Submitted by Disappointed with KDE 4’s performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Today the first third major update of the Trinity Desktop Environment is released, providing an alternative upgrade path for KDE users who do not feel comfortable with KDE 4.
I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I’m not particularly enamoured with what KDE4 has brought me so far. I want to use it, but it never lets me. The biggest issues are performance and stability. Stability because crashes are frequent – when I tried the latest version a few weeks ago, even the crash reporter managed to crash several times. It’s like crashception. Usually though, the crashes often seem to be subsystems that don’t do anything important, so you can generally just go about your way – just don’t use KDE4 for anything serious.
The performance issues are of far greater concern. They seem to focus pretty much exclusively on Kwin, and have been a staple of KDE4 on my machines since the very first few releases. I’ve run KDE4 on several different computers with different graphics cards by different brands, using both open and closed source drivers and different distributions, but the one constant is abysmal Kwin performance.
Some people have suggested I turn off most of the effects, but you know what? I currently have a quad-core Phenom X4 2.2Ghz computer with 8GB of RAM and an onboard ATI Radon HD3200 video card – I’m not going to run a Windows XP-like tearing graphics experience with such powerful hardware! Sure, the video card is anything but exotic, but heck, Windows 7 and GNOME/Compiz offer zero performance issues, even when playing 1080p video, so why should I excuse KDE4?
For those of you who are also experiencing performance issues like this, or those of you who simply don’t like KDE4 for whatever reason (I actually do like KDE4), you may be relieved to hear that the power of open source has made it possible for the KDE 3.x branch to continue development in the form of the Trinity Desktop Environment, which has just pushed out its first third release, version 3.5.13.
Other than new patches and fixes, the Trinity project also includes fixes, patches, and enhancements coming from several distributors such as OpenSUSE, Chakra, and Ubuntu. The changelog is pretty impressive, and the KDE4 compatibility is nice too; you can install Trinity alongside KDE4, and KDE4 applications will be recognised and run just fine inside Trinity.
Binary packages are available for Fedore, RedHat, Ubuntu, and Debian. Of course, you can always build it from source yourself.
I’m not doubting you, but this is really weird. Your hardware sounds just like my setup (a Gateway DX something or other) and it used to have issues, but it’s worked like a charm since at least Fedora 15. Even before then, KDE4 was usable. The only difference is that I have a slower processor (proc/cpuinfo reportsPhenom 9150 900MHz w/4 cores, though KDE’s info center says it will go to 1.8GHz) and less memory (4 GB).
I wish I knew what to tell you, other than to try a clean install, but seriously — with specs like that, KDE4 ought to be a dream for you.
Edit: Actually, my video card is integrated on the motherboard, though it says it’s HD3200. Do you have a card, or an on-board chip?
Edited 2011-11-01 22:06 UTC
Yeah my specs are similar as well. Considering that he’s been developing kde 3.x, I’m guessing its been a while since he’s tried kde 4.x.
Agreed. On that hardware, KDE4 should absolutely fly. KDE4 works like a charm on each of the multiple systems on which I have installed it, and none of those machines have anything like those specs, they are all far less powerful machines than Thom’s.
I too am at a loss as to what to say.
It is a bit of a shame really, because KDE3 misses out on a number of advances of KDE4, including desktop activities, hardware abstraction via Phonon and Solid, and the semantic desktop.
https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/498660-kde-4-leader-of-the-sem…
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfie…
My standards could just be higher. I’m a Windows 7 user, and therefore, tolerate zero lag when it comes to animations and UI effects, even on slow and old hardware. Even simple Atom netbooks run Aero blazing fast and lag-free.
That can’t exactly be said for KDE4. Considering you don’t use Windows 7, I think the most logical explanation is that your standards are lower.
I run Windows 7 on the same hardware I run KDE4.
Even my very modest hardware (including several different netbooks) runs KDE4 blazing fast and lag-free. Faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware.
Really.
I too don’t tolerate anything other than zero lag when it comes to animations and UI effects, even on slow and old hardware, so I tend to avoid Windows 7 unless I really have to use it.
Why don’t you show us a video of you KDE installation running on low end hardware?, I mean, it is nice an dandy on words, but can you prove it?
The low-end hardware is so low-end that it is not capable of taking a video of itself via qt-recordMyDesktop.
http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/about.php
When I get home I could try taking a video of the KDE4 desktop and the Windows 7 desktop on this same hardware using a seperate digital camera. I am not that confident of my skills using the camera in one hand and operating the desktop in the other, nor have I ever posted video before, so don’t hold your breath, I may not be successful.
Ah, so in other words “screw you, I don’t have to prove what I’m saying.” Nice excuse there
Should I take a video of how KWin runs when Oxygen and Window animations are enabled?
I don’t think you’ll find it useful, unless there are some nasty rendering issues or lags you can actually see.
From my own experience (on a pretty new and fast hardware, as for a laptop, at least), the performance is “fine”. The interface did at first feel sluggish but removing most of the animations brought it in-line with other desktops.
KDE4 is quite heavy on resources, though. Takes long to start up, and then makes my machine run quite a bit hotter than with Gnome2+Compiz or XFCE4+compositor. That might be just a bug (I found that powertop reports that audio uses 100% of one CPU core – not sure if that’s real – top doesn’t show anything unusual). It also happens to crash – not very often but the first time I left it on overnight I found the desktop was frozen.
Other than that, it’s just bloated. In order to make it behave and look like a desktop for an adult I had to go through all the settings and disable a fair number of them. Once done, KDE4 is actually quite usable, which is a big plus in comparison to GnomeShell or Unity.
I strongly recommend people unhappy with recent changes to move to XFCE. It’s now a fully featured DE (years ago I’ve moved to it because Gnome2 was lacking some features) and is sticking to a simple desktop metaphor. One of few things that still “just work”.
Windows 7 + zero lag ? Well, guess you’re just lucky.
It may be because I disable animations and thus am more sensitive to it (I want my menus and windows to show up when I ask, not a silly fade-in later), but I can certify that Windows 7 is still very much capable of lag under load. And by under load, I mean that even booting it and attempting to use the desktop once it shows up fails, like in the good old XP days.
Since using sleep/hibernation will be sort of mandatory in Windows 8, I guess Microsoft are aware of this problem.
I don’t get any … but then again I don’t run crap hardware (my hardware comes from 2007 … 4 years … mid range processor and graphics).
I have the same exact issue with the KDE compared to win7. The animations doesn’t feel that smooth and number of times when things go blank/frees are way to great (notebook, i3 330M @ 2.13GHz, 4GB of ram, nvidia GeForce GT 330M)…
Thom, I read a lot of your comments and articles, but this one is just bullshit. I usualy use Openbox on my laptop (a Dell Vostro 1310, CPU Intel T5670 @ 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel Graphics) and I tried KDE4 just a few weeks ago.
Apart from the fact that I don’t like too much eyecandy I can tell you I had no issues with the interface. No lag whatsoever in animations and graphics. There was no problem at all with compositing… so I can conclude that either you have a problem with KDE4 yourself or your hardware doesn’t like it (sucks!)
Seriously, why do you people keep posting bullshit anecdotal evidence about your own personal hardware. It’s completely worthless data.
So many things will affect KDE4’s performance:
* specific hardware (this is even more of an issue with pre-builds like laptops as the same graphics card can behave differently in one than it can in the other. Also I’ve noticed upgrading from HDD to SSD has made my compositing noticeably smoother – in spite of the upgrade not being directly related to graphics hardware)
* drivers (often there’s more than one open source and closed binary – all of which behave differently on different hardware)
* what Linux distro you’re running (some offer better performance out of the box than others on the same hardware)
* what KDE tweaks you’re running (render method, composite quality vs speed, etc)
* what effects you’ve selected (some are more intensive than others)
* BIOS tweaks (if you know what you’re doing, you can get some noticeable performance differences by just changing a few options in the BIOS)
* the amount of crap you’re running at a time (self explanatory really)
* your output resolution
…and so on.
