KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)
KDE.News mentions
a new document that explains new KDE 4 features.
"
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With all the excitement surrounding KDE 4 development at the moment people are starting to ask why they have not seen any updates on what KDE 4 will look like. KDE 4 - Understanding the Buzz answers these increasingly common questions by explaining the current status of KDE 4 development and why the exciting work so far is only visible to developers."
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KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)
Posted Aug 12, 2005 6:29 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]
From the linked article: Qt4 will bring a wealth of new benefits to KDE. The library is lighter on memory ...I'm wondering how much effect that will have on our bloat problem on KDE systems. Too bad he did not say. On the other hand, additions to KDE4 are likely to make it more memory-hungry anyway.
KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)
Posted Aug 12, 2005 9:04 UTC (Fri) by henning (guest, #13406) [Link]
As she mentioned in the article, applications need to link only against the needed parts of the qt4 library. This should reduce the memory needed from running application.The upcomming kde-3.5 will additionally use (with gcc-4) the "-fvisibility" flag, that will hopefully further reduce the library size and load times.
If you are concerned about the "bloat problem of kde", you could join the kde-quality or kde-devel mailing list on kde.org.
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 theentire 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
KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)
Posted Aug 12, 2005 14:37 UTC (Fri) by henning (guest, #13406) [Link]
AFAIK the upcoming qt-3 maintance release will include the needed patchesto enable the -fvisiblity support in kde. KDE >= 3.4.0 will then
autodetect the support, and should enable it.
Some time ago i tried to use a qt patch from kde-bugzilla with gentoo to
enable this stuff, but with no luck.
Thanks for your comments! I think in the next days i must try it
again.. ;-)
KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)
Posted Aug 18, 2005 13:48 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]
Wouldn't that be quite hard to calculate?
AFAIK, KDE has been working on this for a long time and it hasn't become more memory hungry for a long time. I think KDE4 will be similar and wont require more memory than previous releases, it might even require less.
KDE 4: Understanding the Buzz (KDE.News)
Posted Aug 18, 2005 15:22 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]
Just read this blog post which also comments on bloat: http://www.canllaith.org/blog/antiquity.html