Intel Mesa Gives Problems With KDE's KWin, Again

[Henri]

I'll probably regret replying to this, but oh well. It seems most people didn't bother reading the actual mailing list thread.

"We Germans are direct and speak the truth" etc. Such remarks have no place in (what should be) a technical discussion.

Except that that isn't what he actually said. Here's the actual quote with some relevant context:

Sorry
that I put my frustration into it. This is unprofessional, but also part of my
character. You know we Germans are direct and I speak the truth even if it
hurts.

Couple of points:
- "I speak the truth even if it hurts." is quite a different statement from "Germans speak the truth."
- Even then, it should be pretty obvious from the context that it's a statement about Martin's own personal character and values, rather than some kind of statement of German superiority.
- Perhaps you take issue with "You know we Germans are direct". It's of course a huge generalization, but I do think it's commonly accepted that for example western Europe tends to favor a somewhat more direct approach in communication compared to for example eastern Asia. At worst the statement is simply wrong, but I'd hardly call it racism in any case.

As a reply to this thread as a whole (or perhaps this site in general...), please do some research, check facts, etc. before repeating things you read on some random part of the internet. The person you're repeating may not necessarily know what he's talking about either, and the consequences may not necessarily just be harmless flamewars.

[monraaf]

OK, that last post was unnecessarily trollish, but I can't delete it, and I can't edit it because of the braindead rules. Michael hates the posters here. Sorry about that.

In any case, KWin is used daily by perhaps a hundred million people. Anybody who doesn't think that this makes it very important is just a religious zealot.

Reality is that mesa could do with a lot more developers to make the driver stack robust and error free. That's unfortunately just the way it is, ranting how the devs must use their precious time to cater to KDE isn't going to work.

Red Hat has some devs working on the driver stack, making sure the drivers work well with gnome-shell has probably a higher priority for them than anything else. Canonical with their compiz/unity desktop mostly forwards bugs. And KWin people, well they mostly rant I don't think I have to tell you which of these different types of involvement is the most productive.

Okay that's not entirely fair to KDE, as I did see some contributions to mesa from Fredrik H?glund, using a @kde mail address. Imagine if only 0.01 percent of those hundred million KWin users contributed a small amount of money to sponsor a developer to work full time on the open source drivers. That would be so much more useful than dictating how those few devs should spend their time.

[mat69]

OK, that last post was unnecessarily trollish, but I can't delete it, and I can't edit it because of the braindead rules. Michael hates the posters here. Sorry about that.

In any case, KWin is used daily by perhaps a hundred million people. Anybody who doesn't think that this makes it very important is just a religious zealot.

Still you can use KWin without compositing. Reducing KWin just to compositing is wrong itself.

[pingufunkybeat]

OK, that last post was unnecessarily trollish, but I can't delete it, and I can't edit it because of the braindead rules. Michael hates the posters here. Sorry about that.

In any case, KWin is used daily by perhaps a hundred million people. Anybody who doesn't think that this makes it very important is just a religious zealot.

[pingufunkybeat]

You gotta love the sense of entitlement within the KDE community.

The sole purpose of upstream is to cater to KDE and its Kitsch Window Manager. Every upstream commit, even if it consists only of white space fixes, must be tested to make sure it does not negatively affect KDE/KWin in any way. Those who do not abide or simply forget will have to face the wrath of angry KDE bloggers and KDE foot soldiers spewing their hate on various forums.

Reality check: In spite of what you may think, the world does not revolve around KDE. No really.

This is a problem and dates to the early days and Qt license, and grudges from 10 years ago and FSF and Debian's holy crusade to kill KDE. This STILL hasn't been achieved, despite stunts like Eazel, Ximian, and who knows how many corporate millions invested in basically recreating already existing KDE technology because of the NIH disease.

Now there's been such a huge investment into the competing desktop that several major distros do no want to make the logical switch to the desktop environment which is several years ahead, not Mono-infested, and has better licensing.

KDE is still community-driven and community-developed, so they don't have a strong lobby. It's easy to shit on volunteer developers, and a common Linux-user pastime. THAT is the real sense of entitlement.

[mat69]

Sure, not all cultures are equal. For instance, Germans are direct and
speak the truth, whereas Turks are treacherous and keep themselves busy
beating up their wifes. Poles are better mannered, but have an annoying
tendency to steal your car. Japanese are very disciplined and never
complain. Sub-saharian africans love to dance all day (after all, they
have rythm in their blood). Italians cook well, too bad they're a bunch
of sexist pigs. See? It's all in the culture!

Wow you are so clever.
Have you ever heard of sociology or folklore [1]?

[1] I am afraid this is not the correct translation of "Volkskunde"

[yotambien]

Most of those issues are in the past now, but one part of the
problem will remain more or less forever -- the fact that OpenGL 2.x came
out after DX9 hardware was designed but doesn't quite match the DX9
requirements. As a consequence of this, there are multiple generations of
cards which can run GL 2.x well enough that users want it enabled (ie want
the features advertised) but which can not provide 100% support and never
will.

The choices are either to disable GL 2.x features completely (thereby
costing users the ability to run a large number of interesting and useful
apps) or enable the features and recognize that they are always going to
be "implementation errors" when running on DX9 hardware because the
hardware doesn't support everything that GL 2.x requires.

Ooooh, that's extremely interesting. According to Wikipedia OpenGL 2.0
was released in 2004, and OpenGL 2.1 in 2006. R300s were released in
2002/2003, and a lot of R400s were released in 2004. R500s saw the light
of the day mainly in 2005/2006.

Are the OpenGL 2.1 features required by Kwin among those not fully
supported by hardware from these generations? Is that what's killing its
performance? If yes, what would be the possible workarounds?

Then you are ignoring different cultures and thus act kinda
ignorant yourself...
To asume that every person, every culture is equal is rather naive. Btw.
the term equal does not value, people do.

Sure, not all cultures are equal. For instance, Germans are direct and
speak the truth, whereas Turks are treacherous and keep themselves busy
beating up their wifes. Poles are better mannered, but have an annoying
tendency to steal your car. Japanese are very disciplined and never
complain. Sub-saharian africans love to dance all day (after all, they
have rythm in their blood). Italians cook well, too bad they're a bunch
of sexist pigs. See? It's all in the culture!

[kraftman]

Your decision. Do you think this will affect the free drivers in any way? If you don't use free drivers you have no reason to whine about them breaking kde.

I'm using free drivers. They were the reason I bought an ati card. If free drivers will be making problems in KDE I bet many people will switch to some better supported drivers.

[Lynxeye]

Your decision. Do you think this will affect the free drivers in any way? If you don't use free drivers you have no reason to whine about them breaking kde.

[kraftman]

Developer time doesn't come from heaven. If some developer is *paid* to make sure that gnome works he will test and make sure gnome works. If nobody cares about kde, nobody will notice breakages. Thats how real life works for ages now.

You didn't say anything new. If they don't care about KDE I don't care about floss drivers. It's simple.