Submitted by We’re really in a KDE/GNOME mood today, it would seem. The KDE team has released the second maintenance release for the KDE 4.2 series, KDE 4.2.2. The three biggest improvements in this release are stability fixes in KRunner, performance enhancements in KMail, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML. As always, this release will find it way to your distributor of choice soon enough, but if you’re impatient, you can always build it yourself.
…it’s still more memory hungry than KDE3 which was already a memory hog. I think I remember Seigo and some other KDE developers saying that the switch to QT4 would yield a significant decrease in memory use. So much for that…
Where are the numbers? And where is the bug report?
I still remember running KDE 2.x on a machine with 32 Mb RAM.
But that was years ago, we don’t have machines with 32 Mb RAM anymore. My router and even my mp3 player have more memory now. 🙂
Runs pretty nifty on 512 megs (with effects turned off).
KDE 3 was anything but a memory hog. It was (is) the most lightweight modern full-featured desktop environment. The popular “memory hog” myth was dispelled so many times (by providing accurate numbers showing its incredibly low memory usage) that I can’t believe someone still keeps repeating that nonsense in 2009.
KDE 3 is perfectly usable on a PC with less than 128 MB of RAM (first-hand experience, I know what I’m talking about). Its menory usage is so low that a complete system with KDE 3 takes less than 50 MB of RAM. (And that means the full system together – kernel, services, X.org, KDE and everything else). KDE 3 is simply an extremely lightweight desktop environment.
Links?
Edited 2009-04-04 19:11 UTC
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2004/10/konsole-vs-xterm-or-proof-that-k…
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/shared_memory.html
So… you provide a kde.org link that shows no significant difference (and bizarre and unbelievably low memory consumption numbers all around) as exhibit one. A typically devoid of content Aseigo gloat as exhibit two. And an explanation of what shared memory is as exhibit three?
The first link doesn’t even merit a comment. 60MB to run KDE? Please…
Aseigo’s post. No.
And as an administrator of XDMCP servers… I know more about shared memory than you likely can imagine.
So could you please provide a link that actually substantiates your original claim?
Edited 2009-04-04 21:26 UTC
I already did. Just read them.
KDE 3 needs singificantly less memory than GNOME. Initially, it takes more RAM than Xfce, but firstly, Xfce is not a full-featured DE (that’s what my original claim was about – I did not compare KDE to half-featured DEs like Xfce or even simple WMs like WindowMaker), secondly, KDE needs less memory than Xfce once you actually start using applications in it (KDE applications in KDE), thanks to its architecture and heavy use of shared libraries, as the memory usage does not increase so much when you start KDE applications, which use components that are already provided by KDE (Xfce does not have many Xfce apps and it does not have the features KDE offers via its shared libraries, so when applications want to use such features, memory bloat is inevitable).
So my original claim still stands – KDE 3 is not a memory hog. The “memory hog” nonsese is just a myth and the link shows it very clearly. Plus, you cannot find a modern full-featured DE that needs less memory than KDE 3 (at least when we’re talking about the major ones – KDE, GNOME, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X – the last two do not come even distantly close in their recent versions, running Vista or Mac OS X on a computer with 64 MB of RAM would be way much more that absurd, yet, you can run KDE 3 on it).
Plus, like I said, my own experience confirms it. I was using KDE 3 for 6 years and the whole system (kernel, services, X, KDE plus Konsole) nedeed less than 50 MB of RAM.
KDE 3 is not a memory hog, it is a very lightweight DE.
And you really and truly believe that KDE uses 60MB of RAM? And Gnome 74MB?
I think you need to run some tests yourself, as I have.
Edited 2009-04-04 21:56 UTC
Mod me down if you want, but I need to say that I won’t even try KDE 4. It’s about time to finish the laugh KDE devs took on us by releasing unpolished and alpha software. Highly an evidence that KDE is not a serious project. Anxiously expecting, Ubuntu 9.04 and future GNOME releases. The article about GNOME today was very very insightful, when said that it will use heavy developed and stable technologies, unlike the unforgettable fiasco played out by the QT lovers.
Open source is all about releasing alpha at some point. That distros screwed it all actually replacing a perfectly functional KDE 3 desktop with the yet to be finished KDE 4 is entirely their fault. That end users choose to install KDE 4 even knowing beforehand it’s not complete and then crying the amazonas, well, what can I tell you.
Upgrading to a better technology is being serious. Otherwise we would be still with the Athena widgets.
There’s been years of talk and talk and endless talk about gnome 3 and topaz and lots of projects that started and have never been finished trying to implement the next gnome desktop. Yet they continue to improve and build new things. So you can’t be serious with that “unforgettable fiasco” about KDE, like if KDE was not under heavy development.
Lucky for you then that they released the unpolished alpha software GNOME 2.0, instead of sticking with “heavy developed and stable technologies” of GNOME 1.4, “unlike the unforgettable fiasco played out by the” GTK+ lovers.
