Guest post by KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, phonon, plasma and solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.
Phonon abstracts the platform from multimedia backends like xine, mplayer, vlc, gstreamer on *nix based systems and DirectX (required by DirectShow) on Windows and QuickTime on Mac making it possible to easily write and port KDE SC-based multimedia applications to other supported operating systems. Solid abstracts the hardware components of the host system making it possible for applications to utilize hardware capabilities of the host operating system without really caring what operating system they are running on. Plasma, the KDE SC4 desktop is the last and most visible of the three pillars and it is the part that takes most of the criticism and least understood. Plasma currently ships with two desktop interfaces, “plasma-netbook” for smaller screen sizes like the ones in netbooks and smaller notebooks and the standard “plasma-desktop” for normal monitor sizes.
Plasma adds its own level of abstraction to the desktop. The traditional Linux desktop offers virtual desktops to only opened windows and hence only application windows can be tied to any particular virtual desktop and hence all virtual desktops shares the same desktop wallpaper and show all files in a user’s desktop folder(~/Desktop). Plasma adds “containers” that are formally known as “activities” to the mix. All virtual desktops can be set to use the same activity making KDE SC desktop look and behave like the “traditional” desktop or different activities can be set to each virtual desktop making each virtual desktop totally different from each other. The latter option allows for different virtual desktops to have different wallpapers, different plasmoids, show different files from different places on the system and the list goes on.
KDE SC 4.5 continued this process of abstracting the desktop and most of the effort this time around was on the tray area. In the old days, the tray area was basically a dumb place to host tray applications and these applications were responsible for creating their own inconsistent UI and the only “intelligence” tray system had was hiding/unhiding icons and a user had to manually do this. In the old system, tray applications asked for attention by changing their icons and this necessitated having more icons shown than necessary because the tray system had no way of knowing and showing hidden icons that needed user attention. The new d-bus based protocol allows a tray applications to be hidden by default and to be shown only when it changes its status to “active” or “need attention”. For example, a gmail-plasmoid can be set to passively check for new emails every ten minutes while hidden and to automatically get unhidden when it detects a new email and wish to inform the user. With the new protocol, a tray application sends the information to the user through the protocol and leave it up to the system to presence the information in a way that is consistent and predictable.
KDE SC platform libraries and a few applications are now installable on Windows
and Mac and it is only a matter of time before KDE support on these platforms reach first class citizenship status as KDE SC is in Linux and BSD. The decoupling of the desktop from the underlying operating system seem to be nearly complete with this release and KDE SC is more or less at the same point that fish was when it took the first couple of step on land millions of years ago after it successfully concurred the ocean. KDE SC has its foundations set and it is time to claim its place on windows and Mac desktops.
About the Author.
The author is just a regular Linux and KDE user and a fan of OSAlert.
Good summary of some of the underlying technologies. I disagree with some of the conclusions that the author draws from the fact that KDE has these abstraction layers and doubt that OS X or Windows will ever be as complete in terms of support as Linux or the BSDs, simply because the source code for those platforms isn^A't nearly as available (varying degrees with OS X), but primarily because there aren^A't as many developers working on the Windows and Mac OS X “ports”.
To the extent that it would make some Windows to Linux migrations easier, the porting of some KDE applications is a welcome step, but I doubt that your average Windows user is going to understand that they can fully replace the shell with another one.
What is truly the next frontier for KDE is its ability to adapt to different form factors and screen sizes. Besides that, the concept of activities, as you explain in the article, is beautifully implemented and mature now. Each desktop represents a different workspace with different widgets (plasmoids) running on it, showing you different folders, etc. Windows can be grouped together so that they show on a particular activity.
KDE is truly miles beyond what any other platform is offering, and they have to do a much better job of communicating that to the end-user.
On Linux. Fine. But seeing as I’ve been using KDE since 3.0 and am writing this in 4.4.5 you’re delusional on it’s miles beyond. Not even close.
One of my pet peeves: The broken POS Print System in KDE.4.x.
Edited 2010-08-02 10:43 UTC
What^A's so broken about the printing system? I, and all of my work colleagues, have been printing just fine.
Admittedly, we only switched full-time to KDE 4 series as of 4.3.
Edited 2010-08-02 11:00 UTC
I’m running Kubuntu 10.04, which in turn runs KDE 4.4.2.
