KDE SC 4.7 May Use OpenGL 3 For Compositing 187
Posted
by
timothy
from the that's-software-compilation-to-you dept.
from the that's-software-compilation-to-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."
bloat ware (Score:2, Insightful)
I love eye candy, as long as there is an easy way to turn it off. I don't need my linux box booting as slow as my windows.
Re:And for those older machines? (Score:5, Insightful)
or you just don't turn on the optional compositing in the first place? this is a new feature created and intended for newer machines.
Please make it optional (Score:2, Insightful)
Fix bugs and add non gui related features (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And for those older machines? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:And for those older machines? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people want new features (Score:3, Insightful)
As computers get more powerful, things become feasible that were not in the past. People want those features. Problem is, making software that uses them doesn't work with older systems.
That is just life. Now as for your example with mainframes, in that case someone chooses to pay for support for a system. They cost a ton to maintain. Also, you do not, in fact, get new software, just support on what you have. If you own an IBM/390, as we do, you don't get to run the new version of zOS on it. You are stuck with old software. Supported software, but old software.
Nowhere did I see anything that said support for old KDE would stop, just htat new KDE may need hardware to do composition. I fail to see the problem here.
Re:At some point you have to update (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you're not a customer. If you were, you would know that KDE falls back to no compositing when there is no HW acceleration available. You're just a whiner on an internet message board.
Re:KDE4 (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, shut it. OS X 10.0 was barely beta quality as well, and somehow people stopped complaining when it started becoming usable, even though the upgrade to 10.2 cost money. Same with Windows Vista (6.0) --> Win7 (6.1). With KDE4, you were even warned not to use 4.0. But you still had to run off and use it, didn't you?
Re:At some point you have to update (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, yes, akonadi (Score:5, Insightful)
To truly hate akonadi, you need to be logging in with $HOME on an nfs mount. And shutting down the box from time to time.
What happens is that KDE issues telinit 6 without waiting for akonadi and mysqld to terminate, which means that your nfs mount is still active at shutdown, so when the system forces the unmount the database is not coherent. Thus you get the dreaded "akonadi could not start" error on next login. Well, that's easy enough to solve by just whiffing $HOME/.local/share/akonadi -- as long as you don't have anything useful stored in there.
Which the KDE team is making harder to do all the time. Good thing the system backs up that akonadi database on a regular basis.
Oh, wait ...
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, yes, the good old days of KDE, back when it had exactly five options that could be configured, and the only way to modify the menu was by hacking an XML file.
Funnily enough I recently made the reverse migration. Xfce served me well for a while, but every single recent version has replaced something that worked fine with a rewritten version that has fewer features and/or simply doesn't work properly at all. KDE meanwhile is very pleasant to use, runs perfectly fast even on my underpowered netbook, and is the only mainstream Linux desktop environment that actually bothers to support widescreen monitors properly by implementing usable vertical panels.
Re:And for those older machines? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html [blogspot.com]
He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.
In my opinion Aaron Seigo needs to go. He seems like a really nice guy and all, but he still defends the release strategy of KDE4.0 (and this despite being one of the lead devs of the -at the time- completely bug-ridden and barely functional plasma), and seems to always be at the forefront of KDE4's questionable future plans. They've reached feature parity(?) with 3.5.X. Now they need to work on stability and speed. Stability and speed. Stability and speed. The obsession with social networking integration is stupid and shortsighted. The SC naming scheme is lame. And almost as many users are now annoyed by neopomuk and akonadi as they are by that damn cashew.
KDE is quickly becoming irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been "trying" KDE 4 for maybe a year or so. I like some things, but I hate most of them. At 4.5 it still feels like someone's abandoned alpha. Every new release brings new UI candy, yet breaks long-standing functionality or fails to address real usability problems (like that stupid desktop peanut - whose idea was that?).
What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.
Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...
It seems the KDE people have forgotten that, above all, we just want a GUI to make our lives easier. Streamline it, trim off the fat, we're Linux users for fuck's sake. People are flocking to minimalist interfaces like Fluxbox, just to get out of KDE hell.
Re:Do not care (Score:5, Insightful)
KDE 3 was professional and powerful. KDE 4 seems to have all the options I don't want, none of the options I actually used, ...
Yep. This was my feeling exactly. I had been using KDE since 1.1 or earlier. I've now switched to Enlightenment e-16 (very old but still being maintained). It took some work to customize but now I'm happier with e-16 than I was with KDE-3.5.10. YMMVG.
Re:And for those older machines? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that I think about it, kde 4.x is like the hot but totally completely brainless girlfriend... Nice eyecandy, initially very pleasing and exciting, then rapidly becomes tiresome as the reality that most of your interaction occurs outside of the bedroom sets in.
Likewise, kde 4.x is very pretty and the first half hour is spent checking out all the cute/neato things it does. Horray, kmail finally keeps responding while checking mail in! Konqueror supports more of web 2.0!
Then the dream begins to crack: Why does my desktop's framerate crash to a slideshow when I first move a wobbly window? Why does my desktop require me to install a complete SQL server for something that doesn't work worth a damn anyway?
Then you wake up and the house is on fire: Wait, I swear Konqueror used to fit twice as many file icons on this page... Did its html engine just completely stop updating the display on some random webpage? Why does it seem to randomly forget settings?
Then you call the fire department and realize that everything 4.x does, 3.5.10 does faster, better, more stably and while using half the ram.
Every new version that's released I try out, and since 4.2 (when the showstopping breakage was mostly fixed) every time I end up going back to 3.5 muttering about how they don't seem to have fixed a damned thing.
Re:KDE is quickly becoming irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Seconded. I've used them all, and keep coming back to KDE. SC 4.3 and previous were incredibly buggy, but 4.4.5 is a lot better and I expect 4.5 to be pretty solid. I can't live without Kate, and I much prefer Dolphin+kdesvn to Nautilus. Kontact/kdepim are not yet fully mature, but I still much prefer them to Evolution. Amarok, krfb, k3b, digiKam, ark, klipper, kopete, etc. are all as good or better than the Gnome equivalents. And this is in spite of the fact that there is very little support for KDE from the majority of distros and the development resources they have.
Yes, Akonadi, Nepomuk and Strigi are useless and aggravating at the moment, but philosophically both centralized PIM services and contextual searching are steps in the right direction (although the implementations leave a lot to be desired).
For everyone complaining about the emphasis on eye candy, have you even checked the release feature lists? Sure there are eye candy improvements, but those are very much in the minority. They just happen to be the most visible because when you show screenshots, that's all that really shows up. For every plasma improvement there are scores of tactical improvements that put KDE in a better position in the long term.
And keep in mind, a lot of the improvements are contributions from the community. If there is an active volunteer developer with a pet project (such as kdegames or whatnot) then its no surprise that these sorts of improvements make it into each release.
When I look at KDE I see a well designed framework of integrated and pluggable services, applications, and subsystems. When I look at Gnome I see a collection of do-one-thing-and-do-it-well applications scattered about. Purely a matter of preference, but if I had to place bets on the long-term viability of each DE, I'd put my money on QT/KDE, especially given QTs foothold in the mobile market.