Oh wait …
Meanwhile, I have just recently decided to distro-hop to Arch Linux with its “rolling updates” and with KDEmod. KDE 4.2.2 hit the repositories last night.
Now that really is a distribution with “current software”.
Edited 2009-04-02 22:01 UTC
arch really dances tap on top of other distros. Speed and responsivenes wise, but also simplicity wise. I was a big fan of debian, mostly because of apt-get. Now I love pacman. Of course arch is not for everyone. I’m currently testing KDE in FreeBSD. If it works like in arch, I’ll stick to FreeBSD.
Unfortunately, it also doesn’t comply fully with the GPL:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5355
Check out the package for gamin for instance.
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=2174
gamin is under the GPL and is in the [community] repo, but the sources aren’t hosted on any Arch mirrors. Oops.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Arch Linx in any other way than being a “normal” user.
First of all, (according to the tarball of version 0.1.10), gamin is released under the terms of the LGPL (presumely v2) and not the GPL, but this does not change the fact that, yes indeed, arch linux as a project is currently in violation of the GPL, section 3, by not providing sources along with the binaries.
(Note to myself: head over to aur and request a change from GPL to LGPL there too).
If you follow the thread on bugs.archlinux.org to the bottom, you will find that according to
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5355#comment38777
all “official” packages in arch linux which come with the requirement of providing sources should be available at
ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/sources
It seems that the reason for gamin not being part of the list of files hosted there is that the community repository is currently not using the “official tools”
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5355#comment40379
thus preventing the source being picked up and placed there automatically.
Don’t get me wrong, it is imho important to raise this isue and keep pressing (albeit in a polite form, if possible) because compilance to the GPL is something that is also very important to me. In fact, it feels kind of weird to ask you to cut the arch devs some slack, because they really seem to be working in good faith to comply with all license obligations.
(Aaron Griffin, one of the project leads, has afaik personally provided a – in a forum post – written offer to provide the sources of any package at the cost of shipping these packages on CD).
I may be off, but the situation with Arch Linux’s community repository is proabably comparable to the situation of linuxpackages.net for slackware, where at least I am unable to find an accompanying source code to the binary or a written offer to provide the sources:
http://www.linuxpackages.net/pkg_details.php?id=10767
Since I may be missing something terribly obivious here, please feel free to correct me.
Thanks in advance
In fact, we at Arch Linux had kde 4.2.2 in the official repositories for a few days now. Developers get the tarballs for the release before release time.
I can’t understand what are all the people crazy about, KDE4 is a complete rewrite of KDE, and sure it had to be alpha (4.0) and beta (4.1) quality because people have to use it and report bugs. Now KDE is at what I would like to call release candidate state (4.2), this release is the best so far and the one that made me switch from GNOME, and I have been a GNOME user for more than 5 years. I know it still has some annoyances, but they are too little now for me to say KDE4 is a disaster. Seeing how all is been going, 4.3 in fact will be the final KDE4 talking about stability. Still KDE4 will still be on development, so from this point on everything will become more stable and polished.
Some of the people who say KDE released alpha or beta quality are suing windows, what does it take for windows to get to a final state? sp1 sp2 sp3? Windows XP was not half as good as it became with sp2, and Vista isn’t even good and it is close to be replaced by Windows 7.
Sometimes developer have to make progress happen, even if that means breaking some things. Come to think of it, no one forced you to switch from kde3 there are lots of distributions that still use kde3 and kde 3.5.10 came out after kde4 was released, so that tells you, if you don’t want to test kde4 stay with kde3.
What gets to me about KDE4 is how incredibly *slow* it is. My laptop has 1.5 GB of RAM, and Slackware with KDE4 (with all desktop effects turned off!) absolutely crawls. CPU usage especially seems heavy, with CPU spikes causing my mouse cursor to freeze when applications launch.
(Not just a Slackware problem either, it happens on all the distros I’ve tried that use KDE4.)
The next two sentences will probably make me look like a total bastard that likes to sidestep problems and is not sympathetic to the needs of other users.
It is probably a hardware problem, most likely something to do with your video card. I have Arch Linux KDE 4.2 running on nearly seven year old hardware (Celeron 2GHz, old NVIDIA GForce4 440MX, although the RAM was upgraded to 1GB of RAM some years ago) quite fine.
The painting performance of X11 with the NVIDIA legacy drivers for this rather dated card is not something to brag about, but acceptable. On my 1GB Asus Eee 1000H and my Thinkpad (both Intel video chips) KDE4 is very snappy, altough the known repainting issues (esp. the systemtray) with recent intel drivers can get quite anoying.