The print system is absolutely fine. I plugged in my HP USB printer (which is a deskjet F2480), and Kubuntu recognised it as a new printer within about 10 seconds, and installed the correct driver and made it available for print about 10 seconds after that. The HPLIP status service icon appeared in the system tray, as did the print queue icon, and the HP Device Manager runs (and works correctly) from the HPLIP status service icon, all without any manual intervention at all on my part.
It works perfectly … even the scanner. Straight out of the box with nothing to install, just plug it in and go. Scanner applications were already installed, and of course nearly every application has a print function. It all worked without a single hitch.
That is miles and miles in front of the new printer installation experience (for the exact same printer) on the most ubiquitous proprietary desktop system.
Edited 2010-08-02 11:10 UTC
KDE develops no printing system. The KDE Platform uses Qt’s print dialogs.
If you have problems with them, go bitch at Nokia.
That’s the problem. The KDE 3.x Print System was *much* more powerful. I still wait to get this features back (e.g. booklet printing, custom print filters, more (any!) options when creating PDFs, etc.).
Using Qt’s print dialogs is not a problem. It’s one of the decisions made for the sake of cross-platform compatibility.
KPrinter was so tied to unixoid assumptions, it could never work at all on Windows, probably not even Mac OS X (even though OSX is a Unix), and who knows whatever platforms the KDE Platform will support in the future.
Relying more on Qt itself rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again, even if the reinvented wheel may work better in selected situations, was a conscious decision during the early development of SC 4.0.
They punted on it when they couldn’t ever get the original Print Developer back.
They punted on it when they couldn’t ever get the original Print Developer back. [/q]
John Layt is doing a great job working on printing in KDE, and I believe he is in discussion with the Qt frameworks guys about some patches.
To be fair to the original post, I find KDE4 to be hugely significant to my productivity. So much so that I feel somewhat handicapped when using other other desktop environments (be them in Linux land, the wider open soruce community or even the propriatory world of Win7 and OS X).
There really is very little I find to fault with KDE4.x, so I personally find it miles beyond other platforms too.
However, this is just my usage. As much as I’m an advocate for KDE, I wouldn’t expect everyone to like it (some people prefer less mouse driven interfaces, for example).
At the end of the day (sorry, horrible saying i know), “next gen” desktop managers are as only as good as their usability and usability can often very depending on the user.
Windows and Mac developers seem to be doing just fine without the source code of the respective systems and from only using published APIs, why would KDE SC need source code to integrate well on them?
There is a saying “if you build, they will come”. There is small to none kde developer community on windows and mac because kde ports on these platforms wasnt there before. KDE SC now exists on these platforms and developers will start showing up sooner or later and the work they will do will benefit these ports as well as linux and bsd ports since they will all be working on the same code base.
Source code is not necessary. Complete and full api documentation is. That’s what API’s are for.
I don’t think that shell replacement is necessarily the end goal for the platforms. I also think thats why they renamed kde to kde software compilation, to emphasize that its more than just a desktop environment or X.org windows manager.
Any idea how difficult it is to port KDE 4 apps to MeeGo (the mobile / embedded Linux OS from Intel and Nokia that’s also based on QT4)?
What do you mean by “porting”? MeeGo is just another Linux distribution. All KDE software runs on MeeGo exactly like any other Linux distribution.
If by porting you ask how KDE applications integrate into MeeGo, then the current answer is not at all.
KDE does (for now) not care about integrating into MeeGo’s Clutter-based Netbook UX. KDE develops its own Plasma Netbook shell which you can replace the existing Netbook UX with.
As for smartphones: Applications can be adapted to the mobile GUI. A separate GUI has to be written, though.
Current sub-projects that actively work on such a port: KOffice (port is called FreOffice), Kontact, and Marble (MarbleToGo).
By “porting” I meant “provide an integrated look-and-feel”.
Porting a Gnome app to Maemo (both based on GTK+) required adding the Hildon classes to replace the menu bar with Maemo’s finger-selectable menu system. (A bit over-simplified, but close enough to clarify my question, I hope.)
You’re asserting (I believe) that porting a KDE app to MeeGo (both based on QT4) would require effectively rewriting the GUI, which sounds a bit harder than the earlier case.
Guess I’ll understand more on my first port, but I greatly appreciate the information.
Auto-replacing the menus is also possible with KDE apps. But for real integration into small formfactors, GUIs need to rewritten/rearranged in any case.