So all this shit about “it runs well on xyz” etc is completely meaningless.
Also, I believe the KDE team were using the same excuses as MS were for Vista’s poor performance and stability: poor graphics drivers.
You can read into that statement whichever way you want
Edited 2011-11-02 12:49 UTC
Don’t immediately write something of as bullshit just because it does not apply to you.
I have the same experience as Thom with regards to KDE 4.x Let me start by saying that want to love KDE. I install each minor version in order to see how it progresses. Always I hope it can become my mane DE.
That said on my old with a single core 1.8GHz cpu (don’t know which one any more) 4GB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce GT240 KDE performance is very sluggish. Both with Nvidia’s own drivers as Nouveau’s, tested under both Arch and Kubuntu. Ditto for my girlfriends pc with about the same specs.
Now I bought a new pc –with the soul purpose of playing Deus Ex 3
— but I kept my old videocard. KDE performance became very good. I have nothing to complain in that department. But the stability of the system is still horrible, I mean Windows ME horrible. After a weak I could not bare it any more and installed Gnome 3 (…which I did not like so I installed Fluxbox 
)
Again, I think, feature-wise, KDE is great and the people working on it are great to. I really like to use it. But it still doesn’t work for me, if it works for you, great, I envy you. If it works for the majority of people (as it appears to do), even better! But don’t write of people telling otherwise for telling bullshit, or blaming the hardware. This machine runs other DE (like Gnome 3), modern games and much more complex software without any problem.
And why, why would anybody tell bullshit(lie) about it, what is to gain?
Edited 2011-11-02 13:19 UTC
I have the same issue but on my laptop. KDE4 I really wanted to like but it is laggy as hell. I don’t know what to do other than reinstalling the Gnome shell based Ubuntu or using Xubuntu. With Gnome shell I had zero problems. 11.10 of Kubuntu just has not been impressive enough.
I also use Windows 7 and have used a version of KDE 4 lately, and while you can never any Linux/X etc. based system as really responsive, the difference is quite imperceptible. I also use Windows 7 and OS X on my Macbook, and the lag with OS X when you compare is really quite shocking. KDE and Linux is nowhere near that bad.
Sorry Thom, but you’re going to have to measure this subjective lag otherwise I’m sensing double standards here.
Lemur2’s video drivers are probably better in whatever distro Lemur2 is running,and by better, I mean better integrated and/or newer.
KDE4, Gnome3, and Unity all lean heavily on the video drivers, and the user experience is going to suffer if the drivers are subpar or don’t integrate well.
KDE4 on Fedora 15 is pretty nice. Previously, it was painful, and I credit the new found niceness to the latest Nouveau driver and it’s integration by the Fedora team.
Have you ever though of running another window manager within kde?
Compiz runes perfectly for example.
I love KDE but I must agree that kwin has TERRIBLE performance. I hope to see great improvements in 4.8
kwin (in and of itself) has fine performance. Not yet perfect, not absolutely optimal, but perfectly adequate. However, as far as I know, unlike compiz, kwin doesn’t have any work-arounds for problems in the underlying graphics stack. If the graphics stack reports that it has support for a particular OpenGL feature, then kwin believes it and kwin will use the feature. If that feature does in fact work, as advertised, kwin runs fine. If the feature is broken or poorly performed in the underlying graphics stack, then kwin will uncover this underlying bug, and perform poorly itself as a result.
In Fedora 15, KDE is finally usable again. Previously, KDE4 was a painful experience, but now it’s nice and smooth.
For me, it was the Nouveau Nvidia driver maturing that did the trick.
I don’t think Debian is doing anything magical the other distros are not or can not do. KDE4 on top of Intel and Nvidia machines have both been solid.
At our company, we have ~400 desktop machines running KDE 4.6 on top of Debian Customized AMD64 (kernel 3.0.0), lag-free and with animations.
Our specs vary from Celeron 2.2Ghz + 2gb RAM with Intel Graphics to Core i5 with 4gb RAM with Intel Graphics too.
Works like a charm.
great. I do miss KDE 3.
What’s going on with the Linux Desktop?
It seems that the last releases of the most important DEs in the Linux world (KDE and Gnome) had a lot of criticism. These includes Unity.
I have the impression that the majority of users don’t like the new directions taken by those DE and are seeking for alternatives.
Unfortunately all the FLOSS alternatives provides a second class desktop experience (or, at least, this is what I feel) and people are moving to OSX and Windows.
I believe that those new DEs are putting a tomb stone on the Linux Desktop.
Well,XFCE is doing fine. I know many people who switched to it, as I did at work. (Me uses Windows at home, Arch with XFCE at work.)
If you’re referring to recent DE releases (e.g., Gnome 3, KDE 4.7 and Unity) then I don’t know where you’ve been getting your information. KDE 4.7 has for the most part received raving reviews. KDE 4 is all grown up and has been a welcomed refuge for many users fleeing Gnome 3 and Unity. While KDE 4 might have been a mess at its initial few releases (4.0 through 4.3) it has greatly matured over the past two years and is now a paragon of stability and usability. I suggest you give KDE 4.7 a serious look if you’re seeking shelter from Gnome 3 and Unity, at least until these latter two DE’s mature.
It’s not an information, it is an impression, and, you know, impressions are subjective.
It’s not an information, it is an impression, and, you know, impressions are subjective.
A lot of people’s impressions are driven by what they read, they don’t bother to form their own impressions.
As the grandparent poster (cmost) said:
This is the reality.
However, there is a huge vested interest in disparaging KDE, and KDE4 in particular. You will find a lot of postings on the Internet disparaging KDE4. Rarely is there any actual reason given, sometimes reasons are given that are the opposite of the actual situation (such as feigned dislike of KDE menus), and often there is a vast amount of misinformation.
I have even read quite a few articles (from people who allegedly support Linux on the desktop) which bemoan the situation with GNOME and Unity, ponder the demise of Linux on the desktop because of that situation, and yet they utterly ignore KDE. Go figure.
Disparaging of KDE4 appears to be, for the most part, either astroturfing (paid-for opinion pieces pretending to be grass roots opinions) or coming from misinformed fanboys of other desktops.
The fact that there are indeed some Linux systems on which the underlying OpenGL graphics stack brings down KDE’s kwin doesn’t help at all. It gives the haters somewhere to start.
Edited 2011-11-03 00:12 UTC
Maybe people just don’t like it because, I think the reason is that KDE 4 is kinda ugly.
I hate how all the font spacings to border spacings are not “quite right”, transparency all over the shop … with no regards to constrast, gradients everywhere on everything trying to rip off the “brushed steel look”.
KDE 4, if it was a woman she would be Katie Price (aka Jordan).
If they hired a professional designer ( a proper designer not a mockup artist) with some decent classic art background and a good understanding of Typography (yes this shit is bloody important) … I am not a designer but I know when something “looks nice” … similarly with the new google theme … looks tonnes better with what is just a few CSS changes.
Whether you can change this is pretty much moot IMHO … because it is first impressions that count.
Aesthetics count and so do first impressions.
I seen you brush off the looks of a system as mainly unimportant, but “Polish” really matters in people’s perception.
I recently updated a Google Maps “location finder tool” for HR, fixed a few bugs and made it look “nice” and tidy and 2 minutes after deploy had the HR manager praising my work … all because I made it a little “nicer”.
Oh and this is XFCE
http://imgur.com/Erhxf
Edited 2011-11-03 19:21 UTC
I’m with you, it is amazing what a proper font and good spacing can do:
from this:
http://imagebin.org/182175
to this:
http://imagebin.org/182302
I’m with you, it is amazing what a proper font and good spacing can do:
from this:
http://imagebin.org/182175
to this:
http://imagebin.org/182302
..
Yes, i was kde user 4 years, after kde4 i switched to gnome, and after gnome3 now i use lxde..Lxde is great, i dont need fancy effects and inventions, i need something to start my laptop and to run the apps i use, nothing else..
I use LXDE too, in fact I’m posting from Lubuntu. I switched to LXDE back in 2009 and never looked back.
