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It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Sebastian on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @01:42
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I tried KDE 4.0.1 (openSuse) yesterday. I was impressed by Konqueror. Dolphin is not as much polished as it should be: It does not recognize if your left or right pane is active (and suddenly you delete the wrong files!), I could not figure out how to use the mouse in combination with the keyboard (mouse selection does not work at all, hitting a file always opens it etc.) and a pane with "actions", not only "information" is required (at least as it is hard to get into the context menu for the current directory as now).
Regarding Plasma and Kwin, one should optimize and stabilize the code instead of implementing all KDE3 features. I was simply not able to run KDE longer than 3 hours in one session. Xorg took 100% CPU power all the time, even when doing nothing and when switching all desktop effects off.
I also do not have any clue about all the options for rendering. Using the latest NVIDIA drivers on my 8400 GT, I can turn "Vsync to blank" or "allow flipping" on in the driver settings (what does this mean at all?). In the KWin settings I am able to chose the drawing method without knowing which one is best. There seems to be no documentation available yet. (Are there any help files on KDE4 which are at least partially complete?)
Maybe I was mistaken and did some KDE4 newby mistakes, or the whole software must be regarded as alpha/beta stuff. I am really disappointed. Regressions are okay and understandable, but it is not about stability which MUST be fine on release. If you ask me, the quality management of KDE definitely did fail with 4.0 |
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Diederik van der Boor on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @02:00
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Off course that's being worked on!
One of the things that caused Plasma performance to drain were the clipping algorithms in QGraphicsView. Trolltech never expected those would be used at all, but then came plasma. Now there is a complete desktop shell using QGraphicsView clipping all the time :P That's one of the things that got greatly improved in Qt 4.4.
You also mention NVidia issues. Try turning compositing off, and see how well it performs then. After all, all painting goes through KWin/compositing. If your xorg.conf or kwin settings are bad, it will degrade performance quickly.
You can improve that though with the settings described at http://dot.kde.org/1200050369/1200126492/:
Your nvidia driver section should contain the following:
Option "AddARGBVisuals" "True"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DynamicTwinView" "false"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
And the extensions section should look somewhat like:
Section "Extensions"
Option "RENDER" "true"
Option "DAMAGE" "true"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Good luck!
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Diederik van der Boor on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @02:03
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Oh and to improve the performance even more for nvidia drivers, disable the "vsync" and "direct rendering" in kwin settings -> "Desktop effects" -> "advanced options"
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Thanks
by Sebastian on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @03:24
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The xorg.conf options are not the problem on my machine. Your hint regarding the Qt bug were rather helpful, though. The thing is, that even when all effects were turned off, Xorg took 100% cpu time (even if I just sit in front of a top without user action!). So I turned off all plasma desktop applets except the clock - and now - Xorg is now at constantly 5% which is at least acceptable. The particular applets were the system monitors and cpu frequ. analyzer.
Still, I can't use dolphin. Can I probably turn on the double click somewere again? That would at least help a little. Currently it is just not consequent though through, I think. Don't get used to it and already moved files into the Nirvana...
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Re: Thanks
by Peter Penz on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @05:04
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> Still, I can't use dolphin. Can I probably turn on the
> double click somewere again?
Double click can be turned on already by going into System Settings -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Mouse. If there are still some problems: please use bugs.kde.org to inform us developers about such problems so that we can fix it. I regularly read the dot to collect user feedback, but sometimes it's really frustrating that people complain in forums about the quality of KDE and don't give feedback to the developers directly by using bugs.kde.org...
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Re: Thanks
by Sebastian on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @07:28
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I am sorry to have left this impression. That was not on my mind. Though, I was really looking forward to the release and spent a whole day, just trying to get used to the new kind of software. A few details behaved different from what I expected.
This may be the wrong place to start a debate on bugs.kde.org, but I feel personally offended: I filed many many bug reports during the last years. They even receive some ratings by public votes. It is the minority where any KDE developer reacted at all. Some were just closed after a few years, because the feature it was referring to was removed, but not because a developer cared. By saying this, I do not want to blame the majority of developers, KDE is doing a great job, else I would not use bugs.kde.org. I just mention it, though I do not care much - KDE is not a company where I bought an expensive product. But please realize, that this is also not encouraging. So, my personal experiences with bugs.kde.org teached me to apply it only to severe bugs and wishes. Maybe this is the reason why I mentioned this here.
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Re: Thanks
by Peter Penz on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @08:22
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> This may be the wrong place to start a debate on bugs.kde.org,
> but I feel personally offended:
Sorry Sebastian, it was not my intention to offend you.
> I filed many many bug reports during the last years.
