Submitted by “Considering that the previous revisions were surprisingly unstable, I can honestly call this one the most stable of the ones I have tested until now. I experienced only one crash and the performance was more than satisfactory. Now I can be almost sure that when a stable edition of KDE 4.1 is published, I will definitely say good bay to my old good KDE 3.5.”
konqueror doesn’t use webkit, like the article author says, but khtml, anyway there is a plugin for konqueror that let you use webkit kpart instead of khtml
I think we will see a new browser over the course of KDE 4’s development cycle that uses WebKit, but WebKit itself needs further improvement and development before that can really happen.
oh isn’t the trojan horse pretty, I’m kicking this gift horse in the mouth… I’m calling all the angels cause this trash of interopability is stupid who would want to mix a jap car and a american muscle car, not going to happen, so we should stop supporting cross platform languages becuase then you pervert stallmans visions of opensourc by letting someone on a propriatary system run it. Because monkeys are afraid to learn sometimes, and they’ll never leave that proprietary model of free software on a piece of junk os that I’m “used” to… it’s like kids that don’t want to learn algebra, how drole!
I’ve been working with KDE 4.0 for a while….and starting with 4.0.1 it became more usable…with 4.0.2 it’s more stable…and even though it’s still not feature complete, I’m starting to like it and use it on my laptop exclusively…just to get “ready” for 4.1. I can honestly say that the work going into it is paying off and I think it will be a good release at 4.1 for the masses. 4.0.2 hardly crashes anymore…and the applications continue to have bugs fixed….and applications added. I like Dolphin and am already using Ktorrent 3.0.0 which is for KDE4….working nicely. I am still waiting for a good Postscript Viewer..as Okular still doesn’t seem to handle PS files…unless they plan on adding that later?
Anyway….I’ll be using KDE 4 when it’s ready as my default desktop….thanks KDE team for an exciting change…
okular can read ps files using libspectre, but i don’t know if this is possible in 4.0.x too or just 4.1
here is a dirty hack to do it (like kpdf does)
create this scritp in /usr/bin
#/bin/bash
ps2pdf14 $1 “/tmp/”$1″.pdf”
/home/kde-devel/kde/bin/okular $1″.pdf”
call il okular ps and ajust the path to opkular
chmod 777 /usr/bin/okularps
and set it to default in dolphin/firefox/konkeror for .ps file.
*Be sure you have the ps2pdf14 command installed, if you have other version like 11, 12, 13 or without number only, ajust the scipt to the right name too.
Well, debian packages here. 4.0.2. And Okular can view ps files just fine. No crazy hacks required. Just double click the file and it loads perfectly. Dunno what’s wrong with your packages…
I don’t even have the okular-extra-backends package installed.
Hey…thanks….so Okular is scheduled to do PS by default when 4.1 comes out? If so…great….I just wanted to clarify….I haven’t used the pre-4.1 stuff yet…
Goodness…I see Kghostcript is ready for KDE4 now…problem solved..thanks.
I thought I’d never say this, but I think that in a couple of years time I might end up using OpenSolaris + KDE 4.x – it is looking very professional in the presentation Ultimately I do think that when push comes to shove, although I love my MacBook very much, I do think that for the last several Mac OS X releases, compared to the the opensource world, Apple has rested on its achievements with no vision for the future.
I guess the biggest things that one would be waiting on is the likes of Amarok, K3b, KOffice and a few others to be ported to the new KDE 4.x/QT 4.x framework. Once done, it’ll provide a very solid foundation – I do hope, however, that they eventually adopt the webkit framework wholesale so that as users we can track and embrace all the changes/improvements which Apple has made to the framework rather than being two (or more) steps behind.
Apart from those critiques, I’m very excited about the future and look forward to future developments made by KDE developers – lets hope by then there is a KDE port available rather than it being just a ‘project page’ on opensolaris’s website.
I’m not sure why you put KDE 4 in a position against Apple/Mac OS X. Both are beneficial to each other.
1.: Apple is part of the Open Source world with projects like WebKit and CUPS or Apple’s active development support of GCC or LLVM.
2.: KDE 4.1 will bring native support for Mac OS X. This means Amarok, KOffice, etc. all under Mac OS X.
Supporting a new platform like Mac OS X also means (at least hopefully) more contributors to KDE in general – regardless of the platform.
Yup, on some projects they support each other and you can indeed run it on osx (not the native KDE experience tho) BUT they are on the whole competing products. Gnome and KDE are competing DEs and they also share a lot of underlying frameworks and both can benefit from each other.
