KDE's Plasma To Be Reworked, Use More OpenGL

[marek]

KDE or graphic drivers fault? Or both?

Almost always both. Both KDE and driver developers should talk to each other and resolve any issues together, especially when KDE people launch a new product the driver devs don't know about or don't test (they are usually more busy with making games work and fast).

[monraaf]

This is the definition of FUD.

You are criticising them for things that haven't even happened.

No I'm just predicting what will happen based on their previous actions. KDE has made huge mistakes in the past, but they never take responsibility for them, they always blame somebody else. It's okay to make mistakes but if you don't acknowledge that it's you who made the mistake you will not learn from it. So I say they will make the same mistakes again and again and again.

[pingufunkybeat]

You mean the as of yet non-existent, OpenGL 3 using KDE? You traveled to the future?

Oh yeah.

Now we're criticising the not-yet-existent OpenGL 3 KDE, which will certainly break everything, althought we don't really know.

Take that, KDE devs! You will create programs which will not work in 2 years! Therefore, you suck.

[pingufunkybeat]

Perhaps if you're running the nvidia blob like the KDE devs do.

I run open source drivers.

I've never seen flicker with KDE 4, although I have been using the radeon+KDE combination for over a year. There were issues with KWin and Mesa (no flicker, just suspended compositing), but they have been fixed in the meantime.

In an open-source community, it is customary to report bugs instead of spreading FUD.

[dfx.]

I'm still waiting for an adequate replacement for Konqueror's formerly glorious file-management features. Thanks to myriad "kfile-plugins" packages, you could hover over a file in Konqueror 3, and it would be surprising if Konqueror didn't have a bunch of things to tell you about it. Like hovering over .torrent files, the size of the torrent's data, the directory or file it contains, the tracker listed, etc, all this info would be at your fingertips. Hover over a video or audio file? Length info, bitrate info, framerate info, etc etc.

Dolphin has the "information" panel which does basically nothing except lag out the UI coming up with miserable thumbnails. It tells the size of a file, and the modification date, and, well, that's just about it. Guess what KDE devs? That information is already available in the file list!
/lament

very true, dolphin is just pathetic.
it looks like a trend of requiring more actions for the same tasks with kde4. for one more example, plasma info panel in kde 4.5 in comparison with 4.4 wants like 2-3 more clicks to show same basic info :\
eh, someday, i should also devote a shitload of time to actually write few dozens proper bug reports about most obvious things they fucking up since 3.5 it sooo damn hard to try to express it in coherent phrases and not to swear; only picturing in mind horrors of what is gnome 2 helps to appreciate what we have got with kde4.

by the way, plasma/plasma-desktop completely unusable (in contradiction to kicker) in systems with ati cards with "zaphod mode" and, possibly, with any proprietary driver in same multi-screen setup. fixing that would be a good time spent. maybe they will want to do so while rewriting anyway. with the Power of Scie^WOpenGL!

[pingufunkybeat]

What 'should be' and the actual outcome are not always the same. In the end it probably will be visible to end users in a not so pleasant way. We'll see a lot of angry KDE users, then we'll see a blogpost from the KDE devs shifting the blame to others (God forbid that for once they take some responsibility for their own cock-ups!) In short: L'histoire se r?p?te.

This is the definition of FUD.

You are criticising them for things that haven't even happened.

Oh no, they are introducing changes, this will lead to breakage, this will lead to angry users, this will lead to terrorism, this will lead to a nuclear conflict.

Change is often necessary, and often good. It's not like that other desktop environment did not piss off their users countless times by changing things around first, then trying to convince all their users that they don't know what's good for them:

- Shift from browser-like navigation to spatial mode, then apparently back again
- Reversing Cancel/OK buttons
- File Open dialog changes

[TheCycoONE]

Much like how I can no longer turn on compositing without causing my desktop to flicker whenever I open the Application Launcher. As of 4.5.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249512 is the bug report. The problem is due to faulty drivers and KDE 4.5 using direct rendering by default whereas KDE 4.4 didn't for non-nvidia. It can be fixed with a configuration change.

Unless you're using NVIDIA, in that case there's different bugs and fixes.

[kraftman]

You mean the as of yet non-existent, OpenGL 3 using KDE? You traveled to the future?

No I mean OpenGL 2.1 and KDE 4.5. Nobody says future KDE releases will demand OpenGL 3, right?

[RealNC]

It works excellent with mesa 7.10 from git and radeon on my box.

You mean the as of yet non-existent, OpenGL 3 using KDE? You traveled to the future?

[Yfrwlf]

Much like how I can no longer turn on compositing without causing my desktop to flicker whenever I open the Application Launcher. As of 4.5.

In fact it's a general trend I've faced in the progress of open source software: 3 steps forward (bug fixes and new features), 2 steps back (bad, sometimes critical regressions).

Obviously the KDE point releases are including major changes if they are breaking things, and are not just minor fixes. They need to hold back these new releases until regressions have been dealt with then it sounds to me like. Stay in beta longer or something.

KOffice is not terribly good at MS Office formats, so if that's important to you, OpenOffice is better.

KOffice does use the Open Document format, though, so it can easily exchange documents with OOo and others (Gnumeric, Abiword, etc.)

Office is now including ODF support by default AFAIK. Not really a shocker though. It's in it's own little "other formats" section, i.e. it is buried, so saving *to* that format is hard, while reading from it is easy, meaning they are encouraging saving in their own format that they control which thus can forever be incompatible in various ways with all other non-MS products.