KDE Plasma 5.14's Lock Screen Will No Longer Eat Your CPU Resources On Old Hardware

[Jabberwocky]

While it's nice that developers support 15 year old hardware, claiming that they are required to do it is completely unreasonable. No, they are not required to support antique hardware at all. It's an extra burden that no reasonable user should expect to come for free.

+1 My thoughts exactly. When reading the title "Lock Screen Will No Longer Eat Your CPU Resources On Old Hardware" I expected old to be ~5 maybe ~10 years.

[Nth_man]

> Running side virtual machine using software rendering this bug will appear. In fact this is more painful that on 10 year old hardware.

oiaohm, just out of curiosity, as I disable lock screens in virtual machines, I have to ask why do you have lock screens in virtual machines :-?

[Luke_Wolf]

A note to those poo-poohing this fix, and saying we should tell users their hardware doesn't meet the requirements: Not everyone can afford to upgrade, and NOBODY should be required to for something so banally simple as a lock screen's rendering. Not the cryptography, not the other security checks, the bit where you're drawing some text and a textbox.

A Thinkpad T60 is still a usable daily-driver for many people, despite being released in 2006 and supporting only OpenGL 1.4 (iirc). This issue being fixed is a boon to anyone running a Libreboot-ed T60, or to anyone else using KDE on older hardware.

This sort of BS is why open-source desktop developers should be *required* to use their desktop environment on 10-15 year old hardware, for no less than two weeks at a time, before they commit their Fancy New Major Feature/Rewrite code.

Who pray tell are these individuals who cannot over a 10-15 year span save up $300 to buy a corporate dump Thinkpad? Surely they could have saved up $20-30 a year for the purpose given we're talking 10-15 years (A whole dollar out of every paycheck... is all we're talking). No. Everyone with an income can afford upgrades on that kind of cycle, they are making a choice not to do so. It is entirely within their rights to spend all their money on beer instead, however repeat the following to yourself until it finally clicks:

In Open Source Software I am not owed support.
All of the support I receive is purely coincidental driven by the self interest of open source developers.
If I am not receiving support and I am dissatisfied with that, then it is my job to support myself.
Nobody will come to do it for me.

because nobody is owed support for free. Not me. Not you. Either you have to put in the work, pay for someone else to put in the work, or make sure that you're staying within common hardware trends to maximize the chance that some developer coincidentally has the same hardware as you in order to have them do it for you by coincidence. So... What'll it be?

[Weasel]

Michael Larabel earns money with polemics. Sometimes it's worse, like when he writes fan insults in ["looks like puke"](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...1#post812401):
[...] Michael Larabel quotes insults when they are aimed at KDE; when the insults aimed and e.g. Gnome, then he doesn't quote them, what an "informer". As usual, in his www.michaellarabel.com page he says that he has a "strong support for GNOME", who was going to guess what he understands as support?

That explains everything.

[oiaohm]

> Running side virtual machine using software rendering this bug will appear. In fact this is more painful that on 10 year old hardware.

oiaohm, just out of curiosity, as I disable lock screens in virtual machines, I have to ask why do you have lock screens in virtual machines :-?

Normally because I have forgot to disable lock screen. Think I have installed a distribution in a VM just to have a look at distro because people have been talking about the distro get disrupted come back and find distro in the lock screen and basically stalled is not a good outcome. With the issue fixed way less bad words when I have not managed to disable the lock screen before ending up in the lock screen.

[Awesomeness]

Ok I wish only 10 year old hardware.
1) Running side virtual machine using software rendering this bug will appear. In fact this is more painful that on 10 year old hardware.
2) trying out VKMS with 4.19 Linux kernel again software rendering the bug would appear.

Good to see it fixed.

You should reconsider your VM choice, btw.

[oiaohm]

You should reconsider your VM choice, btw.

