KDE 4.9 Is Faster & More Responsive

[devsk]

You can call it whatever you want, but for a lot of people, these light-weight desktops don't get in their way and actually allows them to get serious work done. Different strokes for different folks.

Now you are talking! Respect what other users want from their desktop. It may not match with your needs, but its their needs. And features need code to be written, thus leading to the bloat you speak of.

[LenS]

I'm very happy with the newer versions. The first 4.0 iteration was a disaster, the next 3 saw gradual improvement, but 4.4 wouldn't even run right on my computers, but starting at 4.5 I've seen a great DE evolving. RAM is cheap. 4Gigs is less than $40 and is more than enough even for win7, all my linux distros could do fine on half that. I rarely have over 1Gig in use so I don't understand what the bloat problem is. I don't see it. I like having options like monitoring RAM and CPU usage in the taskbar. All in all I think KDE is doing great. I can't wait to try out 4.9 when it hits the tumbleweed repositories. Keep up the good work!!!

[Awesomeness]

You can call it whatever you want, but for a lot of people, these light-weight desktops don't get in their way and actually allows them to get serious work done.

I never understood that claim. Which work do you get done with a desktop?

[1c3d0g]

Meaning, if I'm busy coding a webpage, some stupid system pop-up will not aggressively show itself and interrupt my work. Or, when I'm busy copying something to a USB disk, some stupid little "feature" will not magically decide to start-up (to "enhance" file indexing, for instance) and slow down my whole file transfer. Plus: with less features, the software will be more robust, because less things have to be taken into account (by the developers) like how the different parts might interact and conflict with each other. The attack vector of the software in question will also be scaled down, making the software less vulnerable to attacks.

Look, not all of us like there to be a billion features in a desktop. Why do I need to be forced-fed something I just don't want? KISS...most developers seem to have forgotten that.

[Uqbar]

I'm not seeing any difference, other then more frequent crashes. Kopete seems to lead the pack. I know Telepathy is supposed to be the new kid on the block, but that doesn't even show me my yahoo contacts; which is a step up because it used to be unable to log in.
It's not all bad, it's just a crash or two in a whole day of using KDE. Hopefully the final version will fix these.

I don't dare to install beta stuff on my PC as it's daily production.
But from the numbers shown in the main article, I would not say KDE v4.9 is better than v4.8.
At the best it is a little "better", no more than 1% of performance gain. I use to call this "background noise" and a human user (vs the robotic tester) would hardly perceive it!
You can get much better results with low-latency kernels, with a smart choice of CPU and I/O schedulers in the kernel.
Ah!

[TheBlackCat]

But from the numbers shown in the main article, I would not say KDE v4.9 is better than v4.8.
At the best it is a little "better", no more than 1% of performance gain. I use to call this "background noise" and a human user (vs the robotic tester) would hardly perceive it!
You can get much better results with low-latency kernels, with a smart choice of CPU and I/O schedulers in the kernel.
Ah!

Uh, that is not KDE workspace performance, that is performance of games running under KDE. It is totally irrelevant to whether the KDE workspace itself, or even ordinary applications running under the KDE workspace, have improved performance.

[RealNC]

I never understood that claim. Which work do you get done with a desktop?

+1

Which kind of work does KDE not allow you to do compared to another desktop? I cannot think of even a single thing.

[bug77]

I don't dare to install beta stuff on my PC as it's daily production.

I do and they're usually stable enough so my work still gets done. Just goes to show that, with all the whining, the software is pretty solid. On top on being free.
And I'm not talking just about KDE, web browsers (all of them), mail clients (Thunderbird dropped the ball one recently, not handling attachments properly), IDEs, video drivers (nvidia) have all been pretty solid. I'm not touching a beta kernel though.

[crazycheese]

KDE is still far to bloated, sluggish and unstable to be considered a usable desktop environment.

KDE since 4.5 is PERFECT DE, provided you have at least 1.5G ram and at least 2Ghz CPU.

The only sane desktops for power users and those who want to get work done are Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon. The rest are junk.

Wrong.

These are desktops for different goals, and all with variable amount of bullsh!t, unlike KDE. See:

XFCE - the best of three. Flaws:
* (Thunar) cannot change properties of multiple objects
* (Thunar) cannot modify desktop icon text length
* Panel & filemanager functionality is extremely limited compared to KDE
* Panel, adding stuff on panel and working with menu is conter-intuitive, unlike KDE
* XFWM is very very primitive window manager(but does the job)
* XFWM has conflict with Compiz over workspaces
* Its still GTK2 (but works if you find GTK2+3 theme)
Pros:
* Its stable
* Its usable
* It uses around 160MiB RAM total (Xorg, kernel included)
This was the most usable DE of the three.

LXDE
Does some things better than XFCE. Can manage multiple objects in PcmanFM, but
* website is dead
* cannot save sessions
* completely counter-intuitive
Uses 120MiB ram, suprisingly if not broken session manager and a bit more intuitive use of panel, it would outperform XFCE. But its functionality is lower than XFCE and its dead as a project.

Cinnamon
is just GNOME menu. Not DE.
GNOME3 is.. variable. You either like it or not. Personally, I can live with it, but I don't like it.

MATE
is GNOME2 port. So, its not much away from stuff like Trinity - usable desktops seen as compromise between functionality and resource usage, but very buggy due to low hacker base.

KDE only single problem is high resource usage, which is understandable given amount of technology within. It is very powerful, stable desktop, much more powerful than XFCE+LXDE+Gnome3 COMBINED. It is also very easy to tune and very configurable. If you want to get work done without spending hours configuring and digging through config files or spending time to "get used to", KDE is desktop of choice - you can cut it down to your needs without all this. I'm not using KDE currently, because I'm a bit to lazy doing other stuff - my current XFCE+Compiz config works. But if I get time, I'll switch to KDE back just because its easy to drive.

[cyring]

KDE is my favorite DE, I wish it could be more SSD friendly
For instance it could give us some "easy" UI options :
- to stop using MySQL as a meta file indexer;
- completely avoid logging in .xsession (kdebug is not enough to make it silent);
- enhance network FS (un)mounting : NFS is in bad shape, perf sync also;
- a better gtk color & font integration, especially black theme + Firefox, xsane or LibreOffice ( plugin aren't better);
- an icon only taskbar, such as Seven

I also agree: RAM footprint is not an issue

CyrIng
Fr