I believe hes not putting down osx but just that lately they haven’t been innovating as much. He never said it was bad, but If he’d prefer to run kde4 on solaris then there isn’t any problem there
I’m a 5 year Mac OS X user (started in 2003 with a G4 Powerbook). Previous to that, I started using Linux in 2000 with Redhat 7.1. These days, I’m using a Macbook which dual boots Leopard and Ubuntu 7.10 and I find that I’m spending a lot more time in Linux. In fact, since I installed 7.10, I think I’ve booted into OS X twice to open some pesky Office document that doesn’t work in OO.
Don’t know if you’ve done it yet, but you should give Linux a spin on your Mac. It works quite well and I’m rather impressed with it.
Well, I moved from OpenSolaris/*NIX to this machine because I need the applications on Mac OS X which aren’t available on *NIX (Microsoft Office, for example). With that being said, given the nature of how fast software develops, don’t be surprised that in 2-3 years I’m looking at a Lenovo Thinkpad loaded with OpenSolaris/KDE 4.x of some flavour which will have much better Microsoft Office compatibility. I’d use OpenOffice.org, but I can’t stand it (slow, buggy, bloated) so instead I’d sooner wait for KOffice to be delivered – which is far nicer to use IMHO.
So you are saying MS Office on Mac is not buggy. My Friends and the Press disagree ( for the 2008 version that is ).
I always use the latest OO.o and I never had a bug.
However .. i would prefer lean and mean KOffice if it would offer the same compability tbh.
Speaking of Mac + KDE,
which is the best Linux distro to try out on my MacBook? Which distro will let me use most of my MB’s features with as little fuss as possible?
If said distro even has a live cd version, that would be super.
I know some of my colleagues use Fedora for it. Seems pretty decend ….
(k)Ubuntu. On my 1st gen macbook, nearly everything worked right out of the box. That includes wirelss, bluetooth and even suspend. The only thing I had to tweak a bit was the iSight support but that’s working too.
Most hassle free linux distribution I’ve tried to date.
I used Ubuntu and gentoo on my mac book pro 3rd gen. Ubuntu did work perfectly (not out of the box in 7.04, but in 7.10 yes (we did submit all bogs).
Gentoo with a mac portage reposity work fine too, but i am not able to get the wireless to work… Even with the same svn version of madwifi and the same kernel config than in ubuntu.
I am currently using KDE 3.5.8 and have used KDE 4.0.1 a little bit, and it rocks…. but……..
Is (or will be) there a way of replacing the new KDE 4.0.1 K menu by the older one?
In 4.0.2 there is a plasmoid called Application Launcher Menu which is an old-style app menu which you can add to the desktop/panel.
Just click with right-button over the kicker and select “old style-menu” (or something like that).
Quite simple really, at least in the latest svn anyway.
From what I have seen so far, the existing KDE 4 menu is a serious regression from KDE 3.x
I’m wondering if someone might give the menu a bit of an uplift in KDE 4 and design a replacement menu with functionality something like this:
http://www.notmart.org/tastymenu/index.html
I’ve been testing svn build for a while and everytime I recompile it just gets faster and faster. Thats good but It isn’t saying a lot in my case. My laptops nvidia cards seems to have some problems even with compositing turned off. I have seen intel igp’s handling kde4 just fine, but me its still really sluggish and at idle xorg is consuming 20% of my cpu.
Scrolling is practically speedy now but using the rubber band to highlight multiple items in dolphin slows the mouse down to a crawl. terminal scrolling is still slow too.Anyone care to comment on any annoying slowness issues?
Go to ‘advanced options’ in Desktop Effects and disable ‘Use Vsync’. Should help.
In time NVidia will fix their drivers and performance will be reasonable. Until then – you can only complain at NVidia, it’s their fault. The KWin dev’s don’t really have the resources to work around every crappy videocard/driver combination out there, and they shouldn’t have to. After all, they got exciting things to develop 😉
Unfortunately it’s not desktop effects that are slow. I have compositing disabled. Scrolling and highlighting text and items and moving toolbars is an exercise in patience.
Also kwin is locked at 50 fps so disabling vsync has no effect whatsoever.
I’ve complained a lot in the nvnews forums. Heard not a peep from nvidia. Its not only a kde issue either gtk is really slow. There is also a compositing performance regression in xserver 1.4 when they fixed a security hole.
Edited 2008-03-31 19:27 UTC
Weird. If it’s not compositing and GTK is affected as well it really sounds like a driver or X.org issue.
Now we just need Raptor to be finished and we’ll have the best desktop environment ever
Thanks for the article, it was worth the read!
KDE4 is improving alot, no doubt. From the last time i used it, its faster and it behaves better, by the way some things still bugs me out. The desktop applet doesnt have a preview for images when browsing them, that makes it completely unusable. The image view (gwenview doesnt have an option to set desktop wallpaper either). The K Menu cant be customized and doesnt have borders, wich make a hard transition between the menu and the desktop. The clock doesnt scale itself with the panel (it tries to, but fail). Konqueror doesnt accept a search on the address box. There are tons of configurations missing, like put the menu on the panel (like OSX). Well, besides those little problems, kde is like a kid, each day it gets stronger and faster and always have a way to surprise you
and much of these issues have been fixed in trunk already. The backporting of Plasma features to the 4.0.x series leads to it’s own issues (like the resizing ones).
