reviews of kde 4.1

dhave · 2008-07-27 19:29:08

My only real complaint about KDE4.1 is the consistently high CPU usage of kwin when I have desktop effects enabled. From what I've read, there's a strong possibility that it's because of non-quite-up-to-par nvidia drivers, but I don't know for certain.

Do you people with non-nvidia cards have this problem, too? I'm talking about CPU usage stuck in the 40-60 percent range pretty much the entire time desktop effects are enabled.

Still, I like KDE4.1 a lot, and I've come to like the desktop effects enough that I usually have them enabled in spite of the high usage.

funkyou · 2008-07-27 20:49:20

dhave wrote:

My only real complaint about KDE4.1 is the consistently high CPU usage of kwin when I have desktop effects enabled. From what I've read, there's a strong possibility that it's because of non-quite-up-to-par nvidia drivers, but I don't know for certain.
Do you people with non-nvidia cards have this problem, too? I'm talking about CPU usage stuck in the 40-60 percent range pretty much the entire time desktop effects are enabled.
Still, I like KDE4.1 a lot, and I've come to like the desktop effects enough that I usually have them enabled in spite of the high usage.

Fixed on my 7600GT by disabling direct rendering in the composite options...

Pierre · 2008-07-27 21:17:01

disabling vsync might work, too.

dhave · 2008-07-27 22:19:42

Pierre wrote:

disabling vsync might work, too.

Yes, in fact, disabling vsync did help dramatically. CPU usage -- with desktop effects enabled -- has dropped from 40-60 percent to < 10 percent, usually around 2-3 percent.

Thanks very much. I had tried many other tweaks, including all sorts of changes to xorg.conf, but I had not tried this one simple thing.

I think I'm getting better performance from kwin now, too -- not sluggish, no breakup when repainting the screen. All in all, I'm a much happier camper.

muflax · 2008-07-31 08:34:44

To give some contrast: I'm really disappointed with KDE4 (but only part of it is really 4.1's fault - some is intentional). I used KDE3 for around 2 years and now run Xfce (although I'm looking into tiling WMs right now). Some of the following points also apply to KDE3, of course, but I find it still useful to think about them. (I do not mention good points because this has been done a lot already.)

1.) Performance. I can absolutely not confirm that it uses less memory. I experienced around 100-200MB more usage. Plasma and kwin are real memory hogs, even without the visual effects. (It didn't feel slower than KDE3, though.) It uses around 300MB of memory, 50MB more than Warsow. It's a DE, not the frigging Matrix!
A lot of actions have a small, but noticeable lag. (Gwenview, Kate, Dolphin all took around 2s to be usable. Switching desktops took 0.5s-1s depending on content.) The necessary disk space is just inexcusable. You are required to install a lot of tools because you might need them (even with kdemod).

2.) Incompleteness. Quite a lot of new features lack obvious funcionality. You cannot hide or even move the widget-thingy for the desktop. It's very hard to customize a panel. Okular doesn't save it's view. Kopete can't even display avatars right. Ark is still useless. Dualhead and Xinerama support is very limited. You get the idea. (Amarok is unusable, but that is not 4.1's fault.)

3.) Bugs. Just horrible. It's Windoze ME all over again for me... Konqueror crashes a lot. Konsole screws up it's output all the time. Kate is slower than emacs. Kopete crashes just by thinking of opening it's settings. Krunner has serious visual glitches. I don't know how you could ever call this a stable release.

4.) Code base. Because of some very annoying bugs and missing features, I had to include a few hacks to make it useable - and I'm very disgusted by the source. You can see that it really is a rewrite and doesn't yet have much cruft, but the size of it is still horrifying. That it's C++ doesn't help at all. An hour to compile one of it's meta-packages? Just... no.

