KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)

Posted Aug 12, 2005 10:00 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Yes... it /is/ a /she/. I just spent quite a bit of time looking over the
entire site, including the blog and photo gallery (and having read the
blog after checking the gallery, was surprised to find the gal I /thought/
was probably the girl friend or wife, was the photographer/author! so it
wasn't just the OP making assumptions... <g>) I decided I quite like her
photography style. The landscape and nature ones are nice, but the ones
with people in them are what impressed me (nature ones are so commonly
seen on calendars and the like). The people and environments seem almost
"immersive" -- the textures of the jackets, the smell of the sea air...
not so "artificially posed" or simply "uninteresting", just a bunch of
people, as many people shots I've seen. She and her partner must be very
interesting people.

But... back to KDE. I run Gentoo, and got a chance to run the KDE 3.4.0
betas, compiled with gcc 4.0.0, before they decided they had more work to
do on KDE's use of -fvisibility (buggy as implemented) and to remove it
for 3.4 and put it in 3.5 or 4.0. No doubt part of the reason it made
such a huge difference here was that I use on-load binding, in preference
to lazy-binding, by default (for a number of reasons), but that
-fvisibility stuff made a *HUGE* difference to my load times. It was
almost as if initial uncached launch had already been pre-cached, and
relaunch of apps already in cache was so fast it actually took a bit of
getting used to! (When apps take a couple seconds to launch, one gets
used to deciding to launch the app, and /then/ think about what they are
going to do in it while it's loading. When launch is instantaneous, one
fines it has appeared before one is actually quite ready to use it! <g>)

Actually, I'm glad, if it had to be removed to be reworked for later, I
didn't get to use it all that long, or it would have been /very/ hard to
give up! I'd read about the -fvisibility feature, but this was one of
those times when the reality actually surprised me, it was that much
faster.

So... yes, I'm /really/ looking forward to getting that feature fully
enabled, once again!

Duncan