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Re: wow
by David Johnson on Wednesday 30/Apr/2008, @11:58

Widgets on the canvas is a cool feature, but please don't overdo it. Some of us don't have high end video cards. On my laptop's Radeon X1400, it's dog slow. Qt's pad navigator is barely usable and the he embedded dialogs demo is downright painful. It's even worse on my home system. This is with qt-4.4.0 release (commercial).

I know this isn't KDE's problem, but Trolltech's, but it's still still going to directly impact us. I'm not going to throw away a perfectly good two year old laptop just to run the KDE desktop!

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Re: wow
by Aaron Seigo on Wednesday 30/Apr/2008, @13:42

> Some of us don't have high end video cards

there haven't been performance degradataion associated with our use of WoC. to use your words, we haven't overdone it.

thank you for your concern, i just hope this doesn't turn into another piece of FUD for me to have to deal with now.

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Re: wow
by David Johnson on Wednesday 30/Apr/2008, @14:29

It's not happening on my coworker's system, but it is happening on mine. Trying to move the slider on the pad navigator example shows a significant lag, and that's a pretty simple widget. The embedded dialogs demo is completely unusable. It's not a crappy video card and easily handles most things compiz throws at it with ease. (But even with a high end card, remote desktop access is still a frequent use case for me).

I'll report this to Trolltech as a bug.

p.s. I've tried making a screen capture with xvidcap, but it's not capturing the widgets.

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Re: wow
by mat69 on Wednesday 30/Apr/2008, @15:12

Maybe it has something to do with the drivers of your video card.

E.g. I did not have good experiences with my X1600 AGP -- in other words it sucks -> no OpenGL ;) -- while I was able to run KDE 4 from trunk on an onboard intel chip without _any_ problems.

If that was the case putting the presure on the KDE team to work around driver bugs or generall messy drivers would be the wrong way imo.

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Re: wow
by David Johnson on Wednesday 30/Apr/2008, @15:30

I'm not meaning to put pressure on the KDE developers, as it is a Trolltech bug. I am only alerting KDE developers to a problem that many users will face.

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Re: wow
by me on Wednesday 30/Apr/2008, @22:20

it's not a trolltech bug as these effects work good with on board intel cards which are less than or as powerful as your Radeon card.

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Re: wow
by David Johnson on Thursday 01/May/2008, @09:58

Well it's somebody's bug because it doesn't work!

I should add that the bug is not as pronounced on my Radeon 9000, which is a much older and less powerful card than the X1400. Also, I get great results under Windows with the same card. So it's definitely in the driver.

I say this is a Trolltech bug because Trolltech has made this feature dependent on specific driver capabilities without specifying what they are. At least with antialiasing Trolltech will tell you that you need XRender. But what do I need for Plasma to work? I have no clue because Trolltech hasn't disclosed the requirements of WoC. Maybe it's something simple like one line added to my xorg.conf, maybe it's applying a well known patch to my driver, or something like that. I'm hoping it doesn't mean I have to get a new video card, because this is a *laptop*!

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Re: wow
by Stefan Majewsky on Saturday 03/May/2008, @10:44

> At least with antialiasing Trolltech will tell you that you need XRender. But what do I need for Plasma to work? I have no clue because Trolltech hasn't disclosed the requirements of WoC.

On the technical side, the whole trick about WoC is that a QWidget has QPaintDevice as its base class. That means that a QWidget can be "drawed" on every painting base (such as a display, a printed document, or a QGraphicsView which the Plasma desktop is derived of).

The technical requirements for the drawing process depend on the render hints set by the application (for example: antialiasing and bilinear filtering) and, of course, on the implementation of the drawing process (for example: which external libraries are used). All of these requirements are set by Trolltech through the implementation of Qt.

To come back to your question: A QWidget is essentially the same as a rectangle or an image (= an object that can be drawed on some display). If your machine can paint rectangles or images on the Plasma desktop, it will definitely also be able to paint widgets on the desktop.

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