There is no difference between GTK and Qt here.
After trying the most recent build of KDE 4.5 it is clear to me that their main goal is to look pretty but no stable, KWin still feels sluggish, nepomuk is that anoying experiment users have to pay for, I can’t let my computer on for more than 3 hours bacause it will eat all my memory, is not ironed at all, a black out and say good by to every plasma configuration you had, but hey, we got blured tool tips, right?.
And is slowly going back to their bloated roots, KSnapshot, a simple utility to take a screenshot now have 7 buttons on its UI. But the KDE 3.x series was bloated but at least was fun to use, KDE 4.x is unstable, becoming bloated and with the same boring theme it has since KDE 4.0 with minor variations. The air plasma theme makes text difficult to read so “prettyness” comes first and usability later. The worse of all is that all that eye candy doesn’t impress me at all, they invest to mutch time on that part and still doesn’t satisfiest me. And I could go on with a long list but you get the point.
i like osnews… i do, but more on the news and less on the comments.
i gotta do this:
ok then :
“After trying the most recent build of KDE 4.5 it is clear to me that their main goal is to look pretty but no stable”
after reading you comment, it is clear to me that your main goal is to look stupid !
“KWin still feels sluggish, nepomuk is that anoying experiment users have to pay for, I can’t let my computer on for more than 3 hours bacause it will eat all my memory”
i have an intel 945 video card, and still i can use kwin with blur and all the fancy stuff at a great performance.
nepomuk here is snappy and indexs all my files. i use it alot of time for my mp3 folderview’s dynamic searchs ( like latest music , etc )
i only have 2 gb of ram. its not bad , but not that great. never had ram problems
“is not ironed at all, a black out and say good by to every plasma configuration you had, but hey, we got blured tool tips, right?. ”
not being ironed at all maybe its your 4.5 preview packages ?? maybe ??? about the blackout , i dont know if you are serious or stupid , but i will bet stupid since i had alot of freezes in a kernel 2.6.34 bug with intel drivers and i never lost my plasma config.
“And is slowly going back to their bloated roots”
so , yesterday kde3.5 rulez because kde4 didnt had features. now its bloated ?? i guess someone will moan when the printing dialogs have all the kde3 features.
“KSnapshot, a simple utility to take a screenshot now have 7 buttons on its UI”
why should you completly destroy ksnapshot just so that it has less buttons ? let it be simple and powerfull.
“But the KDE 3.x series was bloated but at least was fun to use, KDE 4.x is unstable, becoming bloated and with the same boring theme it has since KDE 4.0 with minor variations.”
Look you idiot , if you can see the diference between oxygen ( super black theme ) and air ( white / transparent theme ) and you call it only a minor variation , then .|.
why you guys argue so much about the quality of the stories …. i am worried is about the quality of the comments… some just make me sick
Passioned to mutch?, get out and take some fresh air, if you have no problems good for you, but that doesn’t solve mine.
And I only touched de surface of the problems, I can’t imagine your reaction if I talked aboud the rest.
yeah , i had a way to strong reaction.
but the points are still valid.
either your facts are wrong, or your directing them wrong.
if it works for me and doesnt work for you , maybe its your distro/ instalation problem.
that fact is , if kwin is snappy will all the latest effects ( blur ) on a intel 945 … damn… you can’t possible have a worse video card then that.
air(new) and oxygen(old) themes are also completly diferent
etc …etc … etc
Am not the only one who has reported the sluggish KWin behavior, I’ve used ATI and NVidia vid cards, open and closed source drivers and the problem persist. In KDE 4.3 this problem dind’t exist at all.
So I doudb is driver related, but you can’t even complaine because pasionated users like you will overreact and crusified you or even exist a new term invented from KDE develpers them selves, you are “harasing”. So in order to fix all these problem the first step is to admin they exist, deny it won’t make them dissapear.
“Am not the only one who has reported the sluggish KWin behavior, I’ve used ATI and NVidia vid cards, open and closed source drivers and the problem persist. In KDE 4.3 this problem dind’t exist at all. ”
lots of people report the existance of jesus, but still i dont believe it.
the problem didnt exist in 4.3 because 4.5 probably uses latest mesa/opengl tecnologies.
you of course are aware ( you should be , or else you would be just trolling, not caring if right or wrong ) that just using mesa git master instead of latest 7.8.2 version fixes alot of bugs ( namelly present windows alike on radeons , like i have on my desktop pc , which is flawlessly fast and snappy).
also , you are aware that composite performance is specific to driver / mesa / kernel versions, much more so than of kwin or compiz.
i bet that if you had an intel card and it would start freezing in kwin direct rendering with 2.11.0 upwards drivers, you would blame KDE , instead of just updating your drivers and kernel to a 2.6.35_rc kernel.