Starting with Qt 4.5, users with “problematic” graphic chips can use the raster backend which judging from non-scientific, personal tests at least feels a little better but sidesteps the problem (here, he is doing it again) of the lacking graphics stack on *nix by burdening the CPU with additional workload (which may not even be acceptable on mobile devices due to power concerns).
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/10/22/so-long-and-thanks-for-t…
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/03/13/using-hardware-accelerat…
Another disadvantage of this backend is that Zack Rusin (quite understandably) feels the urge to drop on any (likely non-graphic expert) user who tries to portait raster as a solution to all graphic related performance problems with flawed benchmarking like the proverbial ton of brick :-).
I know this will again sound rather tired, but: Have you tried filing bug reports with your distrobution and/or KDE and X11? Because, believe it or not, some folks out there get quite good performance with KDE4 so apparently something *is* working properly for a growing group of users.
best regards & Good luck 🙂
Edited 2009-04-04 08:48 UTC
Actually, come to think of it… Maybe you’re right. I’m using crappy Intel 945GM onboard video hardware, and the crappiness of the hardware is compounded by the crappiness of the XOrg drivers.
(Run glxgears and drag the window around while compositing effects are enabled, and you’ll see what I mean… Artifacts galore on Intel chipsets.)
So yeah, it could be the hardware.
On the other hand, pure Qt4 applications like VLC run nice and fast, which makes me think it’s some kind of issue with the KDE libs.
I run a G43 chipset. And I play OpenArena at 1680×1050 on maximum quality settings. 945GM is, perhaps, substandard. But current Intel on-board offerings are not too shabby.
Thanks you very much for replying!
I don’t mean that the hardware is “crap” per se, my old Acer notebook had an Intel 855 graphics chip and was/is absolutly sufficiant for everything I threw at it over the years (Case in point: I still use the beforementioned desktop computer to develop and test all my non-embedded, “regular desktop” softeware. It helps to maintain a humble approach to resource useage, as a developer). The point is that although the intel integrated video hardware offers adequate performance (even on my Eee KDE 4.2 runs very well, if you neglect the repainting and flickering issues) for desktop use, obviously there are some glitches somewhere (presumably in the driver) that are in need of squashing.
Bearing in mind that the only benchmarking quality of glxgears is to determine if hardware acceleration is working properly or not, a quick test with my EeePc (intel 945gma) and my Thinkpad R61i (intel 965 Mobile) show the same behaviour as you described.
Repeating the procedure on my desktop computer (the one with the Gforce4 MX, which was a cheap and crappy card even back in summer 2002) and the nvidia legacy drivers produces no flicker at all, although there still are from time to time some minor repainting issues.
Possible conclusions from this little excursion in non-scientific testing:
– While the intel chips are not too shaby (as sbergman noted earlier), there are some already known and identified problems with the driver that cause a lot of artefacts, esp. in combination with compositing.
– KDE4 is capable of running smoothly even on rather dated hardware setups. At the same time, the problems in the graphics stack (esp. the video drivers) are one major factor contributing to scenarios where people still seem the have problems getting the kind of performance from KDE 4.2.x that they expect.
I’m not a fan of pointing fingers, etc. And until blazer[1] or other alternative desktop shell(s) for KDE4 reaches the level of maturity that plasma currently offers (writing something like that in April 2008 with a straight face would have been impossible, so yeah, there is *a lot of* progress), the next best thing to inventing a time machine and trying to improve the situation in the past is to repair the current problems in the graphic stack right here, right now.
This should, btw. be for the profit of all desktop environments that try to use advanced graphics elements in the presentation layer (Gnome 2.30 and possibly XFCE in certain setups & clutter, etc.).
best regards
[1]http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/blazer/
I’m not sure that it’s a driver issue: after all glxgears disable synchronous repainting to have more than 60fps..
So maybe what you’re seeing is normal (not the slowness of KDE of course but the artifacts while glxgears is running), you should ask around.
Afterall glxgears is a “stress test”, so it’s not unreasonable that it has side effects on rendering..
Say that as much as you want as KDE 4 advances, but building what some of the Gnome guys appear to want to build without paying attention to the fundamentals that you build it with is likely to end in tears.
So, you won’t try it because you know that KDE 4.2.2 alpha quality software, even though you never tried it, because you know…
Sadly enough, OSNews doesn’t have”
“-1 – Circular logic, uninformative / useless”
Guess people we’ll have to settle for -1 troll…
– Gilboa
There’s a difference?
Have you ever developed *anything* in Qt?
It practically makes C++ more streamlined and readable than Python code. It’s a wonderful framework that goes far and beyond graphical widgets.
Well I’m not all that surprised since you always fell the need to troll threads about KDE4.
I’m glad they released a new version. I’ve tried each variation the safest way possible; live CD distros first. If I like what I see, they get a new partition to play on my system.
