Debian Lenny

Posted Dec 7, 2009 23:29 UTC (Mon) by aseigo (guest, #18394)
In reply to: Debian Lenny by martinfick
Parent article: KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Beta1 Released

it's probably not your hardware, it's probably the drivers. which leaves us in a quandry: screw the people with hardware that has decent driver support (mostly <3 year hardware and newer) or support the dwindling group that has really old stuff. sad? a bit. true? yes.

thankfully, kde3 is still there and can be used on system without reasonable drivers.

i truly wish we'd pushed harder on x.org drivers years ago so we wouldn't be in this annoying state now.

Debian Lenny

Posted Dec 7, 2009 23:47 UTC (Mon) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (3 responses)

Do you really think page loads are that affected by drivers? And, again, what is so essential in kde4.x konqueror that merits this? I am confused. How can browsing a simple web page in kde4 stress my drivers, but not in kde3? Is kde4 doing useless 3D rendering somehow when it is not required in kde3? Is it because the QT widgets are fancier? Is it the window manager doing scaling or something like this in kde4?

I am not against good eye candy on the desktop (if that is what you are suggesting stresses my drivers), I just have a hard time understanding why my browser has higher latencies. If it is eye candy, do you have any suggestions how this can be turned off? I love KDE, and really do want to upgrade to 4x when the performance becomes bearable (I am no power user, I have very low expectations for speed).

Debian Lenny

Posted Dec 9, 2009 10:26 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

actually it's not just the drivers (but that does play a part in this),
it's also that konqi simply hasn't been keeping up with the competition.
Hopefully we'll see a better webkit in future releases. I often use Aurora
now, webkit based, works pretty good. And reqkonq is coming, too.

Debian Lenny

Posted Dec 9, 2009 17:30 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

What competition is konqi not keeping up with, an unmaintained kde3 series??? This simply doesn't make sense. But I agree that it is likely not the drivers, especially since I use simple onboard intel video. I think that unless someone from kde honestly sits down on older hardware circa ~2004 with both a copy of kde3 and kde4 to attempt to bring konqi up to snuff, it will likely never get fast enough.

Debian Lenny

Posted Dec 9, 2009 21:51 UTC (Wed) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

> Do you really think page loads are that affected by drivers?

Has Kwin compositing always enabled? That would slow down things.

KDE4 and Drivers

Posted Jan 24, 2010 2:30 UTC (Sun) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

You were indeed correct! I managed to finally get my kernel and Xserver
stack upgraded and it IS indeed much faster (and usable) now on my machine.
I will transitioning my daily usage to KDE4 in the next few days. Thanks
for all the hard work and for pushing forward. It seems that perhaps KDE4
really did pressure the other components to improve. I am excited about
some of the new kde4 features that I already see.