“So I doudb is driver related,”
so sorry , but i dont care about your doudb”.
what i “doudb” is that you searched for bug reports ( or made them ) or searched google and saw that there are a combination of xorg/mesa/drivers with lots of problems and bugs.
software isnt about “doudb”‘s , its about real facts. just because it looks like, doesnt mean its true. you should get your facts straight before commenting. or just ask, instead of making statements
this isnt about passion… i would do the same for gnome, xfce,enlightenment, hell even windows. for much as i dislike windows, i also hate it when it is trash talked not fairly
what i hate is people that no clue what they are talking about, talking shit like if they were “know it all god’s”.
… yes i am in a bad mood, but dont take it personally… its like a response for all the other bad comments i have seen about kde , gnome, linux, etc…
np, thanks for spreading the hate anyway.
BTW, your bad mood didn’t solve my problems, and I still believe is not drivers related. so thx for nothing.
“np, thanks for spreading the hate anyway. ”
will spread no more !
“BTW, your bad mood didn’t solve my problems, and I still believe is not drivers related. so thx for nothing.”
i am sorry , but re reading your original post, i still fail to see where you asked for help.
instead i saw you blaming and spreading fud.
if you wanted help , just ask. i can’t help you with the nvidia problem , but i have it working properly on open source ati and intel drivers.
if you need help on those , just ask away.
please give info about your current system and problem.
My problem is this:
KWin is sluggish when I:
a) Move a window.
b) Resize a window.
If I switch to compiz everything is smooth but I lose transparensy on the panels.
I’ve tried with 2 vid cars, a PCI express Nvidia vid card and with the onbard ATI vid card, used both open and propietary drivers with the same results.
This problem started with KDE 4.4 and looks like is still there in 4.5 so It makes it again unusable to me.
There are bugs reports confirmed for other users but no clear answer till now.
“My problem is this:
KWin is sluggish when I:
a) Move a window.
b) Resize a window. ”
hum… do you have the blur effect on ? and also shadow ?
those can be problematic.
what distro / kernel / mesa / drivers are you using ?
“If I switch to compiz everything is smooth but I lose transparensy on the panels. ”
you should not lose the transparency of the panels.
you can try : kquitapp plasma-desktop ; plasma-desktop
( restart plasma-desktop )
if you enable compiz as the default window manager , you shouldnt need to restart plasma-desktop.
“I’ve tried with 2 vid cars, a PCI express Nvidia vid card and with the onbard ATI vid card, used both open and propietary drivers with the same results. ”
i dunno about nvidia, but i though its latest drivers gave a good kwin performance. you can try changing “direct rendering” option…
if that onboard is an ati 3200 onboard card… i have one too , and it really works like SH*T. of course , on the same system with the same drivers, my ati 4870 just completly flys
forgot :
direct rendering option is on kwin options.
also , see if its using opengl or xrender… you want opengl ( i think
heh … i dont have an nvidia card 
)
also , you can enable “kwin fps plugin”… it can give you a hint as to what is using kwin so much and causing it to slow down.
of course , i am assuming that your “glxinfo | grep rend” gives you a yes to direct rendering
Edited 2010-08-02 18:15 UTC
If i turn off all the efects the problem persist.
Right now Im downloading a different distro to see if the problem gets fixed, stay tuned.
i recommend opensuse.
usually it has a very nice kde setup.
also the unstable and testing repositories usually are pretty good.
good luck
children please…
I regard to kwin sluggishness I have experienced it. Seeming randomly becoming sluggish. Linux compositing in general is nowhere near as good as windows or osx. It may be more flexible and it may have more effects but I got fed up with all the niggly bugs (like the random slowness) or the tearing in videos (thats more the fault of X but it contributes).
plus what gives with kwins inability to hold 60 frames per second (on a decent gpu, 8600gt). Kwin sucks at compositing fast and consistently, but I would say out of any window manager in existence it is one of the best and my favorite at least.