Remember I have that problem when I have forgot to disable the lock screen. I stated in software rendering because to hit the problem is 2 mistakes. It means I have also missed that the distribution I am trying did not include by default the virtual machines opengl wrapper. This does not matter if what you are running is in virtual box, vmware....

This is not your VM choice this is teeth that come out when testing random distributions that may or may not be VM compadible. Good to see those teeth removed less painful when you hit distribution that not suitable for the chosen VM.

[mulenmar]

That's wrong. It's just not right that everyone needs to target old/slow hardware. Anyone might do, but noone needs to. If you target just upper class/newer hardware with any project, that's also a decent idea.

Clearly, you've never been poor. Or lived in a developing country, without being the rich tourist. Come back when you have a clue.

[mulenmar]

Who pray tell are these individuals who cannot over a 10-15 year span save up $300 to buy a corporate dump Thinkpad? Surely they could have saved up $20-30 a year for the purpose given we're talking 10-15 years (A whole dollar out of every paycheck... is all we're talking). No. Everyone with an income can afford upgrades on that kind of cycle, they are making a choice not to do so. It is entirely within their rights to spend all their money on beer instead, however repeat the following to yourself until it finally clicks:

In Open Source Software I am not owed support.
All of the support I receive is purely coincidental driven by the self interest of open source developers.
If I am not receiving support and I am dissatisfied with that, then it is my job to support myself.
Nobody will come to do it for me.

because nobody is owed support for free. Not me. Not you. Either you have to put in the work, pay for someone else to put in the work, or make sure that you're staying within common hardware trends to maximize the chance that some developer coincidentally has the same hardware as you in order to have them do it for you by coincidence. So... What'll it be?

Ok, fine. You go tell that to the people who have to choose which of eating, having a home, paying med bills, paying for two cars because if one breaks down they and their kids are screwed otherwise, a cheap cellphone, a home phone so they can all contact each other in an emergency, all on about $10 or less an hour, they want each week. Tell them they just have to get a better job, while you're at it, I'm sure your eardrums will heal eventually.

I'm not even mentioning any teens in broken, heroin-addled homes here in the Mid-West US either, or people in places like Brasil, India, Indonesia, eastern Europe, or any African country you want to name, just the experiences of myself and some of my friends who were lucky to get hand-me-downs with broken hard drives or bad RAM, and no matching Windows CD. Those cast-off corporate Dell's are pretty useless when the drives are gone "for data security reasons". Thinkpads go straight to resellers to recoup costs, you still gotta pay for those on eBay around here.

I do understand your point, and there's the higher power cost of operation too. It's not the only important part of the story, however.

It is entirely up to you whether you want to be a dick, but I suggest reading the following until they stick:

Not everyone has had the opportunities in life you've had, even as meager and bitterly fought-for as you might think they were.

Setting up a strawman argument and attacking it helps nobody. See the end of this post for what I actually was saying, in the context.

When encountering something you don't want to believe, it's helpful to ask, "What would it take to make this be true?" If you can't think of anything, take ten minutes and do some research, looking specifically to disprove what you believe, because you don't know as much as you think you do.

Ensuring your code can detect available resources and perform graceful fallback is a mark of a competent programmer. Whining like a child because you think everyone has the advantages your social group does or did in its place and time, or because you don't want to do the work, is the mark of something else entirely.

If someone imitating how you said something infuriates you, it was probably annoying, patronizing, and unclever when you did it, too. ;)

Nobody is asking for free top-tier support, here, or the equivalent of running a fluid dynamics simulation on their Pentium 3 laptop. Just for idiotic, easily checked-for mistakes like the one in this article to not be committed, ESPECIALLY in a codebase that SPECIFICALLY SUPPORTS LOWER-END HARDWARE. Making this a culturally-expected check helps millions, not doing it makes a few people falsely content and the entire open source software look unfairly incompetent to the very people who might otherwise come to help...if they aren't told to fuck off or pay up, sending them away to pirate Windows 7 or shudder XP.