Try OpenBox with tint2 panel. Forget LXDE.
That dream died years ago.
It’s not that people are moving from Linux to Windows or Mac, it’s that Linux never offered a compelling reason to move to it and stay.
Your opinion only. Feel free to express it but understand that opinions are useless to anyone but the author.
I have been using linux and freeBSD for 8 years now so your statement contains no logic. Troll much?
His post makes more sense than anyone’s. The Linux Desktop isn’t losing users to Windows/Mac they just haven’t got, relatively speaking, very many users.
I’d like to add that, the reason why is because: One) no one has ever invested enough money in developers and advertising to have a well crafted and marketable enough distribution for consumers and Two) few hardware manufacturers have the competency it takes to create and profit from such a product.
As long as Linux kernel does not offer stability for developers no commercial project is willing to invest into linux development. So far the kernel API-s change too often too radically and nobody wants to rewrite their application every few month.
Next is some stability in user space. Again there is a lots of fragmentation and clutter in Linux, no agreed standards and that frightens the commercial developers away as far as they can go. Windows have had Win32 for ever, the C# and .NET has been around for a long time and people trust these platforms. OS X have its internals stabilized. That is the winning formula.
So Linux is all about innovation and eyecandy and SYSTEM stability but that does not win users. In order to win users, you must win developers and they want stable working environment in a sence of API-s and ABI-s.
Develop for a stable parent distributions and let the child forks inheret it instead of trying to target every child fork distribution on the menu. “Not a big deal ™”
Heck, Nvidia can deliver a binary blog with an easy setup wizard that installs across multiple parent distributions and I don’t see Nvidia as being some kind of blessed bubble of developers.
Kernel APIs (or ABIs) mean squat for application API stability.
I can run a 2004-era (or older, didn’t test recently) Linux app on the latest and greatest Linux system without problems (though vice versa, things often break by the month, so you better build your release binaries on old Linux systems).
The Linux interfaces are important for drivers.
That’s not really true. Look beyond the desktop and at mobile and embedded system’s you’ll see Linux in several commercial products. Many have managed to get around those shortcomings by forking (at least temporarily) the Linux kernel and developing and maintaining a different user space. It just hasn’t really happened on the desktop.
yes, it’s my impression, and that’s what I said.
I’ve been using Linux since 1998 and didn’t know that write my own idea seeking for debate was trolling.
The logic of my message is “I’m and old Linux user and the current DEs sucks very bad. I’m going to switch to MacOs or windows”.
If you can’t see it, then it’s not my fault.
fepede – my comment was not directed towards you and I don’t take issue with your original post.
ok! sorry, please accept my apologises then!
I thought you were accusing me of trolling
No, I had an opposing viewpoint so he assumed I’m trolling. Truth is, I’m not. If he’s happy with his OS, then more power to him!
However even Blind Freddy can see that on the Desktop, there has been little to no adoption by the average user. Anyone that argues otherwise is trolling, a zealot or is just plain kidding themselves.
Maybe. Or it could just be that the unhappy people are a small but noisy minority. It’s hard to say one way or another, since as usual, people make more of a fuss when they’re unhappy than when everything is working fine.
If I can chip in my 2 cents, I’d call myself a pretty average Linux user. I used Linux with gnome 2 for about 7 years before gnome released v3. I used gnome 3 and unity for a bit and thought they had some good ideas. However, the usability failures and bugginess of both environments (Unity literally died on me twice for no apparent reason) ultimately drove me to a tiling window manager, and I believe my next computer will be a mac.
People hear what they want to hear and then they echo it. Especially if some of those people are high profile like Linus. I don’t actually believe the number of people who “hate” the new desktops is anywhere near as predominant as a casual glance at tech sites like this one and /. would have one believe.
I also think a lot of what you saw in the early days was kneejerk reaction to the initial attempts to use the new environment without learning to make it work for the user instead of against. That’ll improve as they get more polished and features find their way back into the codebase.
Of course there are people out there who legitimately want to stay with the old way of doing things, like the Trinity folks, and are willing to put forth the effort to preserve it. I applaud those people for taking the initiative and wish them nothing but success in the future.
If there is a problem with the new Linux desktops Gnome 3, KDE 4+ and Unity, I feel it is because they are being ambitious and innovating rather than simply copying the Windows desktop.
These new desktop environments are released early lack polish and are incomplete and quirky. However, all of them either do or in the very near future will offer a complete and engaging user experience, even if there is some learning curve for users of older desktops. The old tree menus seem to be a thing of the past.
Personally I find KDE 4 difficult, I dislike the kicker menu and don^aEURTMt like Lancelot much either ^aEUR“ however, I suspect that most of this is my fault as I^aEURTMve never bothered to get my head around the activities system in KDE 4 ^aEUR“ which I suspect is good. For my part I like Unity which is greatly improved in 11:10 and presumably will be more so in the next Ubuntu release, I find it easy to work with multiple desktops and as I tend to use only 5 or 6 apps so the doc works well for me. I friend of mine likes gnome 3 a lot and the multiple desktops system here look very promising and better than I can see in any other DE including Mac OSX or Windows. I don^aEURTMt like the icons being so large but this will no doubt be adjustable shortly.
The changes to the DEs are innovation and the nature of open source means that the initial releases are unlikely to have the polish of OSX but if you are prepared to be a little tolerant and climb a little learning curve the DEs will be as good or better than proprietary ones, if they are not already ^aEUR“ I prefer Unity to the Windows desktop now, as it has more features that I use and this will only increase.
Edited 2011-11-02 06:59 UTC
No. Wrong. The KDE4 desktop lacked polish and was incomplete and quirky back in 2008 when it was first released. It has put all that well behind it now, and is quite polished and easily THE most complete desktop of any.
The “old tree menus” are still there under the Kickoff menu. Just right-click on the menu icon, and select “classic” mode.
Lancelot is a lot like the “new” mode menu of XP, except easier.
http://www.coolnerds.com/XP/StartMenu/xpStartMenu.htm
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…
Kicker classic mode is a lot like the “classic” tree menus of XP and KDE3.
If you have these opinions of KDE, do you also have them for XP? If not, then you have a clear double standard, I’m afraid.
OK, a lot of people seem to have a similar comment. I’ll try to explain without too many words.
On KDE’s Plasma, everything you see on the desktop is implemented as a widget. This includes panels, the task bar, system tray, notifications, icons (representing either shortcuts, URLs or actual files), the wallpaper, folder views, and true widgets such as weather monitors. All of these are different types of widgets in Plasma.
As do most desktops, KDE4 lets you arrange these desktop elements however you like. You can change the wallpaper, change the size and placement of widgets (of all kinds), add quick-launch icons to the panel … whatever. All pretty much standard. The thing is, KDE4 lets you “save” such a setup as a named “activity”. You can save as many such “desktop arrangement definitions” as you like, under different names. Then later you can “load” a previously saved “desktop arrangement definition” (or activity, if you will) back on to any virtual desktop.
https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/358560:kde-45-desktop-activiti…
Very powerful. More flexible than any other desktop.
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/08/16/kde-desktop-activities-explained/
http://lifehacker.com/5668873/use-kde-activities-to-create-differen…
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/kdes-desktop-features-activities-widge…
You don’t have to use this feature if you don’t want to. If you do want to use it, it is only available with KDE4.
None of this is outside the scope of KDE. KDE can easily do all that for you.
KDE is better than the OSX desktop. Unity has quite a way to to get anywhere near the OSX desktop.
Edited 2011-11-02 10:28 UTC
So… are you the official KDE “Minister of Information” now?
Lemur2 I always enjoy reading your comments ^aEUR“ even ^aEUR“ especially when they are robust, however you write
But I wrote
Which is true of KDE when it was released it was incomplete and quirky and it now offers a complete and engaging user experience.
