Even though there was a lot of negative criticism over the new KDE, but over the last time there are mostly positive critics and they encouraged me to try this DE (some of them even told me that KDE4 is better than MS Vista's and even OSX's one!). For those which don't know what is KDE and what should they expect from it, here is the official link from the devs. : http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.1/


With the comming of KDE 4 lots of things changed and lots of new things were added in it, but I'll keep on one productive thing in here, and its called Folder view which I'll explain in short first.

We know that the concept of every DE which is orthodox for almost every computer user in the world is to have a panel with a start menu, w/ a list of apps which work, a clock, and having folders and link on top of the desktop. Now, imagen that folder desktop, with all its icons and links to be a field (square) on the desktop background. Something like the first attachment.

Every folder shown on the desktop is not just graphics with links to the folders and apps. If you erase a folder in the widget, it erases itself from the file sys. too. So, the changes are real, and all the basic file operations are supported. You can change file names, copy, paste, copy from one Folder view to another one with drag-and-drop (which is a great bling-bling ), and so on and on.

Adding widgets is now very easy] (see the other 2 attachments), and the actuall performance of the widgets [i] are stunning , which is a result of the new [b] Plasma [/i] technology built into KDE4. In fact, the whole desktop is made from widgets, everything is a widget in the desktop of KDE4, the menus, they panels, the clock, the list of applications!

If you don't like this concept of folders, you can get one folder, and make it full-screen. What I like is because of the productivity. You can make more folders and they'll stay on the desktop. One works at the moment, one with finished materials, and the other one with additonal materials to help you get more productive .


Will this become an orthodox concept, we'll let the time tell. People are afraid of changes , so even if it becomes, we'll have to walk a looong road for it to pass...

 

 

 

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The FolderView widget lags a lot for me when i scroll in it. It's probably due to the transparency effects, but i'm not sure.—found out the problem: bad Nvidia driver; switching to their latest beta driver fixed it and increased window management performance all around. I removed it from off the desktop though it is useful. It is now happily on my desktop once again. And it has always been easy to add widgets. But i should get into making my own.

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Hi, in my opinion this KDE(4.X) is some bad in many aspects. The first one i has noticed is performance, i have never used such a slow desktop manager as kwin4. It takes expensive minutes to change between windows. Then i cant believe that as my friend says everything is a widget. They are adding layers between kde and X11. This is making every process slow and they are creating bottlenecks in this layers.
I feel that KDE doesnt have much to say. They are coming to an end. After the QT library was closed but "let" kde keep using it, it made very good developers feel dislike from this library and quit kde development. I am one of those that used to cooperate in programming and translating kde packages for Debian.
Fortunately there is always GNOME with 2.20 version that is faster that the older releases.
I must aclare that my computer is a Pentium III with 4mb of video dedicated RAM(i810) and 256mb of ram.
With this requirements it is impossible to run kde4 so this guys should think about changing the word "preformance" from the release announcement. They are laying.
Another thing i am thinking is that Kde 4 is just some new publicity for QT4 that is diying very slow. I give no more than 5 years before QT die with KDE or QT comes again to an open source license.
I love philosophy of software, maybe sometime i will write about this more explained for normal people.

Regards

 

 

 

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Back when i was on the slow computer in my house—1.2ghz (Celeron), 512mbs of RAM, on-board Intel i810—KDE4 (at that time was 4.0) loaded up faster than KDE3. But KDE4's first release was geared toward testers and other developers, not for productive environments. The KDE4 devs said that KDE 4.1 would be the starting point toward productive environments (i've been running KDE 4.1 as my default DE for a few days now). You mention Pentium 3, but that doesn't supply us with the gigahertz, though it's probably more than the Celeron i was using back then. They weren't lying about KDE4's performance; not being able to run on your computer says nothing about performance. Trolltech provides dual licences for Qt3 and Qt4, it wasn't a back and forth thing. It hasn't been too long since the release of Qt 4.4 and i don't see them going in any direction that implies their end. KDE3 will still be around for a long while and i'd give it around 3 more years for KDE4 to catch up to KDE3.

Kwin4 isn't a desktop manager, it's a window manager; Plasma is the desktop manager. I'ma assume that you tested KDE4 on another machine rather than the one you talked about here, probably your friend's computer, or else you'd be contradicting yourself when you say KDE4 can't run on your system. But i have no idea of the system specs of the system you tested KDE4 on—could be better, worse, or not much better than your system. If you can run KDE3, then you should be able to run KDE4, since it's less resource hungry.

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Probably your performance issues are caused by your nvidia card.
The nvidia (closed) driver don't have some features (extensively) used by kde4.

A lot of people noticed HEAVY slowdown using nvidia and kde4...
[To get better performance try the new beta driver from nvidia (177.70)]
Now nvidia is working on the new driver release that will (hopefully) let us enjoy more kde4.

-reply by Framp

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