I like the vision of kde and plasma is nice. However I have yet to see anything major come from it. Plasma tackles desktop composition of widgets etc differently from other oses and desktop environments but the practical results are exactly the same => widgets on desktop icons and panels, nothing new there.
Sure there is no duplication of effort when having a widget go from the desktop to a panel but still is it really that much inconvenient to have a battery widget for a panel and one for the desktop?
Nepomuk is awesome in theory. During the two years that I used kde exclusively It didn’t find squat. I *couldn’t use it* and it refused to index inside text documents (worthless).
Solid provides abstraction but there are no backends of other oses and they have been really slow to drop hal. The only practical advantage is that when they do change backends all kde apps will essentially get it for free.
phonon. Waste of space. only good for toy applications. Gstreamer backend was full of fail, xine backend used xine, mplayer backend buggy. Maybe the new vlc is where it is at (not holding my breath). There are no good kde multimedia apps (amarok excepted but even they had tons of problems getting sound working due to the crappy backends)
I could go on…What started out as a simple paragraph has morphed. The tl;dr is that kde sc is a good de that seemingly promises more on paper than is seen in practice and has no shortage of quality and while the plumbing is well thought out, it’s polish is really lacking
just tried opensuse 11.3 KDE live.
with my onboard ati 3200 video card, it has working composite effects and is kinda smooth. not as smooth as my ati 4870, but … smooth
and it worked right out of the box.. maybe you can try opensuse live with your onboard ati.
good luck
I can confirm this problem, also tried it with Nvidia and Ati card. Kde 4.3 was smooth.
I used Arch Linux with Kdemod.
Kwin is quite snappy and mostly works just fine with the open source drivers on my system, which has only a very modest ATI video card.
Command “grep Radeon /var/log/Xorg.0.log” shows: ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] rev 0
This card would rate very poorly indeed on any “Vista experience index”, yet it runs a KDE4 (Kwin) composited desktop just fine, except for just one circumstance: I can’t get full-screen video without an occasional bit of tearing if Kwin compositing is turned on.
This is not a huge problem. I just key Alt-Shift-F12 (which turns the Kwin compositing off) when I want to watch video, and Alt-Shift-F12 again after I have finished. This simple step allows full-screen video to render as smooth as silk.
I expect that even this minor problem will go away when I upgrade to the next release of the kernel (2.6.35) some time later this year:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODIyNA
See also:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/CompositeSwap
Edited 2010-08-03 10:49 UTC
There’s NO CHANCE he might actually have these problems, right? Because, you know, KDE is perfect on EVERY hardware combination. Do you believe in unicorns too ?
I can attest to the horrible KWin performance on nVIDIA cards. The developers seem to not want to fix this, instead preferring to blame nVIDIA. I don’t care whose fault it is. Compiz works fine, yet KWin sucks.
there is the chance and i am sure he might have those problems. KDE is not perfect , but KDE is not responsable for your Xorg configuration and instalation. Nor has KDE the responsability to make your nvidia cards work. its your own fault for buying closed source drivers video cards.
what ? is it Microsoft’s fault that years ago ATI drivers sucked hard on windows ?
you said it all … you dont care who’s fault it is, you just want to blame someone. nice for you.
compiz works fine, yeah … its full of hacks … or you think compiz was rewritten from scratch because the dev’s got bored ? why did you think beryl also disappeared ?
you want to kill kwin too ? make it full of hacks because nvidia can’t open source and develop proper drivers ?
yeah , your right and im wrong … lets make KDE a new WIN ME , full of hacks, buggy, and not address the real bugs where they are ( Xorg and Drivers )
What part of “It also hapens with open source drivers” you didn’t understand?
KWin sucks, no doubt about it.
fine , i am tired of this.
whatever you say
works really well here on intel and ati video cards. but fine.whatever.
final conclusion is that it sucks, “no doubt about it”
That didn’t stop Vista from sucking on a lot of systems, nor does it stop KWin from having bad performance (read: slow resize and effects) under certain configurations, while Compiz works fine.
I’m afraid you want it to suck, that’s the problem here. The fact that you can’t back that up and keep coming back with one line assertions as a response is even more damning.
Edited 2010-08-04 11:23 UTC
Im afraid you want to cover it sucks, but sadly it does.
Sadly you’ve not been able to back that up despite posting umpteen comments to try and do so. You just come off as sad and bitter. One can only speculate as to why.
