KDE's KWin Gears Up To Advance At Faster Pace

[Tyler_K]

i actually did set up "Zaphod mode" on my 4.9.2 via static (xorg.conf) config file, and kwin does treat secondary screen as a separate, independent desktop space. but some parts of KDE still are confused about it, like, for example, it's monitor configurator is all fucked up and useless

Why do you think the monitor config. app is confused and useless?

[asdx]

Its great that you have logical order to the file system but not everyone does, and even the people who do its easier to just hit alt-f2 and start typing the name of the file you want than pull up dolphin and start going through folders.

Slow-ass? really? I just give Nepomuk 512mbs of RAM in settings and forget about it. Its high enough that Nepo never uses that much, and can index at its maximum speed. Can't really call Nepomuk or Akondi ugly since they dont have a GUI... its all backend.

MySQL is a bit much of a dependency, I wish they'd switch it out for SQlite but thats just me *shrugs*



"fucking around" is a bit much for Kopete vs Telepathy, and plain just wrong for Gstreamer. I'm glad to see Telepathy-KDE is coming along nicely, Kopete was never really my favorite application and the desktop integration is awesome. GStreamer...I cant even imagine what you were trying to get at. Phonon has always allowed you to use libVLC, libXine or Gstreamer without any problems thanks to the abstraction layers.




Can't comment on the compile flags because I run Arch, not Gentoo or kde-src. But if you've got problems, report bugs, and if you are still using KHTML...you're doing it wrong. KHTML has been replaced by WebKit, and even if you are still using Konquerer you can tell it to use a Webkit backend instead of KHTML.



Lack of manpower/interest is kind of an ironic statement to make considering Martin just got hired to be a full time developer on Kwin and even before then he was doing weekly development updates on Kwin.

How is it a fucked-up design, exactly? They are using the best of modern technologies available to them, and the ones they arent using they have plans to use such as QT5 and Webkit2. Thats the joy of the level of abstraction KDE chose to do, they can gradually replace the backends without it being too much of a big deal.

You mean Qt5, not QT.

Qt == Qt
QT == QuickTime.

[pejakm]

I successfully manage to compile KDE without nepomuk/soprano/akonadi stuff (IMHO bloat), so if anyone needs instructions, PM me.

[dfx.]

Its great that you have logical order to the file system but not everyone does, and even the people who do its easier to just hit alt-f2 and start typing the name of the file you want than pull up dolphin and start going through folders.

and most people also use you-know-which OS. and i get more than enought frustration with consequences of their haphazard usage patterns and that OS's design as it is.
treating that kind of people and their habbits as the only target, and ackonwledging those patterns as legitimate is not a good way to go for the least sucky DE of best F/OSS OS out there :|

Slow-ass? really? I just give Nepomuk 512mbs of RAM in settings and forget about it. Its high enough that Nepo never uses that much, and can index at its maximum speed. Can't really call Nepomuk or Akondi ugly since they dont have a GUI... its all backend.
MySQL is a bit much of a dependency, I wish they'd switch it out for SQlite but thats just me *shrugs*

really. maybe it should be so in theory, but on my every (unoften) try it just would hog whatether resources where available indefinitely.
with which on my every act of disabling it, notifications on plasma would pop-up about how horrible, that it's switched off. every log in, and some times in-beetwen, until not long ago, when it finally shut the fuck up with some update.

"fucking around" is a bit much for Kopete vs Telepathy, and plain just wrong for Gstreamer. I'm glad to see Telepathy-KDE is coming along nicely, Kopete was never really my favorite application and the desktop integration is awesome. GStreamer...I cant even imagine what you were trying to get at. Phonon has always allowed you to use libVLC, libXine or Gstreamer without any problems thanks to the abstraction layers.

Kopete was almost unmaintained for years, from what i gather. they didn't even bothered with proper IPv6 support. at least now they doing something.
and Phonon... like there isn't enougt abstractions for multimedia already. for me, it also always glitchy: on pure ALSA it most of time unable to playback and poops text notifications instead into plasma about soundcard "being bussy", despite everything else working fine; and on PA it ignores sound notifications volume level from its config menu and "fart out" sounds with distortion, if any other playback is going on at that moment.
i pretty sure Gstreamer will suffice, and i heard that Gnome people prefer it too, so some more unification as a bonus. at least that way there are more chances, that someone would maintain it in the end.

