KDE's Plasma To Be Reworked, Use More OpenGL

[aaaantoine]

What 'should be' and the actual outcome are not always the same. In the end it probably will be visible to end users in a not so pleasant way.

Much like how I can no longer turn on compositing without causing my desktop to flicker whenever I open the Application Launcher. As of 4.5.

In fact it's a general trend I've faced in the progress of open source software: 3 steps forward (bug fixes and new features), 2 steps back (bad, sometimes critical regressions).

[kraftman]

What 'should be' and the actual outcome are not always the same. In the end it probably will be visible to end users in a not so pleasant way. We'll see a lot of angry KDE users, then we'll see a blogpost from the KDE devs shifting the blame to others (God forbid that for once they take some responsibility for their own cock-ups!) In short: L'histoire se répète.

Indeed it should be visible for end users. Impressive performance gains.

[kraftman]

Much like how I can no longer turn on compositing without causing my desktop to flicker whenever I open the Application Launcher. As of 4.5.

KDE or graphic drivers fault? Or both?

In fact it's a general trend I've faced in the progress of open source software: 3 steps forward (bug fixes and new features), 2 steps back (bad, sometimes critical regressions).

I didn't face something like this. I usually see performance and features and I cannot say the same about non open source software which usually makes one step forward and few steps backward.

[monraaf]

Indeed it should be visible for end users. Impressive performance gains.

Perhaps if you're running the nvidia blob like the KDE devs do.

[oblivious_maximus]

I'm still waiting for an adequate replacement for Konqueror's formerly glorious file-management features. Thanks to myriad "kfile-plugins" packages, you could hover over a file in Konqueror 3, and it would be surprising if Konqueror didn't have a bunch of things to tell you about it. Like hovering over .torrent files, the size of the torrent's data, the directory or file it contains, the tracker listed, etc, all this info would be at your fingertips. Hover over a video or audio file? Length info, bitrate info, framerate info, etc etc.

Dolphin has the "information" panel which does basically nothing except lag out the UI coming up with miserable thumbnails. It tells the size of a file, and the modification date, and, well, that's just about it. Guess what KDE devs? That information is already available in the file list!

/lament

[kraftman]

Perhaps if you're running the nvidia blob like the KDE devs do.

It works excellent with mesa 7.10 from git and radeon on my box.

[Yfrwlf]

Much like how I can no longer turn on compositing without causing my desktop to flicker whenever I open the Application Launcher. As of 4.5.

In fact it's a general trend I've faced in the progress of open source software: 3 steps forward (bug fixes and new features), 2 steps back (bad, sometimes critical regressions).

Obviously the KDE point releases are including major changes if they are breaking things, and are not just minor fixes. They need to hold back these new releases until regressions have been dealt with then it sounds to me like. Stay in beta longer or something.

KOffice is not terribly good at MS Office formats, so if that's important to you, OpenOffice is better.

KOffice does use the Open Document format, though, so it can easily exchange documents with OOo and others (Gnumeric, Abiword, etc.)

Office is now including ODF support by default AFAIK. Not really a shocker though. It's in it's own little "other formats" section, i.e. it is buried, so saving *to* that format is hard, while reading from it is easy, meaning they are encouraging saving in their own format that they control which thus can forever be incompatible in various ways with all other non-MS products.

[RealNC]

It works excellent with mesa 7.10 from git and radeon on my box.

You mean the as of yet non-existent, OpenGL 3 using KDE? You traveled to the future?

[kraftman]

You mean the as of yet non-existent, OpenGL 3 using KDE? You traveled to the future?

No I mean OpenGL 2.1 and KDE 4.5. Nobody says future KDE releases will demand OpenGL 3, right?

[TheCycoONE]

Much like how I can no longer turn on compositing without causing my desktop to flicker whenever I open the Application Launcher. As of 4.5.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249512 is the bug report. The problem is due to faulty drivers and KDE 4.5 using direct rendering by default whereas KDE 4.4 didn't for non-nvidia. It can be fixed with a configuration change.

Unless you're using NVIDIA, in that case there's different bugs and fixes.