KDE 3.5.10 Updates Kicker and KPDF

The KDE community has finalised another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release, 3.5.10 brings numerous bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5. The fixes are thinly spread across KPDF with a number of crash fixes, KGPG and probably most interesting various fixes in Kicker, KDE 3's panel.

  • Improved visibility on transparent backgrounds
  • Themed arrow buttons in applets that were missing them
  • Layout and antialiasing fixes in various applets

Note, as with every release, the changelog is not complete as our developers often forget to document their work. For users of KDE 3.5.9 it should be low-risk to upgrade to KDE 3.5.10 since the rules of what is to enter the KDE 3.5 branch are pretty strict at that point, it is in maintenance only mode.

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Comments

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

KDE4 alone with X.org server perfectly fits into 512MB or even less RAM, but then try to run a handful of applications and services, and you'll experience what I'm talking about.

God!

Can you, please, download any of Fedora 9 or/and Mandriva 2009 One KDE4 Live CDs and run them on computers with 512MB RAM or less. This is SO easy to check out and you won't blame me for making unfounded statements!

Until you do that there's nothing to argue about or discuss.

by Julien Blanc (not verified)

Sure... As long as you start a bunch of qt3 and gtk apps, the memory use is going to get higher.

IMHO people tends to consider that kde4 uses more memory because they run a lot of kde3 apps. And loading qt4 + qt3 (worse, kdelibs3 and kdelibs4) is, and there's nothing that can be done about that, more memory consuming than just loading qt3/kde3.

Just give the time to port apps like amarok/k3b to kde4, and memory use of "kde4" will decrease greatly :).

by Janne (not verified)

"Can you, please, download any of Fedora 9 or/and Mandriva 2009 One KDE4 Live CDs and run them on computers with 512MB RAM or less. This is SO easy to check out and you won't blame me for making unfounded statements!"

Like it has already been said: LiveCD:s suck for measuring performance. I have tested KDE4 through LiveCD on my MacBook Pro. It has 2.4GHz dual-core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. And guess what? It ran slow. For starters, it consumes a lot of RAM to load the contents of the CD to RAM. Seconduly, since not everything is loaded to RAM, it occasionally fetches stuff from the CD; and that is REALLY slow.

I tried the LiveCD:s to see the functionality and features. Never in million years did I imagine that they would give me accurate idea what the performance is like.

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

LiveCD image stored on your HDD gives you roughly the same performance as a usual system installed on your HDD.

LiveCD's may suck in measuring performance but I can clearly see how much RAM they need to run.

by Janne (not verified)

"LiveCD image stored on your HDD gives you roughly the same performance as a usual system installed on your HDD."

Um, then you are not talking about LiveCD anymore. If the system is installed on the HD, then it's not running from the HD, and therefore it's not a LiveCD anymore.

"LiveCD's may suck in measuring performance but I can clearly see how much RAM they need to run."

LiveCD's do not give you accurate information regarding memory-consumption or speed.

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

Well, I'm not in a mood of arguing with you :-)

It seems like you disregard my arguments without proving anything - I have facts - you have superficial opinions.

I've been a techie for the last fifteen years and I can tell you for sure, that running LiveCD Linux image gives you a very good impression about its environment speed and characteristics - you CAN compare any KDE3.x based LiveCD distro with any KDE4.x based LiveCD distro. The former will run just fine if you allocate just 256MB of RAM for it, the latter will not be running fine until you give it 768MB of RAM. Once again, I'm talking about running ISO images stored on your HDD.

If you DO that that come back and give me more reasoning :-)

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

I think you are absolutely wrong here. You state that you have facts, and dissenting people have opinions. That alone counts against you right there. You're saying exactly opposite things. One person isn't commenting on objective matter while the other is commenting on subjective matter.

First off, we are talking about something objective, and easily verifiable. Do LiveCDs represent real world memory usage? No, they do not.

Live CDs have to run off of memory. Different live CDs do this through a variety of different means. Sabayon live CDs load through QEMU for some crazy reason. Some will attempt to see swap and use it. Some load a huge image into memory to have more apps, while others load less into memory to have more room for running those apps. Some Live CDs use different file systems, different forms of compression, etc.

People compile binaries differently as well.