I am sure much of what you say about KDE is true, I’m sure the activities thing is a very powerful tool and it is my fault that I haven’t spent more time working out how to use it. – I don’t like the kicker menu and that is what we are intended to use not the classic menu but that a minor niggle. I suspect the reason that I don^aEURTMt like KDE is more to do with a dislike of Kubuntu over Ubuntu and the fact that I find Opensuse a little bloated and unresponsive. I don^aEURTMt have the time at the moment to set up another OS and learn to use it, but it^aEURTMs not out of the question in the near future.
Like I said
Your point is that KDE is already better than a proprietary desktop and I have no issues with that ^aEUR“ my point is that shortly we are likely to have at least 3 DEs that are better than a proprietary desktops and a little patience and tolerance wouldn^aEURTMt be a bad thing.
Sorry I missed
Firstly I don’t see XP as the gold standard of user interfaces – I think its dated and poor by the standards of today. However, XP does have a programs menu as a break out tree which I find quite usable. KDEs Kicker, I find more like Vista and Windows 7 and equally horrible.
KDE4 doesn’t run kicker. Kicker is the menu from KDE3, which is a tree menu.
KDE4 runs Kickoff, which has two distinct modes. The default mode is, I find also, not very good, but Kickoff also has a “classic” mode which is exactly like the “tree” which you yourself claim you find quite useable. If you find it useable for XP, why wouldn’t it be useable for KDE?
Furthermore, there is the issue of the names visible on sub-levels of the tree. In KDE4, the first sub-level is the application category … which is groups like Internet, Graphics, Office, Games, Utilities and System. On XP, this level is the name of the vendor, so that you have to know that Adobe is the author of Acrobat Reader. Back on KDE then next level below the category is the application description, so the PDF viewer would be listed as “document viewer” on the menu, with additional information being the name of the program, which happens to be “Okular”. On XP, this level is the application name, so you have to know that Acrobat Reader is Adobe’s PDF viewer application.
So, I ask you once again, why do you hold this apparent double standard, when the KDE menus are actually easier to use?
PS: Lancelot also has several modes. By default is has two columns, so when it opens you see a “favourites” column (which contains whatever you set), and the applications category column.
Applications category opening menu:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…
Computer category opening menu:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…
When you click on an entry in the right-hand column, that colum slides across to the left, and the next lower level of the menu appears in the right-hand column.
If you wish you can change this behaviour so that Lancelot uses more than two columns.
Edited 2011-11-02 22:44 UTC
“Easier to use” cannot possibly be a factual statement. Please don’t present it as such – it dilutes the discussion.
I can’t think of anyone, objectively, who would claim with a straight face that finding the PDF viewer application under menu entries:
Start => All Programs => Adobe => Acrobat Reader
… is somehow “easier” than finding it under
Start => Office => Document viewer (Okular)
Seriously, Thom, get off your high horse.
Edited 2011-11-02 22:49 UTC
Except, of course, that by default, Adobe dumps a shortcut on the desktop. And, on top of that, if I recall correctly, a shortcut is dumped in /programs, not in /programs/adobe.
Other than that – this is beyond silly. Opening an extra menu? Are you guys (BOTH of you) fcuking kidding me?
How irksome is it when that happens … programs having the audacity to litter your desktop (and even worse, the ONLY desktop you get under most desktop software) with their icons (unless you tell them otherwise).
If I want an icon on a desktop, or in a quickstart on the panel, then at my discretion I will put one on whichever desktop or quickstart panel I want it to appear (I can have any number of differently set-up desktops or quickstart panels, BTW).
Seriously, you Windows users do have to put up with a pretty braindead and annoying desktop.
This is my number one annoyance with most Windows program installers. Too many of them don’t give you the option of whether or not to spam the desktop/quicklaunch with icons. And too many of them don’t give you the option of selecting the sub-directory of the Start Menu to put the icons into. It’s very frustrating having to continuously remove icons, move icons, delete folders, etc.
Even worse is that if you move icons around on the Start Menu to keep things organised, the icons are not removed when the app is uninstalled.
How anyone can find the Windows Start Menu and application management to be “easy” or “intuitive” is beyond me.
Sorry the kick off menu – I don’t I think a traditional break out tree such as in BeOS, RISCOS etc is easier than the menu implementation in KDE or Vista or Windows 7. XP is somewhere between the two – an I’m not going to argue XP is how it should be, personally I’d prefer Gnome 3 for example – Oh and I don’t think we should stick with that either – innovation is good.
meh.
With Lancelot, there is an option to have the different main menu categories (which are: computer, applications, documents and contacts) appear in the panel as separate, distinct “Start” buttons.
Form there, as I said before:
“Applications category opening menu:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…..
Computer category opening menu:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…..
When you click on an entry in the right-hand column, that colum slides across to the left, and the next lower level of the menu appears in the right-hand column.
If you wish you can change this behaviour so that Lancelot uses more than two columns.”
This means that with Lancelot options selected the right way, you can click on the “Applications Start” menu button in the panel, then click on say the “Office” category in the right hand column. A new column showing the Office applications will appear on the right, depending on the way you like it, either as a third column or the existing right column will slide to the left. Either way, you can then click on the desired program, for example on the “document viewer (Okular)” program.
Three clicks in all. Start Applications Menu => Office => Document viewer (Okular).
This is in effect the equivalent of the GNOME 2.x separated menus, which has three separate menu starters for: Applications, Places and System.
Like so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome2.30.0.png
I can’t think of any GUI menu system with as many available programs which can be as clear, as easy to use, and yet require less clicks (or other interaction). You can probably equal this, but it would be hard to beat IMO.
I certainly can’t see how this is any better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome_3.2_shell.png
or this, for that matter:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Customize-the-Start-men…
Edited 2011-11-03 06:03 UTC
I can tell you I don’t like the direction the New DE’s are taking. I did like KDE and then 4 came along, at first it was awful and it’s gotten better; but in the meantime I moved to Gnome and than Gnome make’s this new DE and Ubuntu makes Unity. Both personally I do not care for and ended up in XFCE which I like a whole lot. The DE developers of Gnome should have stuck with a classic look imho.
They’ve lost the plot, that’s what’s going on….
Edited 2011-11-03 09:28 UTC
Haven’t had any in the last two years…
Performance? Yeah, kwin is slow. Supposedly fixed in each version released, but not bad. Turning off effects is a good solution. Does kwin 3, did not have compositing effects, so going back to it isn’t really any better of an experience than just turning them off.
But kde 3.x was pretty cool. I understand why people love it, and were turned off by some of the 4.x issues. If you just prefer it, that’s cool. I actually prefer 4.x. It might be neat to go back just to play with now and then. Don’t a lot of distros have a kde3 branch they can install? I guess this project provides a way forward for those people with updates and bug fixes.
The KDE team’s definition of ‘fixed’ seems to deviate greatly from my definition of the word.
KDE seems to run really rough on my hardware and it has a long way to go before I would call it ‘fast’… and 100% usable. It works but it is no gleaming gem.
Even after the headaches KDE has saddled me with, it remains my reluctant refuge from the current DE insanity.
Hey.
I am one of the developers working with Trinity Desktop. Thanks for giving us some press coverage!
One small error, it should be our 3rd* major release not our first. we have had two prior ones. The slashdot pots seems to have been mistaken
Amending this would be great
Calvin
Any plans to use Qt4 as backend instead of Qt3? (similarly to what Clementine guys did with Amarok code base).
I don’t think the Clementine guys simply swamped toolkits, nor is doing that trivial when there is no backward compatibility between QT4 and QT3. If you read the project page, the devs state that the Clementine Project is inspired by Amarok, not a fork of it. There was a fork of Amarok 1.4.10, Pana, that used qt3 but development ceased this past August.
Edited 2011-11-02 20:57 UTC
I never asserted that porting it could be a trivial task, but as far as I knew, Clementine was a port of AmaroK 1.4.* to Qt4. Yes, its homepage says “inspired”.
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-announce-apps/2010-February/00439…
I have been running Trinity on both Ubuntu and Debian since it has been available and I love it. Everything I loved about KDE 3. Thanks to everyone that has made it available.
