Submitted by “KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.”
I’ve become a big fan of KDE again. I loved it up till 4.x, which is when it changed dramatically, and distros that had it made it crappy. However, I’ve been using Kubuntu 11.04 lately, and I must say, I really like it.
my only real gripe with kde4 is kwin performance. is nowhere near as smooth as compiz fusion and others.
and that’s a i7 with a rather fast intel graphics (yeah yeah its not an heavy 3D game but hell, its WAY more than kwin should need – and certainly compiz/win7 and even osx run extremely smooth)
It runs great with my mediocre laptop, but only if I use proprietary drivers. Then again, same holds true for Compiz.
I know that’s not very hopeful.
For my Radeon based setups, the open source driver runs much, much better on Compiz than kwin. I defiantly think there is a lot of room for performance improvements in kwin. The ATI drivers are much faster, but tend to be less stable. Kwin’s feature set is useful enough that I tolerate the less than flawless performance.
I’ve got a Radeon card running on the open source driver, and installed the new beta yesterday due to a bug in the stable version of Archlinux’s Akregator (true story), and it does seem a bit smoother, especially for the expos~A(c)-like effect, but still not quite as fast as compiz.
Edited 2011-05-26 23:22 UTC
You can always run KDE with compiz as the window manager.
Go to System Settings –> Default Applications –> Window Manager –> Use a different window manager
I think this requires you to install a helper application (it may be called kde-compiz) which will also install compiz itself as a dependency.
Having said that, the Radeon drivers are improving very rapidly:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ4OQ
This is great on Arch Linux, which has rolling updates. In general Arch will pick up new stuff like this within a month or so. The Radeon drivers have already improved markedly twice this year, and the default (on Arch Linux anyway) has now switched from the classic mesa driver over to Gallium3D.
Edited 2011-05-26 23:29 UTC
Yes, I’ve run kde with compiz before. I prefer kwin and all of its useful composting tricks, like the psuedo aero snap.
I’m thinking/have thought about moving to arch. I’m just a bit afraid it will end up like gentoo. I’m okay with being a few months off of the bleeding edge.
Fair enough. Kwin in KDE 4.7 has lower OpenGL requirements, and so it should run faster, even on less capable hardware.
Also perfectly fair enough. Running Arch is indeed a case of “riding too close to the bleeding edge” for many people.
Edited 2011-05-27 00:51 UTC
I’m loving the Arch. So far the only thing I’ve had a real issue with was the combination of transparent terminals, the nVidia driver and Xorg 1.10. Apparently some were having this issue under Gnome with transparent terminals as well, but in KDE4.6.x if you tried to resize the terminal window, it’d lock up your whole computer. Downgrading Xorg and a few packages of it to 1.9.4 fixed the issue. So I keep looking for updates to that since I held the packages.
http://www.archlinux.org/news/nvidia-173xx-and-nvidia-96xx-removed-…
On the topic of the removal of the binary blob graphics drivers for nvidia from Arch Linux, I did an experiment for kwin with the open source (Gallium3D) ATI drivers. This should also yeild similar gains with the open source nouveau driver.
The 3D openGL performance of the open source drivers isn’t up to snuff yet, but the 2D acceleration is fine. So, what I did was in the desktop settings I set the compositor to use Xrender (which is 2D only).
The effect was that certain types of desktop bling, which use 3D graphics, were no longer available. I could no longer use the desktop cube animation when switching virtual desktops, for example.
The gain, however, for that small scrifice, was considerable. With the open source drivers, using the 2D-only Xrender for desktop compositing instead of OpenGL gave me a very nice performance boost (at this time). One finally does get the benefit of a hardware-accelerated desktop rendering.
Apparently I am not the first to discover this, and also apparently the Xrender compositor works better than OpenGL even for some people using binary blob drivers:
http://linuxology.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/interesting-discovery-xr…
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3099721.0
As an additional benefit, using the Xrender compositor seems to result in the desktop compositing having no impact on other uses of the GPU, such as playing games or rendering video.