On a sidenote: do you ever get the feeling that sites like these, more specifically OS focused, are just here to set people from different OS camps at odds with each other for the sake of content generation at our expense? Just a random thought…
Any site that has comments turns inmediately in a content generation site. There’s nothing wrong with it. You can stop commenting if you feel abused. But then you would have to stop using internet, as this happens everywhere.
Edit: in fact, it’s good that people write what they think or believe about stuff. Remember this wasn’t always possible in other eras, and in some places it might even be dangerous nowadays.
Edited 2009-04-02 22:36 UTC
It’d be a pretty boring place if it weren’t.
One of my favorite greeting cards, which I saw in a little shop years ago, depicts a sort of balding average guy angel, sitting on a cloud with his halo above him, his harp lying next to him, wings drooping casually at his sides, chin resting in his hand. And the caption?
“Hmmm… I shoulda brought a magazine…”
Edited 2009-04-02 22:39 UTC
Maybe, but I highly doubt this site was born from the idea of starting flame wars.
It’s a pretty difficult task to maintain peace on subjects like this when so many are so passionate and so many really don’t know much about the alternative options, thus fire off uneducated and random comments that really do nothing more than add fuel to the fire.
The subject of this site deliberately posting articles to start arguements (thus generate traffic, thus generate advertising revenue) has been debated many times before and that in itself did very little than start more arguements about the “real intentions” of Thom and alike.
Human nature I guess…
My real intentions are clear and out in the open. I’m maintaining an army of upper-class hookers with which I’m planning to take over the world, all from my super secret hideout here in the Dutch countryside.
I thought that was common knowledge by now.
I have to stop using the internets!! Oh no!! j/k :p
Yea this place is nowhere near as bad as the blogs over at zdnet. Holy cow, the flame wars over there is like going into a deathmatch arena
There’s a segment of people who are unable to support one project without putting its rival(s) down. So KDE fans snipe at GNOME, Linux fans snipe at Windows, Mac fans snipe at Linux, hell even GPL fans snipe at BSD, etc. (/and/ vice-versa in every case!).
I’ve been testing Kde 4 since KDE 4.0.0 , and now with all my experiencie I can say Kde 4.2.2 is a solid rock release (fully stable, fully feautered, fully styleish), now it’s time to start using as an enterprise envioroment o normal desktop.
Hey Kde 3.5 && Gnome && windows ¿7? users!
Upgrade!, it’s time to shine!! = D
Edited 2009-04-03 01:47 UTC
I agree wholeheartedly. As one who tried KDE 4, then 4.1 and now 4.2 I can really see (and feel) the difference. KDE 4 is now ready for mass consumption. I’ll be moving back to KDE as my primiary desktop in short order. Of course some stubborn, narrow minded loud mouths will continue to deride KDE regardless of any improvements.
KDE Rocks! I’m sure KDE 4.3 will be the release that will help KDE gain its market share again.
I’m using Kde 4.1 with Mandriva one. Any idea how do i upgrade to kde 4.2?
Upgrade to Mandriva 2009.1 Spring: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_RC_1
There are unofficial 4.2.1 packages. Don’t know about 4.2.2
Mandriva packages are here: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.2.2/Mandriva/2009.0/
Of course they are unsupported.
The only thing I noticed was it breaking up Amarok (2.0.2). It doesn’t anymore submit np to Last.fm. Opened it up in console and it gives me some kind of an XML error and the test login in the plugin’s options dialog doesn’t do anything. f–king sucks, can’t come up with any other opinions. One step closer of going back to GNOME after being majorly let down by KDE 4.1 and 4.2.
I’m already back using Rhythmbox so actually the migration has begun.
Edited 2009-04-03 06:46 UTC
Could it be related to Last.fm now being a payed service?
Well unless they stole my identity and charged my card without me knowing, last.fm is still working for me for free… Im in the US though, maybe that makes a difference?
On a side note, Better to build the last “stable” amarok then use the new one, its unfinished and really shouldent be used by anybody not wanting to test it. Unless a recent build changes that (im using the one with fedora 10).
If you are in the US, then I don’t know. Last FM is a paid service outside US and UK since 1st April so they may have changed their APIs to accomodate that.
No. Last.fm isn’t a pay-to-use service. Only listening to music there is not free. Besides it wouldn’t explain, why Amarok’s Last.fm plugin broke just after I installed update 4.2.2 and rebooted. My last track submission to Last.fm was the last song playing before rebooting.
Rhythmbox’s Last.fm plugin works just fine albeit not being upgraded in weeks.
Edited 2009-04-03 09:39 UTC
As part of the changes since they became a paid service, they removed the unofficial API everyone was using.
So no, don’t expect *anything* OSS to work with Last.FM right now.
They are planning to release “official” APIs someday, though.
Then go and shut up.
Kubuntu users: KDE 4.2.2 has already hit the kubuntu-members-kde4 PPA on Intrepid. It’s a 78 megabyte download.