I had horrible KWin performance issues with Nvidia Quadro FX 1600M on the current Debian testing, but that didn’t seem to be specific to KDE, just Nvidia bug, which is fixed in their 290x driver.
I like that the Trinity Desktop environment exists. Years ago I thought that KDE 3.5 (with the Kickoff menu) was the best desktop environment around, and I’ve never been able to have that kind of speed and stability in KDE 4.x. (IMHO, Mageia and Fedora’s KDE spin are usable). I have a couple of questions though:
1) Is there a plan to move to Qt 4.x? Qt3 hasn’t been maintained in almost seven years, and feels dated. Is Trinity going to be a modern continuation of the KDE 3 experience, or a relic from the past?
2) How do the developers plan on integrating the KDE 3 applications? I’m talking about things like DigiKam, K3b, Kaffeine, KDevelop…the integration of programs are what made KDE 3 great. Are they going to maintain separate forks, or do I have to pull in KDE4.x and set it to use the Plastik theme?
Thanks for the hard work, guys.
As far as qt3 they have taken over maintenance of that as well. http://www.trinitydesktop.org/wiki/bin/view/Documentation/Releases_… I use the old version of digikam and k3b with no issues but you can also use the newer versions if you like you just need to install extra libraries if you want to mix.
Hey I am a developer for Trinity
We Actually maintain Qt3 as of this release. This means we’ve been adding patches, and pulling in the many dozen patches from distributions that have piled up over the years.
As for Qt4, it’s in beta. We actually have a abstraction layer for Qt called TQt. this will allow us to use Qt4, Qt5, Qt3, whatever, concurently and effectively. Reduces the porting effort majorly.
Funnily enough we’ve had A lot of QA issues with Qt4, some stuff just plain doesn’t work, or has been really dumbed down from Qt3. Qt3 is much faster and works well, but we are definitely in the process of being able to use Qt4 optionally.
We have those applications in our SVN tree and repositories. Basically we maintain them now. This means we’ve been patching them to work with our latest libraries (which have changed quite a bit, broken the ABI compatibility). Typically this process is pretty simple, this release we have added 3 “new” applications to repository. We are looking to add more as well. Right now we have
probably 50+ applications, from Digikam to Amarok and the whole KDevelop Suite.
Edited 2011-11-01 23:24 UTC
Care to provide a valid download place for EL6 rpms? Nothing works now..
Do you need more download mirrors?
More mirrors the better! But most mirrors sync every 24 hours, so that’s why they aren’t working.
x
Edited 2011-11-01 23:23 UTC
Well, because the trinity people work inside KDE’s svn infrastructure, I see their commits pass by. I see that they’re doing some kind of abstraction layer thingy so they can compile with Qt4 and Qt3 and I know they are porting the old KOffice 1.6 codebase to it, so they’re also taking care of the apps.
They also very decently renamed Krita in the old KOffice application set to something else when I asked them to, since no matter how you slice it, Krita 2.4 is much, much, much faster, more powerful and more useful than Krita 1.6 and I didn’t want users to get confused.
I recently tried KDE 4.7 and I must say that it doesn’t crash anymore on me this is a great advance, there are still some problems, mainly KWin.
KWin is fat and slow, it needs to be optimized a lot, the defaults are bad, I had to turn the blur and other stuff to make it more usable and still it wasn’t all that great.
KDE 4.7 usability also has problems, some widgets doesn’t have hints, the notification system is annoying and gets in your way, there are some geometry bugs in panels and other little annoyances, KWin doesn’t remember the position of a closed windows by default when you reopen it, every window get’s a 0,0 location always unless you change an obscure configuration in KWin, is nice that is configurable, just give better defaults.
Oh, and they are obsessed with rounded corners, honestly, the checkbox is huge just because it has to have pronounced rounded corners, every border in Oxygen is rounded, and I’m not talking about smooth and subtle rounded corners, I’m talking about pronounced rounded corners.
The good thing is that it is really configurable, it can be configured for almost every taste but I think they have put more configurations they can test and some combinations lead to some awkward results.
There a couple of recent performance improvements for kwin effects which were due for inclusion only at KDE 4.7.2 and 4.8.
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/08/rendering-at-60-frame…
“Alex^aEURTMs complaints got me wondering why we are not able to render 60 frames/second. Each frame should only take 16.67 msec and knowing that our repaint loop is fine, I could not imagine how a frame could take longer to render than the 16.67 msec. Knowing the KWin^aEURTMs source code pretty well I suspected two parts of the repaint loop to be slow: the method which actually renders each window and our effect chain. The effect chain calls each effect in turn to transform windows. I had an idea to improve the effect chain for quite some time by calling only the currently active effects. That is currently each effect checks first whether it is active and just does nothing. So you basically call all effects again and again and nothing is actually performed except waisting cycles on checking whether it should do nothing (some effects are heavy there).
Of course I do not just optimize without checking if the code needs to be optimized, so I did an analysis of callgrind output and I was surprised.The effect chain was way more heavy than expected. In fact it^aEURTMs so heavy that the paint method doesn^aEURTMt matter in comparison. A deeper analysis of the code showed that there is a small bug, which we will fix in 4.7.2 (too late for 4.7.1), so that we can give the benefits as fast as possible to our users. But the real optimization by only calling the active effects will hit only 4.8. After that change the effect chain is no longer visible in the hot pathes of KWin. Also the change immediatelly helped to identify some expensive checks in some effects which are now ensured that they are not called in each frame (unless the effect is active).”
Apparently it affects only some systems, because kwin has been rendering at 60 frames per second for quite some time now on a number of my quite modest machines.
Anyway, the kwin optimizations of which you speak already exist, the first of them has been included in the most recent KDE rlease (4.7.2), and others a due to follow in the next point releases.
I share the sentiments. Perhaps Thom is a *LITTLE* exaggerated on the crashing narrative. But yes, I have crashes too. But particularly I despise the K Menu and the Oxygen tiny buttons. Weren’t these so much misdesigned, I would actually stick with KDE 4 series. Hell, just simplify that menu and make the buttons larger. Oh, make more attractive Qt themes. All we have is Oxygene, Redmond and CDE stuff? For goodness sake. Can’t you see why GNOME 2 beat the hell out of KDE in the past 6 years? And now being beaten by crap like Unity and controversial but fast GNOME Shell ?
KDE Team… give Thom and I, a break…
Install and use the alternative Lancelot menu.
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
I recommend the setting where there are no “category buttons” and the separate categories can all be set as sepearte menu buttons in the panel.
e.g. Lancelot Applications category menu:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…
Lancelot computer “Places” menu:
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/images/screenshots/lancelot-main-wi…
Google for “KDE4 extra themes”
http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/10-most-beautiful-plasma-themes-for-…
Metalized, Perla Negra, Marysia, Aya, Slim Glow, Silicon, Perfection, Akoma, Mist and TiComb.
Other themes which turn up often as people’s choices are Qtcurve and Bespin.
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=47631
Edited 2011-11-02 00:08 UTC
I think Lancelot’s is a poor attempt to create another menu which is more messy than KickOff itself. Lemur2, do you work for KDE team?
The themes are ugly and unattractive. All of them have quirks.
But you haven’t got the spirit. We’re talking about SANE DEFAULTS, and not stupid user hunting based settings. KWin default is a disaster. KickOff should be better off cloning the entire Windows 7 Menu and the themes…well… please copy Windows 7 theme too. Why not. Since complete noobs can’t see any difference between KDE4 and Windows 7, just copy it.
The problem my friend, is that KDE team is just after Windows 7 heels. Copying it… and to NOT SAY THAT, they make up particular idiosyncrasies which don’t help the user at all.
I’m really not asking much. I didn’t bash KWin. It deserves every criticism that Thom leashed. Why not just trash KWin? Please KDE team, use just another thing… try Clutter or Compiz as default. I know, I know, it breaks your KHearts. Oh fuck… sorry.