The only real similarity is that you can be overly aggressive in tracking new packages if you want to be. If you restrain yourself to updating once a week/fortnight it is fantastic. (Happy Arch user surrounded by an increasingly large pool of happy Arch users)
Arch is amazing. Not long ago on this very thread, I posted a message about how using OpenGL with kwin and the open source drivers was not up to snuff performance-wise, and that it was better to use Xrender with kwin.
Just a minute ago I did an update on Arch, and I noticed that Xorg-server was upgraded to version 1.10.2-2.
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/testing/x86_64/xorg-server/
So on a hunch, I reverted my Desktop Effects settings back to use OpenGL rendering, and I enabled the fps monitor. Yep, kwin is now rendering the desktop fairly solidly at 60 fps (locked to the monitor screen refresh rate), with only an occasional flicker down to 59 fps. I can now watch full-screen 720p videos from YouTube without any hesitation, even when kwin is using OpenGL to render.
I have got the virtual desktop switch spinning cube effect back again, all of a sudden!
Arch is amazing.
Edited 2011-05-31 11:00 UTC
I’ve had the opposite experience, or rather, KWin with OS radeon driver runs quite smoothly with a few minor exceptions with some effects I don’t use. If I put it on XRender instead of OpenGL, it’s smooth as butter (except for the vblank synching, of course).
From the link:
That may also help on desktop devices as well.
Also interesting from the link (http://www.kdenews.org/2011/02/18/kwin-embraces-new-platforms-openg…) describing those changes..
It goes on to describe how this is a necessary step to moving to wayland in the future! There is also a video of it running on a n900 and an unspecified intel tablet.
At various stages in the KDE 4 evolution kwin did indeed have poor performance at some releases. Sometimes this was due to kwin itself, and at other times it has been due to kwin exposing deficiencies in underlying drivers that have been dormant for years (with no programs actually exercising the drivers in that way).
Lately though, it has picked up again. On my modest Athlon 64×2 system, kwin with compositing (Arch Linux, KDE 4.6.3) is faster and more responsive than Windows. Some time ago I used to have to temporarily switch off kwin compositing (Shift + Alt + F12) if I wanted to view anything but the smallest of videos smoothly, but lately that has not been necessary.
It runs *perfectly* on my 5 year old laptop with a crappy Intel 945GM (added an extra gig of ram and changed hard drive though)
IMHO if a DE runs this smooth in 5year old hardware it means it’s doing great!
If it’s not smooth in an i7 there must be a problem somewhere else, I doubt it’s kwin’s fault.
Regards
They are now getting OpenGL ES 2.0 [a subset of 2.0] when OS X is getting full OpenGL 3.x in Quartz.
Considering OpenGL is at version 4, they both are pretty far behind
That is very confused.
What KDE is doing is making kwin’s compositing depend only on OpenGL ES 2.0 [a subset of 2.0] wheras OS X is dependent full OpenGL 3.x in Quartz.
Ergo, KDE will be able to run on mobiles and handhelds, whereas OSX and Quartz won’t.
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.7-beta1.php
Hence the statement in the original article:
FTA:
Understand?
The 4.7 release of KDE won’t require a full-blown OpenGL feature set in order to run composited, it is reducing the requirements so it can run composited (and hence hardware GPU accelerated) even on mobiles and handhelds.
BluenoseJake:
KDE and kwin compositing doesn’t provide OpenGL, it uses it.
http://www.kdenews.org/2011/02/18/kwin-embraces-new-platforms-openg…
My oh my, that backfired a bit on you both, didn’t it?
Edited 2011-05-27 00:47 UTC
Uh, not really, as I am fully aware that KDE doesn’t provide OpenGL, I was trying to make a point, and it’s a simple one:
OS X is not using (or providing) the most recent version of OpenGL.
Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I should have been, but please, that huge vomit of text taken straight from the same posting that you had just linked is a little over the top, don’t you think?
I think perhaps you may have been drinking from the same kool-aid that myself and tyrione were slurping down, that sweet drink that makes us want to show up all the other mouthy bastards that hang around here.
I’m pretty sure you probably knew what I meant, and just wanted to stir the pot a bit, and, hey, that’s cool, nobody enjoys a little pot stirring more than myself, but come on, scrape the bottom of the barrel much?
