KDE Ending Out February With More Improvements To The Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Ending Out February With More Improvements To The Desktop

It was another busy week in the KDE space with many developers engaged in various polishing and improvements to the KDE desktop stack...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-24-February-2019

[orschiro]

KDE is where the developing is happening right now. 😗

[hax0r]

Better news is that nvidia's EGLStream patches for KWin are really looking good at this point, I started out patching Kwayland and Kwin 2 weeks ago discussing it on reddit and finally got it running yesterday on GTX 980, I tested out Kate in fullscreen on EGLStream'ed wayland and it is butter smooth. This is next big thing for KDE desktop users. Nvidia market share is >70% according to Steam stats.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/apf48e/compiling_nvidias_kwin_eglstream_patches/

https://www.overclock.net/forum/131-linux-unix/1720662-nvidia-kwin-eglstream-patching.html

[M@GOid]

Nvidia market share is >70% according to Steam stats.

That is gaming machines market share. Obviously not every PC is used for gaming. On the total PC market share, Intel dwarfs both Nvidia and AMD putted together. That is why Linux window manager developers didn't care for Nvidia driver shenanigans, since they are minority here. Nvidia should provide support for installed Linux standards, not the other way around.

I do not think is OK to let users get part of the flak on Linux vs Nvidia developers feud, but on your next upgrade, consider that Intel and AMD tend to provide a most trouble free user experience.

[starshipeleven]

Nvidia should provide support for installed Linux standards, not the other way around.

I agree on the principle, but at least it's NVIDIA's developers that are adding support for eglstreams in Kwin, so they are at least doing the work to add support for their own crap.
https://phabricator.kde.org/D18570 (see the copyright notices in the eglstream backend files)

[ElectricPrism]

That is gaming machines market share. Obviously not every PC is used for gaming. On the total PC market share, Intel dwarfs both Nvidia and AMD putted together. That is why Linux window manager developers didn't care for Nvidia driver shenanigans, since they are minority here. Nvidia should provide support for installed Linux standards, not the other way around.

I do not think is OK to let users get part of the flak on Linux vs Nvidia developers feud, but on your next upgrade, consider that Intel and AMD tend to provide a most trouble free user experience.

I would love to see Ubuntu take down GPU vendor statistics on this page if anyone know's the right contact

https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/statistics

Additionally according to https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics the metric is 66% nvidia instead of the 70% average including windows and mac.

Of course for daily usage I would much prefer a laptop with Intel graphics to Nvidia as the difference is night and day in terms of stability.

[doom_Oo7]

Until you say "Gwenview now supports HiDPI displays" I won't be happy.

huh ? gwenview works fine here (3840x2160) : https://i.imgur.com/NPFDRXB.jpg

[skeevy420]

huh ? gwenview works fine here (3840x2160) : https://i.imgur.com/NPFDRXB.jpg

Some people want everything to work OOTB without having to tweak font sizes and whatnot, and there is nothing wrong with that. Even at 1080p, I have to tweak various sizes since I'm using a 49" TV and not a 20" monitor...the tweaks I have to do are damn near identical to what people using 4K smaller sized screens have to do.

4K/HiDPI/Large Screens all highlight how bad we need a new resolution scaling system. DPI based like Android, new or better display size to resolution algorithms that dynamically set the fonts and scaling upon install, or DEs or distributions can do something similar to Enlightenment and include display scaling and font sizes as part of the initial setup. I don't know what the best solution is, I just know that what we have doesn't work very well for 40"+ screens and 2K+ resolutions.

[skeevy420]

I do not think is OK to let users get part of the flak on Linux vs Nvidia developers feud, but on your next upgrade, consider that Intel and AMD tend to provide a most trouble free user experience.

This might not be the norm, but back when I upgraded my GPU back in 2012 or 2013 I researched more than how good what cards were in my budget, I looked at driver roadmaps, blog posts, and whatnot. AMD had just started really talking about AMDGPU and going open source, what platforms they planned on supporting, etc. I picked a 260x because it was both cheap and supposed to be well supported with AMDGPU (for a CIK card it ran damn well for being "experimental"). Years later I'm on my 2nd AMD card, a 580 4G. All I can say is using Linux has never been easier with the 260x or 580 -- stuff just works, for the most part, out of the box.

I say for the most part because I still need GPU sections for xorg.conf. For example, the 580 has screen tears with KDE unless I either disable and re-enable the KWin vsync after boot and/or playing full screen games or just force it with xorg.conf...260x doesn't require it with radeon or amdgpu...