KDE 4 Debate

[saahne]

SJVN barfs on KDE 4 on openSUSE 11 and Ryan Paul at Ars Technica disagrees.

[kastorff]

Thread moved to Soapbox

saahne wrote:

>
> 'SJVN barfs on KDE 4 on openSUSE 11' (http://tinyurl.com/6984ym) and
> 'Ryan Paul at Ars Technica disagrees' (http://tinyurl.com/65ndhz).
>
>
the kde 4.04 rant is a bit old and not necessarily reflective of KDE4's
current state as demonstrated in the 4.1 beta (using the openSuse facory
repo which is almost a nightly update).

Personally I'm finding kde4 and kwin very stable but can't say the same yet
on all the apps I've tried - still using the 3.5.9 versions of Konqueror
and knode and after the latest upgrade getting no sound in Amarok. And yes
plasma needs added functionality but it's not crashing and having the kde3
panel available does help.



--
Suse 11.0 x64, Kde 3.5.9, Opera 9.x weekly

[GofBorg]

Well this probably needs to be moved to soapbox, and I
suspect it will be, but to me the whole pile of moaning
about KDE4 is silly. Nobody forced you to click on
KDE4 and install it as your desktop. You took a gamble
and you lost when it didn't turn out to be all you thought
it was going to be. So for now, install KDE 3.5 and
wait until 4.X impresses you so much that you can't live without
it...or don't. I'm sure there are still OS2/Warp folks out there
wondering what people see in a Start Menu. Logically every application
icon should be available on the desktop. ;^)

I think one difference with open source and corporate software is that when
a company takes a new direction there's not much that can be done from a
users perspective other than continue to use the old stuff until you no
longer can. There's nobody moving the platform forward and the IP
ownership prevents anyone else from moving it forward.

With open source it's possible to keep an active group carving on
KDE 3.5 until the end of time. So in a way KDE has already forked.
Does it even matter?? From what I have seen on the KDE devel group, they
have every intention of making KDE4 everything KDE3.5 was with the added
benefit of some new tech...that IS NOT FINISHED...read the fine print on
the installation screen...'less mature'..maybe next time they should
put 'Ass broken. Install at your own peril' and avoid the whole debate.
I think what has everyone's gnads frosted is that they are working more on
the new tech and less on 'making it KDE3.5'...but 3.5 functions are coming.

In the meantime if you don't like KDE4, pretend it doesn't exist.
I'm sorry for the folks out there having problems
with 4.X stability, but it runs flawlessly on my P4 2.8 with 1GB of memory.
It also runs flawless under a VM which has only 512MB of memory allocated
on my AMD 3800+ 2GB rig at work. KDE isn't your problem, it's the drivers.

[growbag]

Exactly, the words "not as mature" are akin to buying a Lion instead of a cat advertised as "not as cuddly"!

But if by stable you mean "slow as a snail on dope", or "able to slow down even the fastest machine", then yeah it's rock solid .

[GofBorg]

> But if by stable you mean "slow as a snail on dope", or "able to slow
> down even the fastest machine", then yeah it's rock solid .

Sorry I've experienced none of that. Runs fine and you can see the
hardware isn't 'all that'.

[GofBorg]

> Exactly, the words "not as mature" are akin to buying a Lion instead of
> a cat advertised as "not as cuddly"!
>
> But if by stable you mean "slow as a snail on dope", or "able to slow
> down even the fastest machine", then yeah it's rock solid .
>

In fact I forgot I installed it on an HP laptop with a 1 Ghz Duron and 512MB
of memory. It's not that bad on it either. I think if you are having
performance issues, you need to look elsewhere. KDE4 isn't causing it.

[growbag]

Where else is there to look though? It's a HP dv6645 laptop, 2 gigs ram, AMD 64x2 1900 CPU, Nvidia 8400gs video card with the Nvidia driver from the repos.

Plus it's the same on every machine I've tried KDE4, so it's not the machine.

Even on the default install before I started adding any software it was sluggish. Not slow as in an obvious fault, but sluggish, especially when compared to KDE3/Gnome/E17/XFCE/iceWM on the same machine, same driver etc'. Even Vista runs well.

It takes 10 seconds to resize a window, and if I move the mouse too fast it forgets what it was doing and just leaves it as it was, after waiting 10 seconds of course.

Resizing a desktop thingy is also slow, again if I move the mouse too fast, it "forgets".

It just feels slow, the main menu takes too long to pop-up, windows open and close too slowly etc'. It works ok, but feels sluggish, like driving a truck compared to a small car.

And if it needs a higher spec video card, well, all I can say is Vista revisited! What's the point?

[GofBorg]

>
> Where else is there to look though? It's a HP dv6645 laptop, 2 gigs
> ram, AMD 64x2 1900 CPU, Nvidia 8400gs video card with the Nvidia driver
> from the repos.
> Plus it's the same on every machine I've tried KDE4, so it's not the
> machine.
Maybe you've got a corrupt install DVD?

> Even on the default install before I started adding any software it was
> sluggish. Not slow as in an obvious fault, but sluggish, especially
> when compared to KDE3/Gnome/E17/XFCE/iceWM on the same machine, same
> driver etc'. Even Vista runs well.
> It takes 10 seconds to resize a window, and if I move the mouse too
> fast it forgets what it was doing and just leaves it as it was, after
> waiting 10 seconds of course.
> Resizing a desktop thingy is also slow, again if I move the mouse too
> fast, it "forgets".
You have some serious issue, no idea what, but that is not normal.

> It just feels slow, the main menu takes too long to pop-up, windows
> open and close too slowly etc'. It works ok, but feels sluggish, like
> driving a truck compared to a small car.
> And if it needs a higher spec video card, well, all I can say is -Vista
> revisited-! What's the point?

Onboard Intel cheese wiz shared memory video card on my home rig,
GeForce 6600 128MB on my work machine using VMware SVGA driver routed though
whatever ancient nVidia driver I have that I installed when I installed SuSE
10.3. The laptop, LOL prolly an 8MB card... NO performace sluggishness and
these are not high spec anything machines.

[giaslamo]

I tried the early live cd's of kde4, and it seemed pretty glitchy, so I installed VirtualBox in my suse 10.3 and installed openSuSE11-KDE4 inside that. Just to keep an eye on how it's coming along. Everything installed with no hitches and ran out of the box (no pun intended). Did the kde upgrade from the factory repo, and kept snapshots along the way. It's handy to just revert to a snapshot when you play around till you screw up something. I also check kdelook.org once in a while to see how many add-ons, service menus etc. are being listed. I'm thinking I will probably do a clean install of suse11-kde4.1 when it is released. Even though kde3.5.9 is awesome. And when I switch, I will know my way around the new desktop better. And I still get a kick out of rotating the compiz cube with 10.3 on one side, and 11 on the other.