Edited 2011-05-27 01:07 UTC
Nice try, but no cigar. You aren’t getting away with that.
Here is what you said:
Since KDE doesn’t provide OpenGL but rather uses it (same as OSX), the fact that KDE can now work with a lower OpenGL requirement puts it far ahead of other environments (including OSX). This is an improved capability of KDE, not a retrograde one. Certainly tyrione made this mistake.
I know you didn’t actually say that it was KDE that “was pretty far behind” (and so you probably didn’t make the same error) … but becasue this thread is about KDE that is the impression you seemed to be out to create.
Quoting the text in context clears up the error and removes the negative connotations tyrione was trying to establish.
Edited 2011-05-27 01:23 UTC
but would it use the benefits of version 3 or 4 if the hardware supported it?
Not requiring the latest and greatest is good (IE9 not on XP…bad) but not taking advantage of the latest and greatest when it is available is bad (IE9 on 7 using DirectWrite…good)
KDE is written primarily to work on Linux, but because of the hardware abstraction layers (Phonon and Solid) it can actually work on a number of platforms.
OpenGL support on Linux is only available up to OpenGL 2.0 or 2.1 for a lot of drivers. In many cases, the driver supports only a lower version of OpenGL than the hardware of the card does.
Here is the picture for one open source driver:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
Only the closed nVidia driver, AFAIK, supports OpenGL 4. OpenGL support on Windows is also very sporadic.
Using later features of OpenGL (i.e. OpenGL 3.x and OpenGL 4.x) in this context would only make it possible to have fancier effects. In other words, more bling.
Requiring only widely available features of earlier versions (i.e. mature parts) of OpenGL in this context means faster hardware acceleration of desktop rendering, working on a wider range of hardware including legacy hardware and mobiles, but less of the really fancy bling. Using less of the available GPU hardware resources for the desktop itself leaves more available for applications.
Which approach would you rather?
Edited 2011-05-27 02:36 UTC
You also need a new nvidia card for opengl 4.0
Even requiring opengl 3.0 for kwin will stop people with cards older than 8xxx series from using kwin with opengl compositing. I used to run a opengl 2.1 card and now I upgraded to a card that supports opengl 4.1
Edited 2011-05-27 02:35 UTC
I’m not even sure there are that many OpenGL 3/4 features that are of interest for a window manager. Most of the changes where targeted at games (shader branching, geometry shaders, etc…).
Exactly.
I think some people must be getting confused because of the very high requirements for the video card in order to run Win 7/Vista with acceptable performance. Somehow that gets transformed into a presumption that “advanced graphics card required” means a good desktop, rather than an inefficient/poor desktop.
People’s perception is sometimes a very funny thing.
That’s entirely FUD. What are you smoking? To run Windows 7 even an old S3 video card will do. To run Windows 7 with Aero enabled, something as low as Intel GMA 950 and 500 is enough.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/microsoftintel_capable…
“The lawsuit, which was filed at the end of March, alleges that Windows XP PCs carrying the “Vista Capable” logo couldn’t fully run the newer operating system. My own earlier testing confirms that at least some PCs running the Intel 915 chip set were incapable of running all Windows Vista features, mainly the Aero user interface.
Page 30 of the 158-page court document has a staggering Microsoft admission, and one that strongly suggests collusion between two monopolies.
Microsoft executive John Kalkman explains that Microsoft “lowered” the Vista Capable requirements to accommodate Intel: “We lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded.” ”
Edited 2011-05-27 09:25 UTC
That’s not entirely true. Which GPU stressing apps are you using in Linux? All apps using OpenGL and running on Linux doesn’t stress the GPU too much. And even if they do stress the GPU, running full screen makes the GPU use the resources only for that app and not for desktop drawing.
Even if you use the full capabilities in OpenGL 4, you won’t consume much resources and even a lousy GPU such as GMA 950 would do the job. Windows 7 Aero use the full power of DirectX but it doesn’t use very much GPU power. I think the same is true for Os X quartz.