And btw, is not product of my imagination.
http://i36.tinypic.com/2wnz0qg.jpg
It might not be, but you simply want to and have to blame KDE for this.
There is no evidence whatsoever that this is KDE’s fault despite what you’ve gone through above, other than the state of drivers for some cards is rather crap. Once can only hope that KDE will give the needed push to the right people to fix things.
Edited 2010-08-04 17:23 UTC
Actually, is more prolly you are one of those guys who sees a square on a chalkboard that has drawed a circle, most of the people pass by and see a circle because there is a circle, but you want to see a square, so no help for you there.
Is more like you want to apologize KWin and KDE at any cost because can’t accept reality, but the reality is this: KWin is unstable, KDE 4 is unstable, is not ready because obviusly is alpha material, but, I won’t burst your buble you can stare to that circle prentending is a square, meanwhile KWin will stil be sucking till someone fix it.
Thx. for your availability.
A fix might be on the way with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ3OQ
I’ve never had such a problem myself, so I can’t comment, but if some users are having such a problem, it looks like a fix is on the way.
Nice screenshot. And if you use it as a base for your complaints about KWin, it rather nicely show you beeing wrong and makes the whole tread a little odd.
ohhh no no no no no
that is a compiz problem… its their compiz-kde decorator!
actually , its a distro problem, since there are 2 compiz-kde decorators ( kde3 and kde4 decorators ).
If that’s the case its sad bacause Im out of options now, I can’t use KWin or Compiz with KDE 4.5 on both distros I tried. The irony is that only works well with metacity.
what distro are you using ?
try to install emerald.
well , if using compiz , use emerald , it has some nice border themes
but really ? did you distro shipped compiz without emerald ? that is bad
after installed emerald , just do the command : emerald –replace &
you can configure in compiz ccsm what window decorator you want by default. ( dont recall where , havent used compiz in a while )
good luck
hey … this is getting crowded.
if you want , you can go into freenode and pvt me : yagami.
i can help you better there.
if i dont reply , its because i am not there, try again later
I have tried latest KDE because of the fact I can’t lasso files in listview in GNOME for how long God knows when. I liked what I saw… the only KDE thing that is bothering me is the K Menu, which is a bit too confusing. I think they could do the simpler approach. Opening folders inside the Menu (as bad as browsing through) is a Vista thing. The Classic K Menu is also messy with too many entries. Even XP’s Start Menu is more organized. I think there needs to be common sense for the Menu. Something not much complicated, and something not much too simple.
A Major level with apps, settings, documents with no-browsing access to itens would be the more pratical approach.
To me that is the only thing lacking. And of course, removing the vertical text from apps.
You have three choices, normally. You can use the default KDE4 menu, or you can switch it to classic K Menu mode, or you can remove the ordinary K Menu plasmoid entirely and change it for the Lancelot menu plasmoid in its place.
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…
The last option has preference settings on the way that it is displayed that should satisfy your points here. For example, as shown above, you can get Lancelot menu to present separate menu buttons for each category.
I am not aware of any vertical text in apps apart from perhaps Kate, wherein it is OK in the context (tabs down the left-hand side, which change the context of the pane immediately to the right).
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kate_(text_editor).png
I hope this addresses your points.
Edited 2010-08-03 03:54 UTC
I think KDE developers made a mistake by rewriting a code from scratch.
It’s easier writing a new code than fixing the old messed up one, but it’s not the way how software developement should work.
FOSS community is forgiving, that’s why KDE has survived.
The SC wasn’t rewritten from scratch.
The UI was very heavily re-written. And turned from being slick, if cluttered, into slow, ugly (IMO), inconsistent and buggy. Maybe it is better now, I don’t know; I switched to gnome after the whole 4.0 fiasco.
Not true. Only very few applications include new GUIs. Amarok is the most prominent one, but Amarok is not part of the SC.
Not true.
Too stupid to select another theme?
Not true.
Not true.
To sum up you post: Failing troll.
Changed distro same problems.
KWin sucks.
Edited 2010-08-03 15:10 UTC
People on this website are so apologetic to anything open: “Simply tweak this setting, or try this distro or this trunk build of this subsystem”. The real problem is that people are still having the same fundamental problems with Linux that they’ve always had, the out of the box experience blows chunks.
Then you’ll get the apologist to scream until his little open source head explodes about how a user is doing it wrong simply because he has a problem. That it’s entirely out of the real of possibility for said problem to actually exist.