5.) Style. I don't get how people call this beautiful. It is ugly. Everything is oversized. Applications seem to be designed to be run fullscreen. Borders around content are huge. I can read most icons from across the room. A friend coudn't configure some apps because the dialog didn't fit on his laptop screen.
It lacks clarity. Everything has soft borders and is somewhat blurred. I could probably drink a bottle of wine and not notice a difference. (Unfortunately, this is related to the current disease that is the bloom filter, so it won't go away and a lot of people will defend it.)

tl;dr: KDE4 completly violates the Unix Way in virtually any way possible. It encourages lazyness instead of growth ("the DE should provide a magic button" instead of "understand how it works and do it yourself"). The whole system is in my opinion completly hacker-unfriendly. It looks and feels like something marketing might cook up.

brynjolf · 2008-07-31 19:14:57

muflax wrote:

tl;dr: KDE4 completly violates the Unix Way in virtually any way possible. It encourages lazyness instead of growth ("the DE should provide a magic button" instead of "understand how it works and do it yourself"). The whole system is in my opinion completly hacker-unfriendly. It looks and feels like something marketing might cook up.

That one was quite unfair imo.
Nepomuk not hackable? Jolie: http://ervin.ipsquad.net/2008/06/28/jolie-rocks/

Last edited by brynjolf (2008-07-31 19:29:23)

TigTex · 2008-08-01 03:07:22

I'm really disapointed with kde4. I've only tryed the beta version and it was a lot resource heavier (34mb ram vs 135mb) toooo slooooowwwwww with older pc's... I will do a new arch clean install and use the kdemod (4) to see if now it's better and try some tweaking with it. But I will probably give up from kde... it's sad... I like to have an updated sistem, I won't stay with kde3 series

Last edited by TigTex (2008-08-01 03:09:02)

sweiss · 2008-08-01 07:22:07

Well, I'm just installing KDE 4.1 using pacman, and I'm getting ready to be disappointed.
There's no way it is going to satisfy all of the KDE4 hype just yet.

Hopefully, release schedules will be tight, and in a matter of 6 months I'll forget I ever mentioned such a thing.

signor_rossi · 2008-08-01 08:46:35

TigTex wrote:

But I will probably give up from kde... it's sad... I like to have an updated sistem, I won't stay with kde3 series

I think kdemod will still provide up to date kde-3.5 packages for some time (isn't 3.5.10 around the corner?), it is just that they need some time to sort things out with all those changes in the main Arch repoitories.

Bye, signorRossi.

Vipes · 2008-08-01 22:08:00

Pierre wrote:

disabling vsync might work, too.

Just want to say that this helped GREATLY. HTOP was reporting around 80% CPU usage also and as soon as I disabled it, I dropped to 3% on kwin.

Arch Linux
Kernel 2.6.25-ARCH
KDE 4.1
Dell Inspiron E1705 Dual Core 1.73Ghz / 1GB RAM

nirvanix · 2008-08-02 16:31:06

I see that KDE4 has potential, but it's crashing all over the place for me. I guess it's KWIN? I've got an Nvidia onboard 6150, don't know if that'
s the cause?

ssbfalcon · 2008-08-02 17:33:03

TigTex wrote:

I'm really disapointed with kde4. I've only tryed the beta version and it was a lot resource heavier (34mb ram vs 135mb) toooo slooooowwwwww with older pc's... I will do a new arch clean install and use the kdemod (4) to see if now it's better and try some tweaking with it. But I will probably give up from kde... it's sad... I like to have an updated sistem, I won't stay with kde3 series

Really? I'm seeing general lower RAM usage overall with KDE 4.1...

Granted, under both systems, I never usually see my RAM usage much higher than 500 MB, except when using apps like Eclipse (with tons of plugins), GIMP, and Openoffice at the same time...

I'm curious as to why X has 2 sessions runnign... (2 X processes using 91MB each, could it be dual head monitor clone?) and let's forget Firefox 3, which eats RAM like candy (105MB right now and counting)...

You did say you used the beta version... It was very clunky as they were trying to get the features running... It was at times slow on my system as well, and I started worrying (The desktop alone shouldn't slow down dual core machines... That's just ridiculous...)

but as I used the SVN version so graciously provided by Tanis, I saw dramatic changes with each update...

Performance of KDE 4.1 final should be on par, if not better than KDE 3.5...

muflax wrote:

1.) Performance. I can absolutely not confirm that it uses less memory. I experienced around 100-200MB more usage. Plasma and kwin are real memory hogs, even without the visual effects. (It didn't feel slower than KDE3, though.) It uses around 300MB of memory, 50MB more than Warsow. It's a DE, not the frigging Matrix!
A lot of actions have a small, but noticeable lag. (Gwenview, Kate, Dolphin all took around 2s to be usable. Switching desktops took 0.5s-1s depending on content.) The necessary disk space is just inexcusable. You are required to install a lot of tools because you might need them (even with kdemod).