I just won’t bash KWin that bad because I have tested on a recent hardware and it was fast and “OK”, that meaning, tolerable… not 10 star… suffering well. It did got better after moving its settings to XRender instead of OpenGL.
Please, lemur2… don’t smear more margarine love on KDE. It’s beyond belief this, what you do. Let’s take the facts into account. Default facts.
This does happen on some machines. It shouldn’t be so. This is a dead giveaway that the graphics stack implementation of OpenGL is not performing anywhere near as well as it should on that particular machine.
Xrender should not be able to beat OpenGL (at anything, let alone at hosting Kwin).
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=111&t=88842
OpenGL is not KDE4.
There are a number of choices and modes of both Kickoff and Lancelot, and they both follow the selected theme. You can’t possibly criticise them all, so you thought you would just go for a generic slur, hey?
Easy for you to say. No, really, that is just easy to say. It is simple, you don’t have to prove anything, and you can get a cheap shot in without any effort at all.
Not credible. Cheap shot. Unproven, unsupported and unsupportable. Try again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation_4
The first major version (4.0) of this series was released on 11 January 2008
http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/10-most-beautiful-plasma-themes-for-…
Above page was posted Posted by jun auza On 8/20/2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and reached general retail availability on October 22, 2009.
OK, let’s do just that. Exactly when did the KDE developers invent their time machine in your world?
Facts please.
Edited 2011-11-02 04:25 UTC
Yes.. At that point in time they were copying Vista with its black UI and shiny themes.
I’m pretty sure he was talking about the newest versions of KDE4 trying to copy 7, but you chose to misinterpret what he was saying.
Why doesn’t he conclude that Win 7 is a copy of KDE4? Except of course for transparent window title bars, which are a UI problem utterly unique to Windows.
This conclusion would, after all, fit better with the whole “cause and effect” thingy, given the timelines.
AFAIK just about the only desktop UI feature that truly originates in Windows 7 is the Aero “snap” feature, which KDE4 has a lesser implementation of in the form of “Quick tiling (snap to edge)”.
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.4_Release_Goals
“New: Window maximizing and tiling by snapping to the screen-edges (“Quick tiling and maximization”)”
If anything else has been copied, it has been copied from KDE4 to Windows 7. It is that whole “cause and effect”, you see.
lemur2,
A copy does not necessary mean it is a full clone. No. KDE 4.7 is not a full clone of Windows 7. It just tries to mimic Windows in every possible way, inserting its own stupidities.
What I meant is, KDE Team is better off cloning the whole thing after all. And why not? I even have options to make it “LOOK EXACTLY” like Windows 2000 in the style list. Isn’t that just a proof that KDE cares?
I’m not going to be unfair. I have installed Kubuntu on a RECENT machine and performance was stunning. There was a frigging lag coming from “KWin”. It was a millisecond, but it was there. FACTS: GNOME Shell doesn’t have it, Unity doesn’t have it. Neither XFCE.
After I have put some icons in the taskbar just like they are arranged in Windows 7, KDE was perfect… it’s too bad I can’t change the whole Kick Off menu to behave and look like the same as 7. Because that would be actually GOOD. I don’t know why I have to frigging browse 4 levels to get to an application. Windows 7 Menu behaves better and is arranged better – why not copy it since the trends is obvious?
Fonts? Anyone? Why don’t KDE stablish its own shiny font like Canonical did to Ubuntu? Simple things that make life easier. Larger buttons for people to click? No icon buttons for defaults? You know, KDE can be Windows 7.
It’s just so stupid sometimes. This attitude: well, we’re not a clone, but the copying trend is there.
I’m sure also there’s a lot of KDE margarine lovers around, because everytime I say these things I get modded down. Others too. C’mon KDE margarine lovers!
And I couldn’t care less who invented SNAP first, since I never use this. If Windows did copy it, it made it better at least.
Edited 2011-11-02 14:42 UTC
Thanks for the defense, yes that was exactly what I meant. You said it all. The 4 series HAS BEEN copying Windows since the rise of Vista and it’s black UI bars… very well put.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?484776
I’ve got a plug computer I’d like to shoehorn a GUI on to, and Trinity would be really cool for this. Are there ARM debs in the APT repository, or do I need to compile from source?
Yes! we are just starting to do ARM Builds for Trinity. So far we only have them for Debian Squeeze. If you could test them that would be awesome.They’ll be in the APT repository
Hey there,
I have Debian Squeeze running on my phone (armv6 processor)
I’d love to test out Trinity on it, unfortunately I’m a bit of a debian noob. Would you be able to tell me how to install it?
I tried “apt-get install trinity” but that was a no-go, I imagine I need to add some repositories somewhere?
Cheers
Hi!
you’ll need to add your sources to /etc/apt/sources.list
here is a explanation: http://trinitydesktop.org/installation.php#debian
any questions just hop on our irc channel or mailing list please
Both of the metapackages are missing. I added the repos to my sources.list, added the key, ran an apt-get update, but I still got “unable to locate package” errors.
People make complaints about KDE4.x
Do developers have a stable high performing desktop computing? I am talking about the software.
I wonder if people sometimes forget this is a free software project.
Why instead of complaining we don’t do something positive and fix the bugs that bothers us so much?
After all, this is a FOSS project and we as users should also do our part in free software and contribute improvements instead of complaining and being demanding.
So please people, if you can’t code at least spend some time and try to find bugs, reproduce them, and report useful bugs to the developers, or learn some C++/Qt and start contributing. Am I asking too much?
Edited 2011-11-02 01:46 UTC
If the problem was a few of the details then that is a viable solution, however when the entire project is the flaw (and with kde 4.x that is the case for many of us) then the only solution is a different DE. Being a huge fan of kde 3, this makes Trinity an ideal solution to the kde4 problem that we face.
Could you please elaborate on what you don’t like about the current KDE SC 4.7.2?
I know there are still some crashes that needs to be fixed, but other than that it’s pretty stable. I know that because I’m currently on KDE 4.7.2 and I had Amarok crash a few times when I was using it.
And if you set “Folder View” as a desktop and revert back to the classic menu, you pretty much have the same DE that you had in KDE 3.x.
What exactly you don’t like?
Edited 2011-11-02 14:56 UTC
At the end of the day why make all the effort to make kde4 mimic kde3? Why not use kde3 instead? Its not supported? Enter Trinity.
There is absolutely nothing that I like in KDE4. From login to shutdown its an eyesore, disorganized, slow, and buggy. To fix this, for me, they would have to make it more or less identical to kde3. Since we already have kde3 and now a group is committed to update it, this is the fix kde4 needs.
I disagree, but to each his own I guess…
I’d rather have a modern DE with a powerful shell that is modular and that I can tweak it as I please. AKA: Plasma.
Also, with KDE4 I have the advantage of relying in modern technologies such as Phonon (with VLC backends), Qt4 (soon Qt5 and Wayland). We’re not stuck with legacy libraries like Qt3, which is the case for Trinity.
I know there are bugs left to be fixed, but those will be fixed in time, it’s just a matter of time. Right now KDE SC 4.7.2 is very stable for me.
I’m happy to say that I don’t miss anything in KDE 3.x.
Edited 2011-11-02 15:57 UTC
Not true. Trinity has a subsystem which allows it to use any version of QT. They are not stuck on QT3.
I would rather use a DE that doesn’t get in my way and KDE4 is one annoyance after another. As an avid KDE fan who has found himself without a home, I often return to KDE, including the latest build, and its always the same story, slow, crashes, the gradients give me a headache after a few mins, there are a only a handful of semi useful plasma add-ons ost of which don’t work, crash, or resize/reposition at the whim of the planets. Nothing that I cannot get with KDE3 and some widget add on like karamba. And then I don’t get 3 messages every couple mins complaining that I turned off the file indexing. (this has caused me to stop using kde4 many times) When all of the above is fixed and I can have a normal icon desktop again (the current option for this is unusable for me) then I will consider kde4 until then kde3 does everything I want better and faster witout getting in my way or trying to add flash instead of substance.
Uhm, what? Gradients? Icon desktop?