Can't comment on the compile flags because I run Arch, not Gentoo or kde-src. But if you've got problems, report bugs, and if you are still using KHTML...you're doing it wrong. KHTML has been replaced by WebKit, and even if you are still using Konquerer you can tell it to use a Webkit backend instead of KHTML.

ahh-huh, but Akregator does not seem to give a shit and still crashes (and Konqueror still hangs) even when WebKit is set by default. at least until i rebuilt kdelibs with safer flags (just "-O3" instead of "-O2" with a bunch of graphite options and stuff). i have no intentions to figure out, which flag exactly screwed it up, and why it happaned in khtml-related libs, since it beat up my patience too much already.

Lack of manpower/interest is kind of an ironic statement to make considering Martin just got hired to be a full time developer on Kwin and even before then he was doing weekly development updates on Kwin.

it is an ironic statement ! a way of saying: "FUCKING FINALLY !".
they should have concentrated on kwin status more, instead of doing some shit, like rewriting built-in half-assed plasmoids and fidling with elaborate frameworks for them, since they still had to remake everything (QML transition) anyway and either way plasmoid-writing didn't gathered much usefull popularity. which isn't surprising, looking at the state of built-in, KDE authors's own, plasmoids in comparison to KDE 3.X Kicker.
i'm not saying they shouldn't done any of that at all, but bringing kwin and overall WM-functionality in order to Four-point-_NINE_ release (and not _from_ four-point-nine release) would have been... nice.

How is it a fucked-up design, exactly? They are using the best of modern technologies available to them, and the ones they arent using they have plans to use such as QT5 and Webkit2. Thats the joy of the level of abstraction KDE chose to do, they can gradually replace the backends without it being too much of a big deal.

broken GUIs due to usage of decade[s]-old X functionality, CPU&mem leaking crutch-for-logical-disorder nailed dead unto entire base framework with humongous unnecessary dependency, big plasma rewrites without any substantial derivative plasma work (insufficency of quality-made & maintainable 3rd-party plasmoids) going around (at least it crashes very rarely now), crash/hang-level regressions on minor "bug-fixing" releases - seems pretty fucked-up to me.

modularization, Qt5 and Telepathy work, hiring the dude, etc. seems pretty good though. i just hope, that it won't turn to crap in practice.

Ericg, do you think dfx might be trolling and not really expecting a reasonable answer?

no, i don't expect an answer at all, let alone a reasonable one. i expressing an opinion of disgust and don't hope for much. mostly expecting only something, like you just did there, Ericg did better though, as you yourself acknowledged by this.
you're happy with how KDE4 turning up ? good for you. i'm not quite.

for me: it's fucked up, but, at least, it's not Gnome.
i would expect stunts like nepomuk/akonadi from there, and nice, modular things, like Telepathy & Gstreamer, from KDE. this whole KDE4 & Gnome3 thing is epic mindfuckery :/

[dfx.]

Why do you think the monitor config. app is confused and useless?

because with true multi-seat/"Zaphod mode" it only shows outputs deligated for the screen it was launched on, at best.
and an empty window with just an error message like "graphical system does not support resolution changes or rotation", at worst.

like it is now for me, but that has something to do with RandR being inactive for some reason. probably because Xinerama is enabled, but before that it didn't want to let mouse cursor unto second screen.
this is probably not KDE's but X issue, since it also let's windows go between screens, which it shouldn't.

which doesn't change the fact that KDE's monitor config is just a GUI for RandR, analogie of xrandr. which is pretty useless on use-cases other than "one giant virtual screen from all the outputs"-kind of multi-screen.
yeah, it is useful _for that particular, most-widespread use-case_. not because it's so good, but because there is no other choices in any GUIs, and most people not even aware about other options.
as a RandR GUI, it's OK, i guess.