Right now: Plasma is using 24MB, and Kwin 4MB for me. And with effects, the number doesn't budge, only X jumps from 91MB to 104MB...

As far as stability... The only thing that I had crash on me was firefox...

Rulatir · 2008-08-02 21:36:14

I am a firm believer in KDE4 and I am absolutely certain that the showstopper bugs like plasma crashing on logout will be fixed really very very very very soon, but for the time being I switched to Xfce - mainly, except for metacity rather than xfwm4 for top-edge window resizing, and Gnome's taskbar via XfApplet rather than the native Xfce taskbar for no-nonsense ordering of taskbar buttons. Long live interoperability, open standards, and related stuff :DDDD

It would be unfair not to mention that I am very happy with Yakuake (a KDE quake-style console) and Kmail 1.10.0 (the KDE4 version), both working like charm in Xfce.

Last edited by Rulatir (2008-08-02 21:43:35)

whargoul · 2008-08-03 00:46:51

glodomor wrote:

Sooo... Can I suggest not removing KDE3 from repos? :>

To late. But you can always use KDEmod legacy. That repo will always contain the latest KDE 3.5 release.

corrupt · 2008-08-03 12:52:44

Anyone knows what is the deal with the panel during fullscreen in wine? The problem is that I can see panel and cannot see bottom of the window. Even if I use always on top it does not help.

fede · 2008-08-03 22:36:06

The "invisible system tray icons" bug is really annoying: all system tray icons dissappear in a seemingly random way, and this happens to me more often than not. The way around it seems to be to add / remove the applet an indefinite number of times (ie there seems to be a probability < 0.5 that this will solve the bug on any given try), until it is fixed.

Also, there is the occasional crash on different components, plasma did that a couple of times in a way I couldn't consistently reproduce.

Other than that, KDE4 is beginning to look nice (seriously). I'm liking dolphin a lot already, and kontact seems to be getting there, which for me weighs a lot, since a PIM is one of the programs I use most.

Sir_Leon · 2008-08-04 03:10:02

quetzyg wrote:

Now, the only problem that I have is with the "Add Widgets" dialog, when downloading new plasmoids. They are marked as already downloaded/installed, but I cannot see them in the list. Hence, I cannot add them to the desktop/panel.
I almost forgot! From time to time, running applications from the "Application Launcher Menu" doesn't work. I click on some icon and it just doesn't load the app. Running from the "Run Command" dialog (ALT+F2) works, though.

After using Gnome for a long time, and KDE3 for the last 5 months, I've installed KDE4, and I liked it. The performance is OK. and the login time is fine. However, I have the same problems as mentioned above. Hope, they will be fixed soon.

eWoud · 2008-08-26 10:56:36

Pierre wrote:

disabling vsync might work, too.

Or recompile Qt, and disable glib support.

See http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/08 … ever-more/ for more info.

For the impatient: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LY17YLIP (i686 package).

burmmo · 2008-09-13 20:03:12

i hate the new kdemod4.1 it look, its so complex and not minimalist like rock stable kdemod3 i'm hoping they made a new kde4.1 that look like kdemod3

Arch Linux

#26 2008-07-27 19:29:08

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#27 2008-07-27 20:49:20

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#28 2008-07-27 21:17:01

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#29 2008-07-27 22:19:42

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#30 2008-07-31 08:34:44

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#31 2008-07-31 19:14:57

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#32 2008-08-01 03:07:22

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#33 2008-08-01 07:22:07

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#34 2008-08-01 08:46:35

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#35 2008-08-01 22:08:00

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#36 2008-08-02 16:31:06

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#37 2008-08-02 17:33:03

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#38 2008-08-02 21:36:14

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#39 2008-08-03 00:46:51

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#40 2008-08-03 12:52:44

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#41 2008-08-03 22:36:06

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#42 2008-08-04 03:10:02

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#43 2008-08-26 10:56:36

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

#44 2008-09-13 20:03:12

Re: reviews of kde 4.1

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