Regardless, in the simplest terms, if you want to compare KDE 3 versus KDE 4 for performance, you'd have to attempt to compile them both along very similar lines, even though QT and the underlying libraries are quite different. You'd need to compare a pure KDE 3/QT 3 environment with the same apps/services running against a pure KDE 4/QT 4 environment with the same apps/services running. And you'd want them to run natively, installed properly on the drive, not off some live CD.

Running the live CD itself affects memory usage itself and distorts your results.

by maximegb (not verified)

Do LiveCDs represent real world memory usage? No, they do not.

Live CD's are useful by their own. So I can't see why you have decided they are an inferior way to compare KDE 3 and KDE 4.

by dave (not verified)

livecds are compressing data and uncompressing is memory overhead. basic know how.

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

Live CD's are useful for a great deal many things. Don't get me wrong. However, saying that KDE 4 can't be run on a system with less than 768 megs of memory because a Live CD was slow on a 512 box isn't a fair statement.

by Janne (not verified)

"It seems like you disregard my arguments without proving anything - I have facts - you have superficial opinions."

What are my "opinions" then? Just about only thing I have said is that "you can't use LiveCD to measure performance". I have made no claims regarding performance of KDE4.

So you have facts? Where are they? All I have seen is your OPINION that KDE4 has poor performance. I have seen no facts anywhere.

"I've been a techie for the last fifteen years"

I have been a techie since I have been about 6 years old. That was 24 years ago. Do I win a prize?

"The former will run just fine if you allocate just 256MB of RAM for it, the latter will not be running fine until you give it 768MB of RAM."

But the thing is that I have seen people run KDE4 on Nokia's tablets. I have seen KDE run on OpenMoko. I have seen KDE4 run on computers with 512MB of RAM. And while the former two might be a bit on the slow side (what do you expect, really?), the latter machine seemed to work just fine.

"Once again, I'm talking about running ISO images stored on your HDD."

But that's not LiveCD. LiveCD runs on the CD, it does not touch your HD at all.

by Morty (not verified)

Yes you can see how much RAM a liveCD need to run, but it's not comparable to real installation or in many cases even to other liveCDs.

Running the liveCD image from a cd, harddrive or punchcards do not really make any difference, by nature a liveCD need way more RAM than a proper installation.

As they are designed to run from a readonly media, to achieve proper functionality they allocate a part of the physical memory to use as ramdisk to hold the parts of the filesystem where read/write access are required. Since the size of the ramdisk are dictated by the strategy chosen by of the distribution and the whim of the developers, it will wary between different distributions.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Smootly isn't the correct word for KDE4 on my eeePC.
It runs, much MUCH MUCH slower/fatter than KDE3.

I know some people who did the comparsion also and they have all the same results, using ubuntuEEE. Maybe your distro or KDE is very well optimized?

by Pumpkin (not verified)

I'm running openSUSE here.

by David Johnson (not verified)

It runs slower and fatter on my 1.5G RAM, dual core Thinkpad T60 as well. It's very frustrating to have a three year old laptop treated as "legacy" by KDE.

by boudewijn rempt (not verified)

David, who, outside the dot.kde.org peanut gallery, told you your T60 was considered legacy by the KDE developers?

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

I have 4.1 on my Eee 900 and I don't see that much of a performance hit compared to KDE 3.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

chances are it has nothing to do with memory consumption or cpu cycles otherwise used and everything to do with things like graphics card drivers.

when you and others say, "kde4 runs slow for me" i don't doubt you. there are known hardware configurations out there that cause problems due to driver related issues, for instance. there have also been issues related to performance in the newer Qt4 technologies which have been worked on (and continue to be improved still).

but, as if by magic, when these problem items are upgraded underneath KDE4, things start to work and flow a lot nicer. that there are others, in this very thread even, whose experience is quite good out of the box says a lot ...

so .. are there issues on some configurations? yes. is there something KDE can do about it? yes: track down the issues, report them upstream, let people know about them so they know what to expect.

for the large part, however, even with the newness of some parts of KDE 4's codebase .. much of the codebase hasn't changed much, improvements in performance have been made (KConfig in 4.1, for instance) and our biggest challenges currently lie with upstream projects.

by Debian User (not verified)

Hello Aaron,

during the time I used KDE 4.1, I felt that KDE 4.x felt indeed much less snappy that KDE 3.5 and that's what I blame about it:

a) Animations. I don't have these under 3.5 for menus, menu bar, etc, but it was not as easy to disable them for 4.1. Am I right with that? Anyway, I think the animations somehow made it feel slower.

b) The double buffering is what I blame most for the perceived loss of performance. When I open kcontrol in 3.5 right now and switch panes, it flickers. Flicker may be bad and stuff, but it's an _immediate_ response and lasting very short time only.

