KDE SC 4.6 Release Candidate 1 Makes It Out

[BlackStar]

Is this a KDE 4.6 regression or something?

With hardcore mouse wiggling all over dolphin icons, I fail to get it above 2% of a single core in KDE 4.5.

Issue appears on KDE 4.5.4 here. This is a vanilla Arch KDE installation with KWin/GL enabled and using the Oxygen theme.

[Awesomeness]

Nope, unless there are some serious Arch packaging bugs, i call you a liar.

Issue appears on KDE 4.5.4 here. This is a vanilla Arch KDE installation with KWin/GL enabled and using the Oxygen theme.

So, two people with that issue and both use Arch.

I use SC 4.6RC1 ?upstream? (=vanilla) packages on openSUSE 11.3. All apps run smooth, with or without crazy mouse movement.
No surprise KDE chose openSUSE as base for its official live CD: http://home.kde.org/~kdelive/

[pingufunkybeat]

RealNC uses Gentoo, just like me. Yet I have no problems.

It could be a configuration option, or some strange interaction with the graphics driver.

[devius]

So, two people with that issue and both use Arch.

You forgot about the third person (me) who doesn't have problems and also uses arch, although with an intel gpu. At least there is no slowdown and with the most wiggling I could do it only got to 30% on atom, but usually it was about 10-20%.

[kayosiii]

Issue appears on KDE 4.5.4 here. This is a vanilla Arch KDE installation with KWin/GL enabled and using the Oxygen theme.

There was an issue with Dolphin and nVidia binary drivers and animations - I would have thought it was fixed by 4.5.4... It could be file previews being generated (switch preview mode off - or reduce the maximum file size to preview) or perhaps Nepomuk is failing catastrophically (turn off the information panel)... or like you me you could have ended up with a hard-drive (WD 1.5tb) that has serious performance issues.

Dolphin has been the worst component of KDE performance and stability wise for me. 4.6 so far has been better in this department

[kayosiii]

http://hugo-kde.blogspot.com/2010/09/performance-issues-one-script-and-call.html

also possibly this

[TemplarGR]

What makes people trying to bash Arch in every opportunity is beyond me...

I have Arch and i don't face this issue.

On the contrary, whenever i installed openSUSE i had major problems. Now, i do not try to bash this distro in every opportunity do i?

[mat69]

You don't need nepomuk for akonadi.

Holy cow, that is what I said.

If you did not understood the sentence that means that you simply don't have to use nepomuk if you don't want to.
Yes you'll have less features but it will still work.

Uhm, not so sure about it. You may remember that big bug/request about fake transparency (not a KWin example, I guess). The problem was that the only way to get that kind of eye candy is through compositing. The answer from KDE people was around the lines of "abandon your ancient hardware and buy a new graphics card". They only had to add: "and develop the drivers". They even got a patch to add this feature--which I happened to like and use in KDE 3.5 times--but they didn't accept it. It has to be said that KDE4 has some nice effects here and there that don't require compositing, though.

IIRC this was mostly about Plasma not KWin. And the argumentation was along the lines to not "polute" the code.
You may agree or disagree to that, yeah from a user's point of view this sucks, but considering the lack of resources it is quite understandable.
What I personally don't understand though is the lack of configuration options to turn transparancey in Plasma off, I hate it when a window is under the taskbar.

Similar story with KWin's compositing effects. They are slow and some of them need I don't know what super-advanced features. Compiz people somehow got it right. I understand that the developer of KWin is a volunteer, and unfortunately he doesn't know how to implement those features in such a way that most people would enjoy an optimal desktop experience. But at least let's get the record straight.

I got the record straight.
If your drivers don't support a feature it won't be used. And it is not like KWin asks for some highly advanced features.

Yeah that drivers report bullshit is still not the KWin devs' fault. Drivers bullshitting you really sucks e.g. http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/201...velopment.html

[mat69]

Wait.
It is ok to bash KDE on every occation, be it crappy grahpics drivers, crappy dbus or whatever. But got forsake never do that on a distro.

There are so many different libraries versions are involved -- especially when talking of Arch is this is nearly always up to date -- that it is hard to find the real causes of problems.

[yotambien]

I got the record straight.
If your drivers don't support a feature it won't be used. And it is not like KWin asks for some highly advanced features.

Yeah that drivers report bullshit is still not the KWin devs' fault. Drivers bullshitting you really sucks e.g. http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/201...velopment.html

Look, I think this is really simple. KWin is a lot slower than Compiz using the same hardware and drivers: thus it's obvious where the problem lies. I'm not asking KWin's developers to learn GPU assembly (or whatever) so that I can have some mostly redundant visual effects. But that scenario you described where KWin developers care/target the average hardware/software stack users is not very accurate. On the one hand, the actual status of the graphics drivers was not really taken into account--something that transpired quite clearly from the developer blog posts. After the 4.5 backslash all that guy came up with was a lot of finger pointing. Now, let's imagine that it's true that the drivers are a next-to-useless piece of code. In this case, it would be clearly untrue that KWin's development target the average Linux user, since they would be leaving aside a great chunk of them by not coding around the suppossed limitations in the drivers (I believe this is how things are usually done for games and other applications).

Note that I'm not really talking about some flashy effects that may need some OpenGL feature that perhaps only recently was implemented in the OSS drivers. What I have in mind is the whole composite desktop experience, which suffers from bad performance all around the place. For some people this doesn't matter much. For me it just means that I don't use compositing. I'm perfectly OK with that though.