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#26 2010-10-12 01:49:58

ffjia
Member
Registered: 2009-08-26
Posts: 94

Re: Lightweight KDE

Zom wrote:

The idea behind akonadi, AFAIK, is to keep a central database with all your
contacts, mail etc., so you could theoretically keep track of a large amount
of people and correspondence. The aim is to make it easier to access mail and
contacts regardless of environment.

Now, if you want a lightweight KDE and you don't need any of these features,
you should probably disable them. If you don't use the PIM suite, then you
don't have any use for akonadi. If you don't tag your files and don't need an
indexer, you probably should disable nepomuk alltogether. (Even if you do use
an indexer, there probably are better alternatives than strigi).

Hi Zom, I can disable nepomuk and strigi from the "System Settings", but I do
not find how to disable akonadi, neatly.

I try to modify ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc, change "StartServer" to
false. But KDE still tries to start MySQL, from time to time.

Do you have any better idea?

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#27 2010-10-12 14:00:23

Zom
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2007-10-27
Posts: 430

Re: Lightweight KDE

I'm in the same boat actually. I didn't even know you could disable it from the rc-file.

Are you sure it's akonadi that tries to start mysql? I know amarok also uses that as a default backend for the music library.

Actually, akonadi even fails to start for me now. I wonder why, but I don't really mind. big_smile

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#28 2010-10-12 14:27:59

Emericn6k
Member
From: Toulouse
Registered: 2010-06-22
Posts: 13

Re: Lightweight KDE

The idea behind akonadi, AFAIK, is to keep a central database with all your
contacts, mail etc., so you could theoretically keep track of a large amount
of people and correspondence. The aim is to make it easier to access mail and
contacts regardless of environment.

Now, if you want a lightweight KDE and you don't need any of these features,
you should probably disable them. If you don't use the PIM suite, then you
don't have any use for akonadi. If you don't tag your files and don't need an
indexer, you probably should disable nepomuk alltogether. (Even if you do use
an indexer, there probably are better alternatives than strigi).

As far as I know, akonadi and strigi/nepomuk have absolutely nothing in common, be it in terms of performance or in terms of functions.

Nepomuk/strigi, as already said in this topic, is a bonus which is not really usable with standard hardware yet.

But akonadi is to become a really important brick of any KDE desktop and will be needed for all PIM apps (when the 4.5 PIM apps will be stable). And it does not consume so much your ressources.
Yet, it is not a big database containing all data, so it should be more efficient using KDE with akonadi than without.

Well, I think the best to do to understand what it is exactly is to read that : http://vizzzion.org/blog/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/



My actions to make my KDE desktop fast and light :
- deactivate strigi
- deactivate some kwin 3D effects which were not "nvidia-friendly", such as magic lamp etc.

With only those quick changes, I made my desktop really light and quick (X RAM consumtion, for instance, was more than halved).
The only problem I see with the KDE desktopat the moment is that it is intalled with all options enabled while devs perfectly know it will be painful to run it flawlessly on most hardware. Once tweaked a bit, it is certainly quick enough.


"In a world without fences and walls, who needs Gates and Windows"

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#29 2010-10-13 08:14:09

ffjia
Member
Registered: 2009-08-26
Posts: 94

Re: Lightweight KDE

@Zom

I can see some warnings of fail to start MySQL in my ~/.xsession-errors file
smile

@Emericn6k

I did not install any KDE PIM packages (except kdepim{libs,-runtime} which are
required by kdelibs)/amarok, etc. So why should I start akonadi? At least, we
can have an option to stop this service in "System Settings", I think...

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#30 2010-10-13 18:10:52

schivmeister
Developer/TU
From: Singapore
Registered: 2007-05-17
Posts: 971
Website

Re: Lightweight KDE

KDE has been love-hate for me ever since version 4. I can't be rid of it, but at the same time I have to live with it.

I totally dislike its performance on my hardware. It's not snappy. In 2010, I expect things to be whom-bom-thank-you-com. If I click on an application icon, it takes a while to load, and then less than a second to draw the canvas (when all you see is the white/gray areas of the window forming up), and then another second to render the whole thing. No, for a beautiful and feature-rich environment, this totally blows.

As someone has already pointed out, it's not a lack of hardware juice. On idle my KDE and Openbox desktops are not very far away from each other in terms of resource usage. I suppose it's fast with non-Intel graphics only, as evidenced by the fact that KDE developers (almost all of them) run nVidia. The state of Linux Intel drivers is also not very helpful.

So, I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as a "lightweight" KDE for some of us.


I need real, proper pen and paper for this.

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#31 2010-10-13 20:22:11

Teho
Member
Registered: 2010-01-30
Posts: 200

Re: Lightweight KDE

Luckily KDE and Qt seems to be putting more effort on performance than before. Things like:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/10/plas … onths.html
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/ … 06704.html
Among many other things (caching etc)-> Better graphical performance.

