KDE 4.11 Beta 2 Is Now Available For Testing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE 4.11 Beta 2 Is Now Available For Testing

The second beta of the KDE 4.11 Software Compilation has been released...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM5ODM

[bwat47]

When I tried 4.11 beta I was amazed at how much faster/smoother kwin is. Its a night/day difference from 4.10 on intel, and finally no tearing! will be a great release. The new QML task bar also seemed a lot less buggy than the current one.

[molecule-eye]

When I tried 4.11 beta I was amazed at how much faster/smoother kwin is. Its a night/day difference from 4.10 on intel, and finally no tearing! will be a great release. The new QML task bar also seemed a lot less buggy than the current one.

On Intel Ivy Bridge (ULV Core i5, HD4000), Kwin is butter smooth. You ought to say what hardware you're running to have dog slow performance in 4.10. It must be so old, rotten, crusty and dusty that probably not many are in the same boat as you, I'm afraid.

[bwat47]

On Intel Ivy Bridge (ULV Core i5, HD4000), Kwin is butter smooth. You ought to say what hardware you're running to have dog slow performance in 4.10. It must be so old, rotten, crusty and dusty that probably not many are in the same boat as you, I'm afraid.

I have the exact same video hardware, intel HD4000, and the processor is an i5-3210m 2.5ghz, and the machine has 8 gigs of DDR1600 and an ssd . kwin in 4.10 isn't THAT slow on it, but it definitely seemed far less smooth than unity or gnome-shell, and KDE in 4.11 I immediately noticed the far smoother composting performance. I'm afraid you and I just have very different standards on how smooth and well performing compositing should be. For me in 4.10 and previous, kwin was simply not there IMO, but in 4.11 it is, and its smoother than unity or gnome-shell now

For example minimize animations in 4.10 and previous often had some quite noticeable lack of smoothness, as did alt-tabbing (with the default box alt tab plugin, for some reason the more graphically intensive cover switch alt tab was way smoother). Also things like hovering over the taskbar for live previews had noticeable delays and lack of smoothness. When I tried 4.11 all this was improved across the board. 4.10 was usable, but I wouldn't have called it smooth on HD4000. (and before you blame the distro or something, I've tried kde 4.10 on various distros, kubuntu, opensuse, mageia, chakra, arch etc...)

Anyway, regardless of performance, I don't know how anyone could stand using kwin on intel graphics prior to 4.11! watching fullscreen videos, there was always noticeable tearing on the top inch or so even with kwin's vsync enabled. The only way I found to work around it was to set kwin to totally disable compositing when mplayer was open and use gl output for mplayer, unfortunately this was far from ideal because for some reason with mplayer's gl output I got tearing on certain videos still (yet others were totally tear-free, it was very strange). I tried VLC but vlc's gl output is even more broken and is simply incapable of preventing tearing on intel because it doesn't pageflip. Tear-free video is an absolute must for me, and any compositor that cannot provide that I deem "unusable". I'm very happy kwin can finally provide this, and along with that now also provides some of the best compositing performance I've seen, the developers did a great job in this release.