You realise that everything is configurable to work exactly how *you* want it to, right? Don’t like gradients? Turn them off. Want a single desktop view with icons on the desktop? It’s a quick fix. Don’t want file indexing? Disable it (I’ve yet to see an error about it being disabled). Don’t want akonadi running in the background? Turn it off and don’t use Kontact/KDEPIM apps. Don’t like broken plasmoids? Don’t use the broken ones (I’ve yet to use a broken one, but I don’t try to install every single one).
Sure, maybe the defaults are for everyone. But that’s all they are … defaults. Anything can be changed.
You don’t want to spend 30 minutes configuring the desktop to work the way you want, but you’ll spend two or three times that installing multiple DEs looking for one where they defaults suit you? Doesn’t compute.
The desktop icon “system”is broken and has been since they added it. The behavior of the icons are inconsistent and aggravating when double click behavior is set for the DE. instead of whining and complaining about a feature that the KDE4 dens don’t even feel we should have is a waste when there are DEs that already work fine and have for years.
Turning indexing off causes more annoyances than I can handle. The persistant notices that this app or that (some basic kde behind the scenes app that I could care less about) is a constant reminder that the KDE4 devs like to shove their technologies down our throats and we should just take it.
Last time I tried 4.7 I installed about 10 plasmoids and used an additional 5 from the install (not all at once) and of those 15 not one worked right. Half crashed and didn’t even start to work, the rest either crashed after a little use or constantly resized and repositioned themselves when I logged out and back in.
I could of course deal with the issues and tweak what I can and try to turn off all of the ugly themes and use only the plasmoids that work but honesty kde3 is already there, no tweaking required.
Like what? Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I don’t know what you are talking about when you say “inconsistent and aggravating when double-click behaviour” is set. You single-click to select/highlight an icon. You double-click to activate an icon. And if you hover over folder icons, a folder preview opens so you can manage files from within the desktop. Seems logical to me, and (other than file management) is how it’s always worked.
Again, maybe I’ve been lucky. But I disable file indexing, strigi search, and akonadi on all my KDE4 installs, and I’ve never seen a “persistent notice” about it being disabled or needed to be enabled. Perhaps you could take a screenshot to show the error message?
Did you submit bug reports for any of them? All the plasmoids I’ve tried (lancelot, taskbar, systray, digital clock, some ssh manager, an ftp manager) work without issues.
Simple things like if you single click it does not only select but you get the “pushed” animation (and again on the second click) making an extra delay and a visual distraction. There are a good many details like this all throughout kde4. The kde4 devs are too worried about the larger brush strokes that they rush past all the little details that make a DE enjoyable. Sure I could submit my reports to the stack and hope that they try and fix these (assuming they consider them broken) but there is already a DE (kde3) that does everything I want without all the headache. What sane person would choose otherwise?
KDE4 doesn’t offer me anything at all that would give me reason to use it over kde3 except “future support” and now trinity offers that. So I would rather use the wheel that works than the one that they are trying to make work.
Hmmm, I think that comes down to personal taste. I never even noticed that until you pointed it out, it just blended into the background for me. Now that I see it, I kind of like it. Especially when slow-clicking, or click’n dragging. Makes sense visually, to me, to have the icon “press down” … when I “press down” on it.
However, even with “double-click everything” enabled, I find myself using the hover-and-click-+ overlay to select things, instead of using CTRL+click. Probably explains why I never noticed the “press down” animation.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
This is one of the nicest things about KDE SC4. It’s nice to be able to swap out multimedia backends (gstreamer –> xine –> vlc) without having to make a change to a single media app.
If there’s a bug in one (like the phonon-vlc bug that starts an audio stream whenever you pause a video stream) then you switch to another until it’s fixed.
It’s just too bad the same hasn’t happened yet (as successfully) with Solid. Would be nice if there was a devd-based backend for FreeBSD systems, alongside the udev/hal (now deprecated) and udev/udisk/upower/u* backends for Linux.
This is something that KDE3 sorely lacked. The whole esd/artsd mess is no more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Trinity
Let’s not blame KDE as a whole, lets just list a few modules shortcommings.
1) KWin – slow performer, laggy, even with AMD 4xxx series.
2) KickOff *IS* a Win Vista/7 ripoff. SuSE created it, but to me it was just better off copying GNOME Classic menu group as three big icons, or copy XP or Vista… or 7. MUCH BETTER OFF…
3) Oxygen – tiny buttons, non-configurable. Too much resemblance with MacOS X metal interface.
4) Activities – never used, don’t know why is there.
5) Set Of Applications – mostly I don’t use, give me the GTK ones and a flawless theme to be used between Qt & GTK. I may add here that Gwenview, amaroK, Kate are very weird-viewing compared to the GNOME counterparts. Exception to the core: K3B.
6) Dolphin – Looks like an airplane panel. Please less… less.
7) System Settings – Totally f–ked up as default icons. Windows 95-esque regression. It was better in previous series.
8) Neopmuk or something… not sure what this wants to do, but it’s annoying.
9) The dragon – WTF? Is it german influence?
10) Qt4 – Styles offered: Oxygen, CDE, Redmond, Plastic, period.
11) KWin – slow… oops, I already mentioned it. But it’s worth another shot.
Edited 2011-11-02 16:49 UTC
Well, no offence Lemur2, but some times (well almost all the time, [well, all the time]), I visualize you like this:
http://imagebin.org/182107
I think the image is very explicit.
Is there an openSUSE repo anywhere for the latest Trinity releases?
hmm, I am running a quad core 2 with a ATI graphics card using the open source drivers and I don’t have any crashes and the kwin accelerated performance is outstanding. This is on Chakra(Arch) linux by the way.
Before Chakra I was running the latest KDE 4.x on Ubuntu and that worked fine also.
Exactly so. If your machine has a working graphics layer, then kwin performance (in and of itself) is fine. I wouldn’t have claimed it was “outstanding”, I would have simply described it as “perfectly fine”, but that could be because I run KDE4 on far lower spec hardware than yours or Thom’s.
Hey Thom,
reading your post it seems like you have some configuration issues with your KWin installation. I can offer you to help finding the perfect settings, so that also you get to the point where KWin works for you at least as fast as any other OpenGL compositor. If KWin runs smoothly on Tegra (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-setgsIfY) it has to work on your system, too
Feel free to send me a mail with your system specs (glxinfo, which effects enabled, all compositing related settings, which Qt graphicssystem) and I will provide you a recommendation tailored for your GPU.
There is just one thing: if you do not yet use at least KWin 4.7.2 update ASAP and test whether there is still a need for fine tuning.
Kind Regards
Martin Gr~A¤~A"Ylin
KWin Maintainer
Hey Thom, you couldn’t ask for better service than that!
A personal offer direct to you from the author of kwin.
Wow.
Check your inbox
.
I also have the same hardware profile. Can you unravel the secrets? Why offer just Thommie? I’d like to know this one. I might even switch to KDE… if it really helps.
Maybe the latest fixes in KDE:
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.7.3.php
… and in the Xorg driver for ATI GPUs
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMDM
… might help also. Good luck.
Ok, I get a tar.gz file, and I just installed in /usr/local using the INSTALL instructions. Now how am I supposed to use this driver? Looks like system radeon is still loading up. Any tutorials on this?
So what the KWin maintainer is probably refering to those fixes, specially tiling fixes? I’d like a better explanation from the KWin folk who dropped in here… I don’t see any settings in OpenGL guide, just three options: ( ) Enable direct processing ( ) Use OpenGL 2 Shaders ( ) Use Vsync….
Can a tutorial be detailed written for us ATI/AMD users to actually use KDE4 without these lags? I’d like to have this documented, instead of having it “tailored for a particular website VIP”. We ATI/AMD owners all need the hints.
Edited 2011-11-04 00:42 UTC
Typically, one would not install stuff directly, but rather do it via one’s distribution.
