Plasma Active Is Slimming Down KDE's KWin

[devius]

This sounds strange as I could run KDE 4.0 and 4.1 on an Pentium 3 w. ATI Radeon 9200SE

That doesn't surprise me since KDE ran (almost) as fluently on my Atom N270 with crappy GMA950 as it did on a much faster Athlon II X4 2.8GHz with Radeon HD4200. Maybe it has something to do with OpenGL extensions being used. The 9200 is a OpenGL 1.5 card IIRC as the HD4200 is OpenGL 3.3, so they may be using some extensions of the newer version that cause the slowness.

[movieman]

Still, I am at a loss why Gnome 2.x/3.0 and Unity still are the main favorites for most distros.

Gnome 2.x is the default because most people value a clean and simple interface over fancy compsititing effects. You may have noticed that hardly anyone seems to like Gnome 3.x or Unity with their clunky and slow replacements for simple menu interfaces.

The 'start menu' alone in KDE is enough to put me off using it in place of Gnome 2.x.

[sabriah]

Gnome 2.x is the default because most people value a clean and simple interface over fancy compsititing effects. You may have noticed that hardly anyone seems to like Gnome 3.x or Unity with their clunky and slow replacements for simple menu interfaces.

The 'start menu' alone in KDE is enough to put me off using it in place of Gnome 2.x.

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=94534

[Awesomeness]

Still, I am at a loss why Gnome 2.x/3.0 and Unity still are the main favorites for most distros.

There are countless distributions. How can you actually tell that “most” distributions choose GNOME and Unity? And why do you write about it as if Unity and GNOME are the same thing? Except some GNOME foundation libraries used by Unity, they have nothing in common.

KDE is one of the most active FOSS communities. It wouldn't be if KDE made lots of things wrong.

[bwat47]

Yes, I'm a KDE fan, even before the numbers were out here on Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...anagers1&num=1

Still, I am at a loss why Gnome 2.x/3.0 and Unity still are the main favorites for most distros.

I guess the political side of it should have died a decade ago when Qt went GPL and later went LGPL.

What are the motives for retaining Gnome, seriously? Yes, seriously, as I don't understand that.

From what I have understood KDE can do anything Gnome can do and KDE does things Gnome cannot do (e.g. the scalability of a vector graphics desktop and a lean one at that). Even if I'm a general ignoramus I am still open to counterarguments.

Please educate me.

I loathe KDE, nothing political, Just every machine I've tried it on it has been dog slow, and the UI is a convoluted, unpolished, buggy mess IMO. Gnome has every right to exist and many simply prefer it to KDE.

And with gnome 3, gnome continues to go in a very separate direction from KDE. I much prefer gnome-shell's simple, slick, and polished approach to kde4.

[lolren]

Well,i hope kde works now on my samsung nc10 notebook.until now,i have no desktop effects.im forced to use gnome

[devius]

Well,i hope kde works now on my samsung nc10 notebook.until now,i have no desktop effects.im forced to use gnome

I believe the NC10 is just another Atom N270 + i945G netbook right? That's the same hardware of my Eee PC 1000H and I managed to run KWin with it just fine. I did have to do some hacks to be able to use compositing though. IIRC it's just a matter of going to the desktop effects configuration utility and deselect the compositing checks in the third tab, maybe disabling some incompatible effects like blur and probably restarting the session. Lastly, if none of this works try removing your kwinrc file from .kde4/share/config/

[devius]

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=94534

Sorry, but that just doesn't look good and it's a big mess all around. All those tiny icons scattered around the top panel, the navigation through menu after menu to find the program you're after, it's just not a good example of what a modern desktop looks like. I've seen much better KDE desktops than that one. I do give you one thing and that's the great quality of the desktop background. The last KDE's default wallpapers have been really great. Can't say the same about Ubuntu 11.04... luckily we can change the background easily

[bwat47]

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=94534

That just further shows everything I hate about kde. So cluttered. Both gnome 2 and gnome 3 are far cleaner. I've installed and customized KDE quite a bit before, and it can be made to look real clean on first login, but I still end up running into cluttered UI's everywhere.

I do like some of the things KDE is doing. They have some really cool, modern stuff going on under the hood. But for me the interface is my worst nightmare.

[mmmbop]

KDE's composited performance on the open source radeon driver was horrible up until about a year ago, but the driver has drastically improved since then to the point where I have no complaints. This is on Fedora.

As for the menus, both KDE and Gnome have quick keyboard based launchers that I find much better than any menu/icon based launcher. Alt+F2, type the first 3 letters and what I want to launch, and it is instantly found. I literally have no icons on my desktop. KDE configuration dialogs need a lot of tidying up -- there's absolutely no denying that -- but I put up with that because I prefer eventually finding what I'm looking for to quickly finding out that what I'm looking for isn't an option. If for whatever reason I had to mess with the settings more often it'd be a problem, but I've had the same home directory for years, and everything is already set the way I like it.