managed to do with a incredible small team of volunteers.
I will keep on working on oxygen several facets up until the last day of its existence.
Oxygen is a good default theme that need polish some rought edges, like IMHO the abuse of rounded corners, the use of rect corners here and there would make it more elegant.
Thank you for that comment. “need polish some rough edges” I agree there is allot of room for improvement…
“like IMHO the abuse of rounded corners” Don’t agree there, in the sense of volume, as I see it they can be rounded or not rounded, so all of them rounded or not, some rounded some not would be inconsistent.
A more sharp globally less rounded theme, sure. But not in just some places…
I should note that depending in the dpi of your screen that may vary as they are pixel based, should also note that studies indicate that people feel less comfortable with hard 90 degree angles, so a bit of roundness makes a theme look more #safe” and inviting…
Any way, thank you for the kind comments, and I think i understood what you meent… Globally I agree we need more quality themes with different design pasterns, oxygen is band because it tries to make every one happy, and we can only fail wen trying to do that…
Even though I use bespin from time to time I must say that I really like the overall default look of KDE4. To me it is by far the best DE of them all. Are there some glitches that should be fixed? Yes, there are. But if I weight all things together nor Windows 7 nor OS X are as good to me, despite both of them be very good too.
Thank you very much for all effort you, the oxygen team and all other developers have put on creating KDE4.
thank you
Well that explains why there are so few passable KDE themes. (only one?)
An open source desktop should have artists flocking to it to create. Does KDE?
Unfortunately for KDE, being a good artist is not enough. You’ve explained something the KDE team screwed up. Themes so difficult to create that only the original theme ninja can do it.
My take on this issue is that while KDE4 is somewhat heavier than other environments, the difference in CPU usage or memory consumption does not matter much on most of the hardware people use.
The problem with KDE is that it puts strain on the underlying subsystems and hardware drivers. From my experience, it works fairly well on legacy hardware, where most of the new stuff is disabled anyway, or it requires top-notch drivers supporting all the new and fancy features. The ugly truth is that most of the linux hardware drivers are half baked and require application writers to carefully maneuver their way through supported features.
On my system KDE4.7 is constantly using 100% of one (of four) CPU cores. This of course makes the whole system run like crap but I doubt this is how it is supposed to work (I mean, no one could screw the implementation up so badly, even if he/she tried very hard). More likely, there is some conflict between KDE and some of the subsystems (audio in my case).
Ultimately, though, it is the job of KDE4 programmers and distributors to make their product work well. The users have all rights to complain if it is unusable out of the box and it is not their job to fix it.
Unfortunately your system is “broken” outside of KDE. As you speculate, the problem is most probably in the drivers you are using. This has nothing to do with KDE. KDE itself, on a normal working system, simply does not behave anything like you describe.
KDE developers make a product that performs extremely well for millions upon millions of users on many hundreds (if not thousands) of different systems. It is not at all a “heavy” environment, as you speculate. One only has to run KDE on an under-resourced netbook to realise this. KDE4 programmers and distributors HAVE MADE their product work well.
KDE developers do not have any particular obligation to fix your particular system’s graphics drivers (or whatever the problem, external to KDE, might happen to be on your particular system). Once again, it is NOT the job of KDE developers o fix problems in graphics drivers with some obscure card or another.
Have you submitted a detailed bug report to the graphics driver developers?
If you haven’t done so, I’m afraid you have no “rights” at all to complain. KDE developers simply don’t have to cater to your unique isolated problems with other parts of your particular system.
Edited 2012-01-30 09:55 UTC
I didn’t bother with it because I found the solution myself. Xfce.
You make a good point. If the user experiences that a CPU core is constantly burned while using KDE, then they should be reporting it through KDE. In some sense KDE is to ‘blame’ in the sense that they stand between the underlying system and the user, and they should protect the user from such things.
Buggy video drivers, that don’t work well in certain circumstances? I believe KDE should be adding ugly hacks around this in their system, while at the same time petitioning to get things fixed in the video drivers so the hacks can eventually be removed.
I think that it’s the only way to get the users what they need over the long and short term.
Yup, my point exactly.
In an “ideal world” all the users trying KDE4 would have enough knowledge and patience to identify the exact cause of the problem (and perhaps fix it – that’s often equivalent to identifying the culprit), go to a valid bug tracker and never ever mention in public that KDE is running slow or is unstable (even if that’s exactly what they experience).
But in the real life the users will spend 1~2 hours on “trying new KDE4”, hit an issue they can’t resolve themselves, and spread the word to anyone daring to ask about how KDE4 is slow and unstable.
But, is it fair? Well, IMHO it’s not fair that KDE4 gets all the blame. But they do deserve bad publicity. After all it is their product that wasn’t robust enough and their poor design and testing practices that produced to it.
Besides, who cares?, Ultimately, the goal is to make a better DE satisfying needs of more and more users and not to cover problems with excuses.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/kde-48-minor-tweaks-maj…
My take: The graphics driver for his system has obviously had a bug-fix update since the last time that Jack Wallen (the author) had tried KDE.
Edited 2012-01-31 08:58 UTC
Or see http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/08/rendering-at-60-frame… — KWin did get some serious performance improvements.
Yes, but I have run both KDE 4.7 and KDE 4.8 on a number of systems, and the improvement is there but not as dramatic as the Jack Wallen article paints.
After all, none of the KWin performance improvements that Martin Graesslin blogged about are likely to have anything to do with “stability improvements” … especially stability improvements which “apply to both KDE and non-KDE applications as well as widgets”.
Hence my take … IMO there is likely to have been a bug-fix for the graphics drivers Jack Wallen’s on machine. I am speculating that this is the mostly thing to have simultaneously significantly improved both performance and stability on his machine.
Edited 2012-01-31 10:45 UTC