If you use Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) Oneiric, then perhaps the best way to get this latest driver correctly installed is via the xorg-edgers ppa.
https://launchpad.net/%7Exorg-edgers/+archive/ppa/+index?field.s…
As you can see, this ppa updates the entire graphics stack, not just the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver. AFAIK the entire stack needs to be compiled and installed at compatible versions.
As it says, “You can update your system with unsupported packages from this untrusted PPA by adding ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa to your system’s Software Sources”.
The version of xserver-xorg-video-ati is 1:6.14.99+git20111102.edde94cb-0ubuntu0sarvatt
This would be a “beta” of version 6.15.
Be warned, however, they are not kidding when they say “unsupported” and “untrusted”. It may work, and it may work well, or it may not work at all.
If it doesn’t work at all, you will need to log on to a terminal (rather than running the graphics), and revert your system using the command line:
sudo ppa-purge ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
This stuff is not for the feint hearted. You run a risk of messing up your installation by using this kind of cutting edge stuff. If you are not comfortable with this possibility, don’t do it.
lemur2,
The more you try to help, the more you can’t… Do you actually think approaching someone and directing me to a mailing list and after that, sending me right to a PPA for the fainted heart with 10 warnings that will break your system, apart from the fact that it will be a “beta” of the driver mentioned and downloadable from the mailing list, will help at all?
Come on, I thought you were better at this. Can’t fglrx do this crap? I have tested KDE with fglrx and it is just not much better…lag modes are on. Unless you are saying you know a specific configuration in Catalyst Control Center that does the trick.
I am mad now… Martin Gr~A¤~A"Ylin wants just to satisfy Thom’s needs, and the other won’t reply if it worked or not.
Sorry, this is a whole lotta bullsh1t…
lemour2, you can apply for a job in KDEbootlickers.com
So long KDE… (well, I am not going to mean that just now, but real soon).
Edited 2011-11-04 14:38 UTC
You still apparently haven’t got it. These issues are not issue with KDE, they are issues with the underlying graphics stack.
I can’t fix your system’s underlying graphics stack via posts on a message board. Sorry, but it just isn’t possible.
All I can do is direct you to the places where the latest software is to be found. It is possible that issues have been fixed with the latest software, but it is also possible that there are regressions. I can’t help this, that is the way it is.
No, fglrx (and the nvidia binary blob) are no better. Often they are worse! Furthermore, the vendors don’t have much interest in fixing them, and there is no way for the FOSS community to fix them.
What else can I say? On my systems, with ATI/AMD graphics, I do not see the issues you report. KDE4 runs perfectly well, and it is faster and more stable on my systems than GNOME, XFCE or even Windows 7.
Why do we have to “fine tune” KWin to make it work efficiently? Why can’t KWin just auto fine-tune itself to the hardware where it runs? This seems like a huge step backwards in time. This is the kind of thing the OS should do, not the user.
Excuse me but KDE’ Solid looks like crap if it can’t do such a basic thing like this automatically. It was hyped too much and this is the best we can do? Seriously? Why do we have Solid/upower/udev/u* then for?
I understand we have to configure things sometimes, but this is something the user shouldn’t care or notice, it should just work.
This is the reason why some people prefer to use Windows or OSX, it just works, why can’t we do something better?
Mod me down all you want, but that won’t change anything, and this just proves how lame our current technology is.
I can’t wait until KDE moves to Wayland, at least that’s good news, it’s not 1984 anymore.
Edited 2011-11-03 14:03 UTC
Well that is a valid question.
First of all KWin tries really hard to not require manual adjustments. It detects the hardware generation (e.g. R500) and disables features not supported or badly supported by the known hardware.
But it is only on generation. We cannot take into account the differences between various models of the same generation.
Now hardware detection is just one thing. There is much more. The performance depends on so many factors, like screen size, number of open windows, what windows are used (e.g. lots of Flash) and that also changes at runtime. Getting this right would require to play Big Brother and that is something we do not want to.
Last but not least the value of performance is rather subjective. One user might think an animation is completely fluid while others think it is slow (we can see that kind of thinking in threads like this: just count how often someone claims it’s slow, while other claim it is fast). For some users it is acceptable that for better looks the performance decreases (think of Blur or Lanczos filter), other users don’t care about it, they only want everything perfectly snappy.
So there is just no perfect setup which works for everyone. We provide a setup which is perfect for hopefully most users and provide the possibility to finetune the settings to the custom situations of personal taste and where our well-elaborated hardware detection is not good enough.
I understand. I didn’t meant to be disrespectful or discourage any developers. Sorry.
You guys are doing amazing work and I see that every day with each new release of KDE, I’m using KDE SC 4.7.3 and it’s very fast, very snappy. I don’t notice any slowness, it’s amazing.
I just didn’t understood why tweaking KWin manually was mentioned, but I do now. Sorry.
Please work in making KDE/KWin work with Wayland, that will be awesome.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Edited 2011-11-03 16:42 UTC
When will people stop chasing the bull and just use
Arch Linux with Openbox and tint panel. It is extremely
fast and quite pretty as well.
Who cares about KDE4 or GNOME3, I hate change personally. Just like when I got used to Windows 95/98 they changed where everything is in Windows XP. Then got used to Windows XP and in Vista/7 of a turd, they change everything again. Who cares?!? I want something stable, fast, useable, and not have to relearn an OS or DE every 2 years.
Do yourself a favor guys, download Arch Linux and install Openbox. My system boots in 10 seconds, from when I turn on the power on, until I get a fully working environment with Openbox and tint panel, and a variety of services running. That is perfection to me. Shutdowns are also instant, within a few seconds my system is off.
My system boots so fast, that even my wifi adapter takes a few seconds after Openbox has loaded to connect to the router to browse the internet.
Congrats? I need a full fledged integrated DE, and KDE seems to be the perfect option for me after beating KWin into submission
Edited 2011-11-02 23:10 UTC
Arch has so many architectural shortcomings, it’s not worth consideration for a serious system. Unsigned packages, buggyness, old init-system are just a few of these. Unsigned packages are already a deal breaker for me.
The most annoying thing about Arch is its fanboy user base. They somehow think, that using a system that’s cumbersome to use makes them somehow smarter. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not a sign of intelligence if you can follow instructions on a wiki page.
However it’s a neat system to run bleeding edge software.
I don’t need to cuz Kubuntu with KDE4 works just great for me, even on my 5+ years old laptop with crummy Intel 855GM graphics.
Openbox with tint2 is nice though.
Arch will be viable when PackageKit works with pacman and used as default UI for packaging.
PackageKit already works with Pacman packages. It’s what I use on Arch (well, KPackageKit, to be precise). You have to install it from AUR, though.
Doesn’t work that way. It needs to be shipped as default.
http://trinity-announce.pearsoncomputing.net/?0::14
According to Tim they had an issue with their service just in case you have been trying and unable to install or upgrade.
“As you are probably aware the Trinity website went dark for a sizable
chunk of November 2, 2011. This was due to one of our Internet service
provider’s fiber optic lines being cut, and all Trinity services have now
been restored.
However, this event has delayed the publishing of the Trinity 3.5.13
binary packages for all supported distributions. While the complete
3.5.13 source tree is currently available for download, binary packages
will not be available for download until Friday, November 4, 2011 at the
earliest.
The Trinity Desktop Project apologizes for the inconvenience, and hopes
that you will enjoy our latest release in a couple days.
Timothy Pearson”
I’ve used KDE since 1.x, and the early versions of KDE 4 had problems with crashes. I use Fedora and CentOS 6, and I haven’t had a KDE 4 crash for years now.
I have to admit that KDE 4 has not yet reached the same quality as KDE 3.5, but mainly because the application writers have made small but annoying changes to the applications. Because 3.5 was near perfect, any changes are unlikely to be improvements.
I sometimes find that plasma-desktop uses a lot of memory (hundreds of megabytes) if it has been running for several days, but it can be killed and restarted, so problem solved.
I wonder if, rather than forking KDE 3.5, it would be better to fork KDE 4 and replace the parts that are troublesome. Some of the replacements might be popular, and be absorbed upstream.