That so much that I stoped to perceive it long ago as such. With the double buffering it appears that only when the rendering is done, I will see the result and lack the immediate and direct feedback. So I click and get a feedback like 2ms later or more, that's noticable, is it? I am not saying that I won't be used to that in a few years. I am not now.

-----

Otherwise, start times, Dolphin vs. Konqueror file views, previews, etc. did all feel faster, that's right. I think give back flicker and stop animations and you will get people to say that it's fast. The last one is probably something that _should_ be an option.

Yours,
Kay

by AC (not verified)

easy. Loading all the KDE3 libs because not aps have been ported yet.

by harold (not verified)

KDE 4 live cd's work fine on my laptop with 256MB of RAM.

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

I tried Fedora 9 LiveCD and Mandriva One 2009 beta2 LiveCDs - It looks like you tried something else, cause with my distros KDE4 is hardly usable even with 512MB of RAM.

by André (not verified)

Sounds to me like it is time to switch distros then. If others report KDE 4 runs fine with their low-powered system, and yours doesn't, I would seriously doubt it to be a problem with KDE 4 itself. Note that it still *could* be, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

Well, I have given the instructions how to check out my statements about memory consumption and you still insist that I'm just "claiming" something and the world may be different for you.

Why am I still arguing?

by jos poortvliet (not verified)

Livecd's take a lot of ram by themselves already, even without KDE 4.x. I have an Acer Aspire one with 512 mb ram, KDE 4.1 (Kubuntu) runs pretty one.

by Anon (not verified)

Just the desktop, or desktop + apps?

by dave (not verified)

desktop+kmail+konqueror+openoffice on 1.5 singlecore+512m ram+no desktop-effects+suse.

by odysseus (not verified)

"KDE 4.1.0 is all shiny and sexy but I cannot imagine running it smoothly on a PC with less than 768MB of RAM."

4.1 absolutely flies on my Asus eee 701 with 512Mb and underclocked 600Mhz cpu, and that's _with_ compositing switched on. The "wows" I get out of people when they see Cover Flow task switching with live preview...

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

My eeePC must have some defect...
What distro are you using?

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

LFS :-)

by Michael "nVidia... (not verified)

Scream if you've already been asked this, but what type of graphics card do you use. It's well known that nVidia cards' 2D performance sucks, particularly since KDE4 uses 2D hardware acceleration.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

"KDE 4.1.0 is all shiny and sexy but I cannot imagine running it smoothly on a PC with less than 768MB of RAM."

I saw it running smoothly on a 6-year old notebook with 256 MB RAM. The only feature which cannot be used is compositing.

by blackbelt_jones (not verified)

I only wonder since release notes lack any sings of EOL, does that mean that KDE 3.5.11 will follow? When KDE 4.0 was out I predicted KDE 3.5.10 would be released and it happened so, but now KDE 4.x is maturing and I feel like it's time to say good bye to our old friend who served us well.

Out of my cold dead hand.

You know, I really wanted to like KDE4.1, and I briefly convinced myself that I did, but I lost interest after two or three weeks of use. It's just not as flexible and powerful, though it may be one day soon. I usually run KDE applications from fluxbox, but I'm running KDE3 right now, and after running KDE4.1 for a few weeks, KDE3 never felt so straightforward and stable. I know KDE4 has potential, but "potential" is not a good reason to surrender the most advanced and functional expression of the desktop as we've known it for the past 25 years or so. KDE4 is important work, and the job of developers is development. But users have to use, and KDE3 is more useful. "Maintanance mode" is just fine, security updates are all that is really called for, but KDE4.1 is not as useful to me. Thanks to KDE for taking care of my needs. I think I owe you a modest contribution.

by Morty (not verified)

Since you admit you are not really a user of the desktop in KDE anyway, your insistence on KDE3 are a rather pointless.