I am writing this from KDE 4.0.3 on Mandriva 2008.0 Powerpack. My first impressions: it stinks. I do admit it has a whole lot of potential and could very well become something huge but as it is now it is just unusuable for me. Several issues really, some not that big ones and then atleast one showstopper;
1. the clock and the K-menu button neither do scale properly with the panel. They did tell me in IRC that this is a know issue and will be fixed.
2. The K-throbber in Konqueror is sometimes confused about where it should be. Sometimes it’s there on the right side of the window where it is supposed to be but at other times it just hangs around somewhere beside the menu.
3. Speed. It’s dog slow.
4. As I am typing this this text sometimes becomes bright red, and at times it’s black as it is supposed to be. I can’t fathom why it jumps back and forth all the time. I know it’s supposed to be the spell-checker but heck, it clearly does not work.
5. The fonts. Somewhere the text is really small, and then suddenly it’s written in cat-sized letters without any consistency.
But the thing that really stops me from using KDE4 is this:
6. Any files and folders saved on the desktop folder show up as plasmoids. This makes it totally impossible for me to organize my files. Whenever I download something I save them on the desktop and then organize them from there. The most important files and folders I always keep on the desktop. But if they all are shown as plasmoids I can’t delete the files, I can’t move them to folders or anything like that unless I specifically open a file-manager. This just annoys the hell out of me.
These may be minor issues to other users but point 6 is just something I refuse to live with. And with all the other annoyances included I just can’t justify spending any more time here.
The desktop is not a file manager. It is a canvas on which plasmoids live. There will probably be a plasmoid in the future that will make you happier. But I am quite certain the desktop will never be a file manager in kde4.
Actually there is in trunk a plasmoid which contains a folderview (homefolder by default). So this should solve his issues, even in a much more flexible way than the normal desktop ever could 😉
Sorry, but that makes it useless as tits on a bull then. Many people store folders/files on the Desktop as a quick way of accessing them. Removing this option (or ballsing it up) is not a good usability feature imho.
Saying tough luck by saying that the Desktop is not a file manager is a slack way of saying “we don’t give a ****”. That doesn’t endear end users.
The Desktop is more than just a pretty face – it’s where *most* users interact with *most* of their commonly used files. A tip – both OS X and Windows behave this way (so did OS/2 and from memory, BEos). They can’t all be wrong, can they?
Dave
Anybody have any quantitative numbers on KDE4 vs. KDE3 memory usage and performance? How much RAM do they both use? How long does it take to launch konqueror? How long for the K-menu (or whatever the equivalent is now) to render? How long does it take to log in?
On somewhat modest kit I’d say the performance is on par with 3.5. My primary desktop is 2 Ghz single core AMD processor, with an AGP ATI x700 video card, and 2 GB bog standard RAM, and 7200 RPM disks.
I have observed:
-Starting KDE seems to be about the same, or a bit faster.
-RAM and CPU usage after starting with KDE 4 (Kwin + Plasma + Autostarted things) vs. KDE 3 (Kwin + Kicker + Autostarted things) seems about par. Maybe a hair more CPU in KDE 4, but with what seems like less stuff cached in RAM.)
-Plasma applets seem responsive, and the shipped apps when compared to KDE 3 seem roughly the same. (Maybe just a hair slower…)
-I’m noticing a bit of lag after clicking on a menu item under KDE 4, and a bit of lag with the repaint after the menu goes away. In general repaint feels a bit slower, but nothing ‘bad’.
-Most of the new frameworks seem roughly par to the old ones wrt to CPU and Memory.
-Most apps that have a direct KDE 3 lineage seem much nicer (As in more gloss, new features, cleaner, and with better configs) under KDE 4 barring some regressions. Performance wise they seem on par with KDE 3. The KDE 4 ‘desktop proper’ needs to cover a bunch of feature regressions though. That might come with overhead.
If your KDE 4 experience is ‘bad’:
-Look into your video drivers. I’m finding ‘new’ open radeon drivers are working well.
-Look at your vendor packages. They weren’t all created equally for 4.0.0.
Looking forward, KDE 4’s performance should be bright because there is probably a whole whack of micro-optimising that can be done, and even without that it isn’t generally ‘dog slow’ vs KDE 3.
I’d be interested to hear from somebody who has integrated video, on a 512 Mb memory, 700 MHz, 5X00 RPM HD box though. On semi-recent kit with decent drivers and packages you’d be hard pressed to notice much of a difference, IMHO.