Thanks for this!
> It is the minority where any KDE developer reacted at all
I understand that this is frustrating and for sure we developers have to be more careful for responding to bug-reports.
> But please realize, that this is also not encouraging.
Yes, I agree and I'm not sure how this can be improved...
Still the tendency to write about things that don't work on forums and blogs has increased a lot during the last years. It is fully OK to write about things that don't work, but I think the balance of writing about cool things vs. writing about things that don't work has shifted a lot to the "writing about things that don't work"-camp. Please note that this is just a general statement and my personal impression, this is not directly related to your comment :-)
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Re: Thanks
by patpi on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @07:33
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"but sometimes it's really frustrating that people complain in forums about the quality of KDE and don't give feedback to the developers directly by using bugs.kde.org..."
I'm working on instant messenger now and if I would count only on 'direct feedback ' for new ideas our IM would die ;)
PS. keep up the good work. I love dolphin
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Re: Thanks
by Aaron Seigo on Tuesday 19/Feb/2008, @09:01
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the system monitor plasmoid is in playground, not a production module. there's no guarantee anything in playground owrks properly or well. if your distro is packaging and installing plasma's playground code by default with kde4 they are doing you a disservice, imho.
5% is also ... bizarre though. it should be silent as a mouse (are mice really silent, though? ;)
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Bobby on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @13:26
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I can only recommend these settings because they work. I don't even have a modern machine: an ASRock mainboard, 1.8 Ghz AMD Sempron processor with an nVidia GeForce 6600 LE (256 MB RAM) and I recently upgraded to 1.5 gig of memory.
I am now running KDE 4.0.1 which is quite stable and I can't complain about speed. The only problems that I am having are that my KDE 3.5x programmes crash now and then and I can't get Amarok 2 to run (keeps crashing but that's expected with pre-alpha software). Apart from that i am cool and very impressed with the speed at which bugs are being squashed and missing features are added to KDE4.
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Peter Penz on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @04:57
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> Dolphin is not as much polished as it should be: It does not recognize
> if your left or right pane is active (and suddenly you delete
> the wrong files!)
I cannot reproduce this. Could you please submit a bug-report how to reproduce this (or mail me directly)? Thanks!
> I could not figure out how to use the mouse in combination with
> the keyboard (mouse selection does not work at all, hitting a file
> always opens it etc.)
I'd also need more details about what you mean so that we can fix this. We improved already some minor things in Dolphin for KDE 4.1 (selection area of items is optimized to the real size, selection toggle is available for the single click mode etc.), but to solve such issues we first have to be aware about that there is an issue and need feedback from users. It's OK to post things like this on the dot, but it would be more productive having a detailed issue description in bugs.kde.org ;-)
> and a pane with "actions", not only "information" is required
> (at least as it is hard to get into the context menu for the
> current directory as now).
Why is it hard getting a context menu for the current directory? If it is because of the small viewport area: this has been fixed for KDE 4.1.
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Thanks for replying
by Sebastian on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @08:03
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Most of the issues are probably regarded to the viewport. But two things are not:
(1) Is there a way to select a single way be using the mouse?
(2) When using the keyboard (tab key) to switch panes (I used this after failing using the mouse) I found it 1st a little sad that I had to enter "tab" several times and that the tab key got caught by the QTExtEdit in the information panel. Second, if activating the left pane by using the tab key, the rectangle around the left pane becomes blue. But all actions on the toolbar and in the menu still refer to the other pane.
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Re: Thanks for replying
by Peter Penz on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @08:29
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> (1) Is there a way to select a single way be using the mouse?
Do you mean selecting files in the single-click mode? There is a solution for this in Dolphin for KDE 4.1: a kind of "selection toggle" is blended in "plasma-like" above the item. If you don't have meant this: clicking the mouse on the viewport selects the active view in the split-view mode.
Regarding the tab issue: I was not aware about this and have added this point to my TODO-list.
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by fredde on Sunday 17/Feb/2008, @18:05
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Something that's bugging me with dolphin in 4.1 is when selecting a group of files and pressing down ctrl to select another group of files, the first group gets deselected ...i can workaround this by selecting only one file holding ctrl and then using the rubberband selection again :)
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Peter Penz on Monday 18/Feb/2008, @00:00
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This is a Qt-issue. I have not verified yet whether it still happens with Qt4.4, but will check it...
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by fredde on Monday 18/Feb/2008, @02:54
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Ok, and yes, i'm using Qt 4.4 0214 :)
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Re: It's not about features, it is the quality!
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Tuesday 19/Feb/2008, @09:31
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I've noticed this problem in kubuntu+kde4.0
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