[Tyler_K]

because with true multi-seat/"Zaphod mode" it only shows outputs deligated for the screen it was launched on...
as a RandR GUI, it's OK, i guess.

Right -- but as you seem to understand yourself, the bottom line is that what you have described is not a KDE issue, but rather is a randr limitation (randr does not currently support multiple Screens within an X Display .... though it most certainly supports multiple monitors attached to a single X Screen within a particular X Display).

I suppose that the KDE GUI could provide a better explanation as to why it won't work in the case of multiple X display Screens (:0.0, :0.1, ... :0.n), or across Displays (:0.x, :1.x) for that case I guess, but Meh.

Hopefully, by this time next year, all the hard work that David Airlie is doing towards that end will provide results that many of us wait upon

[ChrisXY]

MySQL is a bit much of a dependency, I wish they'd switch it out for SQlite but thats just me *shrugs*

If you don't like mysql for your desktop indexing, then you better not research what virtuoso is, what it does and how big it is.

But seriously, I have only a 240GB SSD and the KDE indexing is really, really awfully slow and still lacks basic options like disabling the indexing for files bigger than a configurable threshold. If you have several gigabyte germany.osm and germany.txt in your home directory you'll know what I mean.

[Awesomeness]

The story is about KWin and you people discuss MySQL? WTF?

To post something ON TOPIC for a change: Martin already did incredibly much on KWin as hobby developer, it's hard to imagine how much he'll do as full-time developer. KWin is by far the best window manager that ever existed.

[Ericg]

really. maybe it should be so in theory, but on my every (unoften) try it just would hog whatether resources where available indefinitely.
with which on my every act of disabling it, notifications on plasma would pop-up about how horrible, that it's switched off. every log in, and some times in-beetwen, until not long ago, when it finally shut the fuck up with some update.

Just curious, when was the last time you tried using it? 4.7 and 4.8 both had big updates related to Nepomuk and strigi to fix several memory and CPU related issues. After 4.8 hit i've had zero updates with the indexer sucking resources into infinitely, 4.7 had some issues but was better than 4.6 and prior where I would hit the "Sucking up resources until killed" situations every so often.

Kopete was almost unmaintained for years, from what i gather.

Phonon I can't really comment on because I havent had any issues with it in a long time. but Kopete was last updated 4 months ago according to the wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopete ), though if you check the official kopete website ( http://kopete.kde.org/ ) The last update for it was back in 2008 so maybe its been in maintenance mode since 2008.

I am glad to be seeing the community standardizing around Gstreamer, a lot of distros seem to be standardizing on things right now.

Gstreamer handles multimedia / codecs
Alsa handles audio drivers
Pulse handles audio output
Avahi handles mdns
systemd is looking to be the new standard for init and low-level things
LightDM is looking to be the new login-manager of choice since its lightdm-core + a greeter frontend
udev handles devices
NetworkManger handles Network Management (fittingly lol) though it does need bridging support to be fully capable.
Any new standards or possible standards I'm missing? Standards meaning standard because most distros use them/plan to use them, not because a committee sat down and said "This is the standard" (cant remember which is standard de facto and which is standard de jure, its 2am haha)

ahh-huh, but Akregator does not seem to give a shit and still crashes (and Konqueror still hangs) even when WebKit is set by default. at least until i rebuilt kdelibs with safer flags (just "-O3" instead of "-O2" with a bunch of graphite options and stuff). i have no intentions to figure out, which flag exactly screwed it up, and why it happaned in khtml-related libs, since it beat up my patience too much already.

Could the crashes simply be related to the KHTML libs not being optimization friendly? Maybe gcc optimized away something important either due to a gcc bug or the style / architecture of the libs. Quite honestly is KHTML even really updated anymore? The ONLY source of updates I can find is: http://khtml-konqueror.blogspot.com/ and thats, by name, restricted to konqueror not Akregator

they should have concentrated on kwin status more, instead of doing some shit, like rewriting built-in half-assed plasmoids and fidling with elaborate frameworks for them, since they still had to remake everything (QML transition) anyway and either way plasmoid-writing didn't gathered much usefull popularity. which isn't surprising, looking at the state of built-in, KDE authors's own, plasmoids in comparison to KDE 3.X Kicker.
i'm not saying they shouldn't done any of that at all, but bringing kwin and overall WM-functionality in order to Four-point-_NINE_ release (and not _from_ four-point-nine release) would have been... nice.

