Is Fedora's KDE Spin Too Bloated?

[torsionbar28]

Has anyone else here compiled KDE 1.0 on a DEC Alpha in ~1999? Man that used to take forever. Kick it off Friday and let it run over the weekend. Still faster than on a Pentium Pro though!

[useless]

A more important question to ask is whether the kde stack can be justified at all?

The kde experience can be remade on the generic stack from GNOME.

Um.. GNOME Shell and mutter are performance hogs on my three systems (one of them is a high end desktop PC from two years ago). The thing is kwin and plasma, in general, always behave seamlessly with good graphic drivers. An ancient AMD r400 GPU with a dualcore danube AMD CPU laptop run just fine with KDE. Hell, animations are always fast: doesn't stutter unless there's very high CPU usage (100% usage with Firefox loading some nasty javascript webpages).

GTK guys were working on OpenGL rendering but I think it's not completed. I think accomplishing this will bring big improvements in the responsiveness department. And mutter does need some love, too bad GNOME devs said that performance wasn't one of their main goal (at least in one 2016-ish reddit discussion, I don't have the time to search for it now).

[nanonyme]

An equally valid correction. GNOME began as an "I'll make my own desktop, with beer and hookers." response to KDE and every piece of GNOME infrastructure I can think of is an NIH copy (typically a buggier, more unstable one, based on my own personal experiences) of something KDE did first and, quite often, did better.

(eg. GNOME itself began as a response to Qt's old, non-libre license. GnomeVFS is a clone of KIOSlaves that was significantly buggier when I was comparing the two in the KDE 3.x era. KParts are something GNOME never really copied. D-Bus is the jointly-developed successor to KDE's DCOP, appindicators are a crippled implementation of the protocol first implemented by KDE's KStatusNotifierItem, etc. etc. etc.)

In fact, that's the big reason that so little is shared between the two. GNOME refuses to use KDE components for various reasons (eg. "C++ with a C binding offered is still too much C++" was one actual reason I remember reading about back in the GNOME2/KDE3 days) while KDE dismisses the idea of throwing out what they already have because the GNOME alternative is inferior in some way (eg. documentation, features KDE needs, stability, etc.) and nobody is volunteering to bring it up to parity.

About AppIndicator... it's a really sad story anyhow. You need a Gnome extension for it these days because Gnome UX says programs should not minimize to tray in the first place and they think providing AppIndicator support would give the wrong message

[leipero]

Um.. GNOME Shell and mutter are performance hogs on my three systems (one of them is a high end desktop PC from two years ago). The thing is kwin and plasma, in general, always behave seamlessly with good graphic drivers. An ancient AMD r400 GPU with a dualcore danube AMD CPU laptop run just fine with KDE. Hell, animations are always fast: doesn't stutter unless there's very high CPU usage (100% usage with Firefox loading some nasty javascript webpages).

GTK guys were working on OpenGL rendering but I think it's not completed. I think accomplishing this will bring big improvements in the responsiveness department. And mutter does need some love, too bad GNOME devs said that performance wasn't one of their main goal (at least in one 2016-ish reddit discussion, I don't have the time to search for it now).

Man, that's not true at all, aside from GhostOfFunkS trolling and flaiming (I see where he's coming from, but doing exact same thing as some people on GS articles do is not something I would do or approve...) I've experienced complete oposite using kwin and Plasma, and that's with more powerful GPU (r600) than r400 but not on the level of today GPU's. In general, I like how Plasma looks, it does look a bit dated compared to Gnome-Shell, but KDE team did good job in modernizing their DE (KDE 4 was abomination...) and I'm sure that they will improve, and once they introduce their own implementation of CSD it might as well be on pair with GNOME in terms of looks, it's possible. But, kwin is terrible, it's worse than compiz in my experience, it feels clunky and in browsers like Chromium it's evident it is not on pair with any other window manager (in terms of performance) and it does significantly lags behind both compiz and mutter.

I mean, you are logical person, you need to look at it logically, just look at "kwin", what kwin? Nothing. But "mutter" man..., it's like butter, a bit moother, I mean it is in it's own name, just use logic . (yeah I know I'm not as good as others in trolling, but I'm trying).

[rtfazeberdee]

a dumbed down headerbar.

Seems to describe a troll quite well

[carewolf]

Or someone needs to fix the KDE startup. It has become noticably slower. I think it is simply blocking the screen until all services has reported back to have started. It could probably stop blocking the desktop long before, because when it restores browsers on youtube, I can hear they have already launched and are playing videos several seconds before the splash screen lets me see anything.

Edit: And probably at least one of those services is also broken as it shouldn't take that long anyway.

[andreano]

An interesting exercise to compare bloatness is to start with a docker image of each distro and install the same set of packages.

Some distros have surprising dependencies between packages, that when chained together, makes no sense at all! I've done this, not for desktop environments, but for boring stuff (like web servers and compiler toolchains). IIRC, Fedora 20 went down the rabbit hole of dragging in a whole bunch of X stuff as an (indirect) dependency of nginx.

[MoonMoon]

They really should consider to deduplicate the kde stack and just pick whatever works from the GNOME stack. They can still deliver a kde experience and leave millions and millions of bad LOC on the heap.

Nope, the KDE developers are fine with how KDE is. YOU should, since you are claiming it is possible you now should come up with a proof of concept to back up your claims.
Oh, wait, I forgot that you never contribute anything but stupid comments on Phoronix.

NIH is what keeps this circus freak show on air. And it ain't pretty.

NIH can't be claimed for the project that existed first, idiot, it can only be claimed for the projects that came afterwards.

[duby229]

It's because of the way Fedora builds its binaries. Many, many configure flags simply should not be set, but Fedora has a policy of building every configure flag. Whether it was intended to be used that way or not. Fedora totally lacks all concepts of anything that resembles a use flag. Each package has to be individually preconfigured, but they usually don't bother and just build everything.

[AsuMagic]

Gnome isn't even that bad but it's honestly pretty hilarious there are fanboys claiming it is more customizable than KDE, though to move the clock from the center to the right you will at least need an extension (consider yourself lucky if its control panel a. translated to your language, b. compatible with the shell version you use, c. actually works as expected and d. is still compatible with the version of the DE you use).
Edit: I actually just checked and you really need an extension... lol.

Heck even debianxfce probably has a good laugh reading that.