It's also finally the time that Akonadi and Nepomuk is truly put in to use and it's possible to use only KDE4 apps which means less overlapping processes and a lot of shared libaries etc. -> lower memory consumption and faster startup times.

Also KDE is taking move towards the mobile world, which requires resource intensive apps -> More pressure to build 'em up like that in the first place -> Might be beneficial for desktop users too.

I don't personally have big problems with KDE, but there's always room for improvement.

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#32 2010-10-13 22:08:38

Zom
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2007-10-27
Posts: 430

Re: Lightweight KDE

@schivmeister:
You could try switching to raster rendering mode for Qt.

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#33 2010-10-13 23:16:44

Adriano ML
Member
Registered: 2008-12-18
Posts: 38

Re: Lightweight KDE

I would advise changing widget and window decoration theme. Sometimes Oxygen seems to hog a some performance. Use preferably QtCurve, which also happens to serve as a engine for all your gtk apps.

Also, install gtk-qt-engine and use it to change gtk themes in the KDE system settings.

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#34 2010-10-13 23:53:05

schivmeister
Developer/TU
From: Singapore
Registered: 2007-05-17
Posts: 971
Website

Re: Lightweight KDE

It is hardware-dependent; raster rendering and lean styles have no benefit on my machine. But I suppose most people can live with the kind of performance I'm complaining about. And it's good to see those news. I always have this *hope* that one fine day KDE will be perfet.

tongue

Last edited by schivmeister (2010-10-13 23:54:21)


I need real, proper pen and paper for this.

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#35 2010-10-14 02:22:58

Jodell
Member
Registered: 2009-10-09
Posts: 285

Re: Lightweight KDE

schivmeister wrote:

KDE has been love-hate for me ever since version 4. I can't be rid of it, but at the same time I have to live with it.

I totally dislike its performance on my hardware. It's not snappy. In 2010, I expect things to be whom-bom-thank-you-com. If I click on an application icon, it takes a while to load, and then less than a second to draw the canvas (when all you see is the white/gray areas of the window forming up), and then another second to render the whole thing. No, for a beautiful and feature-rich environment, this totally blows.

As someone has already pointed out, it's not a lack of hardware juice. On idle my KDE and Openbox desktops are not very far away from each other in terms of resource usage. I suppose it's fast with non-Intel graphics only, as evidenced by the fact that KDE developers (almost all of them) run nVidia. The state of Linux Intel drivers is also not very helpful.

So, I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as a "lightweight" KDE for some of us.

You have summed up my experience quite nicely.

I want to like it but it is too slow for me. hmm

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#36 2010-10-14 07:11:56

Barghest
Member
From: Hanau/Germany
Registered: 2008-01-03
Posts: 563

Re: Lightweight KDE

Jodell wrote:
schivmeister wrote:

KDE has been love-hate for me ever since version 4. I can't be rid of it, but at the same time I have to live with it.

I totally dislike its performance on my hardware. It's not snappy. In 2010, I expect things to be whom-bom-thank-you-com. If I click on an application icon, it takes a while to load, and then less than a second to draw the canvas (when all you see is the white/gray areas of the window forming up), and then another second to render the whole thing. No, for a beautiful and feature-rich environment, this totally blows.

As someone has already pointed out, it's not a lack of hardware juice. On idle my KDE and Openbox desktops are not very far away from each other in terms of resource usage. I suppose it's fast with non-Intel graphics only, as evidenced by the fact that KDE developers (almost all of them) run nVidia. The state of Linux Intel drivers is also not very helpful.

So, I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as a "lightweight" KDE for some of us.

You have summed up my experience quite nicely.

I want to like it but it is too slow for me. hmm

+1

I like it but it's no fun to use it on an "old" nvidia (7600GT AGP). card

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#37 2010-10-14 18:50:52

Demon
Member
From: Republic of Srpska, BA
Registered: 2008-03-02
Posts: 246

Re: Lightweight KDE

I have a 7 years old prescott 2,4 GHz computer with 1GB of RAM. KDE 4.5 works perfectly fine for me. I've disabled strigi, nepomuk, akonadi, kwrited, using raster engine for QT (http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=40582). I don't see how can you say 2GB of RAM is not enough for you...

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#38 2010-10-15 01:01:02

ffjia
Member
Registered: 2009-08-26
Posts: 94

Re: Lightweight KDE

Demon wrote:

I have a 7 years old prescott 2,4 GHz computer with 1GB of RAM. KDE 4.5 works perfectly fine for me. I've disabled strigi, nepomuk, akonadi, kwrited, using raster engine for QT (http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=40582). I don't see how can you say 2GB of RAM is not enough for you...

How did you disable akonadi? Thx

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