Just gonna down the list, mainly just clarifying things for anyone else reading the discussion...

1) Plasmoids to QML is a nice time. The logic and the GUI are being even more separated, and the GUI is now even easier to write thanks to how QML is done. They are relying on upstream (Qt) now instead of themselves. The plasmoids are also more portable. They can be used in Plasma Desktop or Plasma Active without any changes, are immediately crossplatform thanks to being Qt based, and are less glitchy. Perfect example is the rewrite being done for the file transfer plasmoid, it has a nasty habit of adjusting its size seemingly randomly when you have the details exposed. So you have the plasmoid showing and its height / width are jumping all over the place instead of staying static. The QML rewrite should fix that.

2) Redoing the frameworks for KDE5 is another good thing. KDE4 was a big change from KDE3 architecturally, and they realized they didnt get it right the first time but by then they were stuck with maintaining API and ABI compatibility. KDE5 is an opportunity to throw that out the window and refactor the architecture to be more sane, and split off the libraries into smaller libraries in the process making KDE more modular and having simpler dependencies.

3) Kwin should've gotten more love earlier, yes. But better late than never, and judging from the types of work Martin has been doing in relation to refactoring the classes and the hierarchy and the way things are done, I'm sure he'll have even more stuff to merge now that A) he's a full time developer, and B) He can throw backwards compatibility out the window with KDE5 coming up and people expect an API/ABI break. So its a good oppurtunity to just refactor the entire thing if he has the time and the ideas to do it.

broken GUIs due to usage of decade[s]-old X functionality, CPU&mem leaking crutch-for-logical-disorder nailed dead unto entire base framework with humongous unnecessary dependency, big plasma rewrites without any substantial derivative plasma work (insufficency of quality-made & maintainable 3rd-party plasmoids) going around (at least it crashes very rarely now), crash/hang-level regressions on minor "bug-fixing" releases - seems pretty fucked-up to me.

modularization, Qt5 and Telepathy work, hiring the dude, etc. seems pretty good though. i just hope, that it won't turn to crap in practice.

you're happy with how KDE4 turning up ? good for you. i'm not quite.

for me: it's fucked up, but, at least, it's not Gnome.
i would expect stunts like nepomuk/akonadi from there, and nice, modular things, like Telepathy & Gstreamer, from KDE. this whole KDE4 & Gnome3 thing is epic mindfuckery :/

You said yourself that its decades old X functionality thats breaking some things, I'm hoping that when the Wayland backend is introduced that they can split things off to where Kwin + X works as it always has, but Kwin + wayland will allow for new / better functionality that doesnt have to work around X's fundamental flaws.

I wouldnt say I'm happy with KDE4, like theres somethings I wish could be changed, but I am far happier with KDE than I am with Gnome or XCFE or LXDE or any of the *boxes. The only one that i've always been attracted to more than KDE has been E17, but KDE definitely is more 'modern-capable' than E17.

KDE gets a lot of things right, yes, Gnome gets a lot of things wrong, yes. But no one is right or wrong 100% of the time. Gnome will have some good ideas (though honestly I cant think of anything 'good' since Gnome 3 that KDE didnt already do or was in the works for KDE) For you, Nepomuk is useless. Thats fine, but for me its useful. I just wish there was an search applet on the panel similar to OS X's Spotlight where I could just hit it and search instead of having to do alt-f2 when I wanted to do it, im not a fan of keyboard bindings mainly because I forget about them lol

[Teho]

but Kopete was last updated 4 months ago according to the wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopete ), though if you check the official kopete website ( http://kopete.kde.org/ ) The last update for it was back in 2008 so maybe its been in maintenance mode since 2008.

The Kopete website is just outdated. The project has had quite some developement in the past years but is currently in maintance mode and KDE Telepathy is bound to replace it. It's released as part of KDE Software Compilation so it gets updated monthly.