As you say you are usually running KDE applications from fluxbox, so upgrading to KDE4 makes more sense for you than most. Just continue as you where before, then you don't get affected by any changes to the desktop made by the switch to Plasma as some users have problems with. But you get access to across the board improvement made to as good as every application ported to KDE4.

by Phd student (not verified)

Yay!

I reported a bug and it's fixed in this update :) My fist ever bug report to be fixed and released! I gotta drink on this one! Now only if 3.5.x choppy word-wrapped scrolling would be fixed... but we can't have everything! ;)

by Dima (not verified)

Sorry if it's a dumb question, but I can't figure out how to install it in Ubuntu.
Kubuntu's instructions (http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-3.5.10) say:
1. Launch Adept
2. In Software Repositories enable Unsupported updates in Updates.
...

But there's no "Software Repositories" in Adept. There's "Adept"->"Manage Repositories", but it just does "apt-get update". I'm sure I've seen the repository editor before, though. What am I missing?

I'd rather just edit /etc/apt/sources.list myself, though. Does anyone know what I should add?

by Aaron (not verified)

Adept -> Manage Repositories -> Update tab -> Check the Unsupported Updates box, fetch updates, voila.

by Dima (not verified)

Well, as I said, when I click "Manage Repositories", it just updates everything - same as if I click "Fetch Updates". There's no "Update tab" anywhere.
Is my Adept broken?

by Aaron (not verified)

When I hit Adept -> Manage Repositories I get the dialog in the screenshot I'm attaching. I've highlighted the update tab and and Unsupported Updates checkbox. I haven't done anything funny to Adept (that I can remember) so theoretically we should have the same dialog (You're using kubuntu 8.04?). About Adept says I'm using "Adept Manager 2.1 Cruiser."

by Aaron (not verified)

Here's the screenshot I forgot to attach. Sorry :-(

by Dima (not verified)

I don't get the dialog box at all... But if I run adept_manager from the terminal, I see this:
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/apt/__init__.py:18: FutureWarning: apt API not stable yet
warnings.warn("apt API not stable yet", FutureWarning)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/software-properties-kde", line 34, in
from softwareproperties.kde.SoftwarePropertiesKDE import SoftwarePropertiesKDE
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/softwareproperties/kde/SoftwarePropertiesKDE.py", line 36, in
from PyQt4.QtCore import *
RuntimeError: the sip module supports API v3.0 to v3.6 but the PyQt4.QtCore module requires API v3.7

Not sure what Qt4 has to do with adept.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

software-properties-kde is written in PyQt4.

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

At the linking stage of kmdr-editor I get this error:

http://pastebin.ca/1186020

--enable-final is NOT enabled.

Fedora 9/gcc 4.2.4

Sad ...

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

--enable-visibility causes this error.

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

I did not realize this release was on the way and there are some improvements in Kommander for this branch. They were mostly personal, but had I realized I might have added more. Anyway Kommander 3.5.10 is worth looking at.

by konqueror (not verified)

As for me and a lot of colleagues kde4 doesn't fit our needs - no i'm not
going to list the features i'm missing or things that went in a wrong direction
(don't want to get my post removed) - thanks a lot for maintaining
the KDE3 branch. I really enjoy to work with.
Geared to professional work, but highly customizable though, it's an ideal
platform to get things done.

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

This attitude will ensure that KDE 4 never meets your needs. Drop the negativity, use bugzilla to make sure there are reports for the missing features, be patient, and you'll make KDE 4 better for you and for others.

by Andreas (not verified)

No, his point is "Don't fix it if it works".

by ad (not verified)

No, his point is that he prefers KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.1

by doc_ds (not verified)

It is never the point of negativity. Imagine this, you're working on some let say code file, editing for example, using kate. After you extracted the point of error, and successfully eliminated impossibilities, you save your code, pressing CTRL+S, but somehow in the same time KDE Nepomouk, or whatever is spelling here, emits some garbage over D-bus, your plasma crashes, at the same time the child process crashes too, kate dies, all your work is annihilated. Will you write bugzilla report? Say yes and you're qualify in the same category as the guy who actually invented that D-bus garbage, the category is amateurism.