As someone said in this thread, not using the latest and greatest when you can it’s a waste. The only logical reason for KDE and Compiz to use OpenGL ES 2.0 would be to support Wayland.
Turnig off the kwin compositing (or even the compiz compositing) definitely improves the OpenGL performance of applications.
The Cost Of Running Compiz
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=compiz_speed_tes…
Does Compiz Still Slow Down Your System?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=compiz_2011_hits…
Mutter Can Cause A Gaming/OpenGL Performance Hit Too
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mutter_composite…
KWin Can Cause A Performance Hit Too, But It’s Different From Compiz
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=kwin_speed_test&…
Edited 2011-05-27 09:44 UTC
No, as said in the article, the reason for them to support OpenGL ES 2.0 is for Mobiles and tablets that only support the ES and not the full OpenGL spec.
Like my most infinitely awesome Nokia N900. When can I get a stable image of the mobile version of KDE 4 on it??!?!?!
Hmm, Maemo 5, MeeGo, NITDroid, and soon Kubuntu Mobile. Seriously this phone is like every geek’s wet dream.
Edited 2011-05-28 03:05 UTC
Which approach would you rather?
I know I’d rather have that OpenGL ES 2.0 support, but some people only look at version numbers. The bigger the numbers, the more better!
That and the fact that most people don’t care if their fellows can’t use the latest and greatest if they happen to have the stuff themselves to run it already in their shiny new machines.
What? Arrogant much? Your condescension isn’t even worth continuing this comment.
I was going to say “Diddums” but then I realised you aren’t upset at all at what you claim is my condescension, you are simply trying a different tack at misdirection and trying to take this thread away from the topic of the awesomeness of the KDE desktop.
That is actually pretty smooth. Good one.
It really depends on how you look at it. Sure, it can run on mobile devices better than before, but then again, on desktop computers it’s limiting itself to a seriously outdated feature set and could reap some nice performance boost with more modern feature set in use.
This obviously begs two questions: are there really many mobile devices which can even run full KDE experience yet only provides OpenGL ES, and would it be possible to support both OpenGL ES for mobiles for compatibility AND the full-blown OpenGL spec for more capable devices for better performance?
The OpenGL ES support is primarily for Plasma Active which is exactly not a “full KDE experience”. Furthermore OpenGL ES is also a requirment for Wayland, so ES support was not primarily added only for mobile devices.
Well that’s what we are doing. The desktop system uses OpenGL and OpenGL ES needs to be enabled as a compile time option. But don’t expect that OpenGL gives you a better performance than OpenGL ES, I would say the opposite is true.
Btw. it doesn’t make much sense to raise requirements to OpenGL 3 or 4. They hardly provide anything we need and that can be used with OpenGL 2 plus the additional extensionsion.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTUwMQ
From the author:
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/05/plasma-compositor-and…
“The Compositor received a new OpenGL compositor based on OpenGL 2.x or OpenGL ES 2.0. Our default rendering nowadays uses the programmable pipeline instead of fixed functionality as in 4.6. In order to support the programmable pipeline quite some parts had to be rewritten and got optimized at the same time. Overall this brings a vast performance improvement for all users. From my experience this can even be increased when using the OpenGL ES 2.0/EGL backend“
Wow, fascinating. Thanks for that off-topic and entirely unimportant information.
The mark of the Apple fanboy: utterly clueless.
The problem is that there are so many of them (even on this site) that ignoring and downvoting does not seem to work ;-(
KDE 4.7 B1 still suffers of BOTH Kwin and Plasma crashing upon shutdown. That just is no way an acceptable feature for a mainstream desktop environment. At least they seem to have fixed Kded4, which always got stuck into a infinite loop when Xorg was killed. I am yet to test whether they also fixed other Kded4 problems like ACPI Shutdown key causing a one-minute freeze of the system.
What do you mean by “Crashing upon shutdown”? Do you have a bug you can point to?
I also never ran into the Kded4 infinite loop when xorg was killed. Maybe I’m just better at killing xorg than you are.
Also never experienced the ACPI freeze. What distro were you running? It could also be the video driver. I had terrible problems with kwin stability in the past with one video card at home, but at work it was rock solid.