My impression of KDE is that it is an incoherent mashup of everyone’s science project. Nothing is polished, nothing is finished, and everything is annoying. Seriously, if there was an award for overly gratuitous use of animations, KDE would take the cake.
Why people prioritize letting a select few users have a silly flame effect on KWin over having a stable system with an approachable out of the box experience is beyond me.
KDE4 is not open. It’s just so damn full of cracks and holes you can see right through it.
well , i understand completly your point.
but what you dont seem to understand is that i never had any problems on both my intel laptop and ati desktop video cards.
like i even said on another post, i today ( or yesterday ), i just tried opensuse 11.3 live cd, and it even worked right out the box on my onboad ati 3200 ! composite , grid view , present windows , wobbly , etc.
i do know that xorg , drivers , kernels , mesa , dri2, sync extensions, gallium or not to gallium ( intel doesnt gallium , heheh ) are all a mess. but at least gentoo and opensuse live cd seem to get it working well ( opensuse probably doesnt use latest versions / has optimal performance ) , but still work well and snappy.
what people dont get is that kwin is in no way responsable for drivers / xorg department. kwin does use more advanced mesa/opengl/driver requirements than compiz. ( but that is like complaining a dx 10 game sucks just because your video card is only dx9 ).
about nvidia, fedora, ubuntu, kubuntu, etc, i really cant comment… maybe it really works bad on those systems.
but on opensuse 11.3 live cd, damn, it works properly on ati ( 3200 and 4870 ) and intel ( 945GMA) .
Maybe are the KWin developers who should be careful of what requisites and libraries they use, because compiz runs like a charm, and like KWin it uses x.org drivers, mesa, etc. it is the same as KWin does, so, this means KWin took the risk to try newest libraries from some reasons, breaking the stability it had in KDE 4.3, and taking new untested libraries that conduct to regresion is their responsability.
Edited 2010-08-04 02:19 UTC
I’m not at all sure that “responsiveness issues” have anything at all to do with Kwin:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ3Mw
I can’t say for sure, however, because I personally have never run into any occurrence of such a lack of responsiveness, using eith Kwin, compiz, metacity or any other window manager for that matter.
talking about kwin super sweetness
just tried kwin 4.6 trunk … heh
it does dynamic bluring on windows ( i use transparent background windows , see http://yfrog.com/mutechzoneptsshot1j ) while moving windows , with no visible slowdown at all !!!!
and i have an *allmighty* intel 945 GMA video card
edit reason : damn , wrong screenshot
Edited 2010-08-04 17:53 UTC
Hooray for eye candy, but where is the stability?
where is it ? what do you mean ?
i am not talking eye candy … i am talking about bluring really working well…
and working well does mean stable
I like your desktop, may I ask for your qtcurve config?
Thanks!
sure…
i will try to post it tonight on kde-look.org
stay well
Why don’t you just use Compiz? KWin is definitely better than it used to be, but it still has huge issues on certain hardware and software setups, which probably includes yours.
Compiz is much more finely tuned and optimized, and generally seems to work better in all of the tests I’ve done. KWin’s only advantage is that it integrates better with KDE.
When I use compiz, plasma panels lose transparency and windows borders dissapear, don’t know who’s fault is.
its yours !
really … its yours. do a little googling for learning how compiz works, if you can’t find the answer , ask me tomorrow and i will tell you the magic answer.
its weird that even after restarting plasma after loading compiz still loses transparency, dunno why that happens.
This is why Linux users are considered a bunch of elitists. If you know the answer, do a good thing and help him instead of directing him to search Google for it.
And never, never place the blame on users. I think there’s a saying that the user is always right…
i would !! he never asked !! and a day has passed already !
and HE IS WRONG …
now the answer … compiz in itself really has no borders ! really read : compiz in itself REALLY HAS NO BORDERS !!!!
to draw the borders , it rellies on :
compiz-gtk-decorator,
compiz-kde-decorator,
emerald.
so , if he has no borders, its a problem of compiz decorators.
by the screenshot he posted, he seems to have a bad compiz-kde-decorator ( maybe the distro shipped kde3 decorator in a kde4 environment ).
he can have borders instantly , as soon as he does :
emerald –replace &
( for example , and if he has emerald )
but amazing that even a compiz bug/problem , is a KDE problem …
amazing !!!