Is it just me, or does there seem to be an agenda coming from “lie for Windows” types to try to prevent other people from wanting to try KDE4 in particular?
No, I wouldn’t ascribe it to malice. If I hadn’t looked into the causes of my problems with kde, I might have thought the same as well.
Its like anything having to do with technology: if you give up when you run into a problem, you’ll just go back to what you’re used to unless your forced, regardless of the cause of the problem. I’m old enough to remember the gripes tech folk had when they were forced to use Unix instead of VMS, windows instead of dos, windows instead of Macs,Macs instead of Windows,or Linux instead of Unix. Very rarely did those complaints have to do with the technical merits of the old system vs new. Its usually a matter of familiarity. If you try telling them the new system is better than the old for the use case, they often feel like you are telling them they were wrong for being comfortable.
What is it about the “lie for Linux” types that will make any old-misinformed crap up about Windows which was valid critism in about 1998, but won’t listen to any criticism regarding Linux/KDE/Gnome etc?
Edited 2011-05-28 10:38 UTC
I have before mentioned it in another KDE-related story that I always seem to experience random crashes and glitches in KDE. I have no idea why, but for example moving the panel around and/or adjusting its size usually gets me a nice crash which also screws up the rest of the desktop and requires killing X.org. This also has happened on several different hardware configurations and distros, so it’s not definitely related to a specific driver or distro.
The general crashiness of KDE is one of those things that quite quickly put me off of it. If the situation hasn’t gotten better yet they should definitely work on it then.
In 5 computers it doesn’t happen to me using Kubuntu, if you want to try this.
Edited 2011-05-30 00:13 UTC
I’ll see your personal anecdote, and raise it:
I have installed the last four major versions of KDE on each of about seven different computers using a number of different distributions (Arch, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, MEPIS, Fedora and Debian), and I have booted a KDE LiveCD to recover user data on a good many more (primarily on borked Windows machines), and not one of these installations/live boots has exhibited even the slightest indication of glitches or crashes.
I did have an Arch machine recently that went into a kernel panic when I plugged in a USB device, but that was soon fixed by a kernel update, nothing to do with KDE. I had another machine that refused to install to hard disk from a liveCD, but it refused just as badly for GNOME as it did for KDE. In fact it refused to install Windows also, and it turned out this was due to a bad memory stick. Again, nothing to do with KDE.
I have heaps more trouble with Windows.
Here is another, independent, report on performance, glitchiness and crashiness using the latest drivers and desktop shells.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_ma…
Their experience with KDE (compared to GNOME) is also somewhat the opposite of yours.
I haven’t had any such issue with KDE4 for yonks. KDE 4.0 was a bit flaky, but even that wasn’t as bad as the picture you seem to be trying to paint here.
As for being ‘ready for the desktop’ … KDE4 is already the best desktop in the sense that it can run in the widest variety of contexts. There is already a desktop version and a netbook version, and a touch version (for tablets and mobiles) is in the works.
Apart from supporting multiple desktops, and a feature similar to Aero snap:
http://linuxology.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/yes-we-can-kde-aero-snap…
and desktop grouping:
http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/GroupingDesktop
KDE4 has innovative features such as activities:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/how-to-use-kde-4-deskto…
which together make it the most advanced, flexible and useable desktop available today.
Edited 2011-05-27 03:11 UTC
The only time that happen to me is if I run with desktop effects on on my stone-age laptop that as an Intel GM845 (or something) video card. If I turn off the effects, or use a card that isn’t total ass, nothing crashes on log out or shutdown.
I tried KDE 11.04. KDE was very pretty, and seemed like a big improvement from the last time I tried it (4.2 or so).
My big issue is that every time I clicked on anything, whether it was to open a file or the K on the bottom left, my system took a half second to a full second to respond. This continued inside every application I tried.
I don’t have this issue with Gnome or E17, just KDE4. It’s too bad, but it was enough for me to delete the distro. Not too mention twice in 30 minutes I had to log out because the plasmoids locked up somehow.
This is with an ATI card with the closed drivers.