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KDE SC 4.7 May Use OpenGL 3 For Compositing
An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."
I assume that for those that have older machines and are stuck with pure software implementations of openGL kde will now become unusable.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I love eye candy, as long as there is an easy way to turn it off. I don't need my linux box booting as slow as my windows.
For the ignorant, please explain what KDE currently uses for composting? I know on my machine it's hardware accelerated and DirectX isn't available on Linux. Doesn't that mean, by default, that they used OpenGL?
I recently took a long break from Linux et al., and this is exactly what people were writing about GNOME when last I checked.
KDE was it, and GNOME was designed for idiots, so only idiots used it.
The winds of change
All the people who really needed translucent bouncing icons already migrated to OSX. But I won't complain too much so long as distros still include fvwm.
More things to brag to my friends about. My e-penis will be massive by the time it comes out.
KDE can use XRender and/or OpenGL 2.1.
Just the need to upgrade how Kwin uses OpenGL currently to do rendering. Right now its still using the old OpenGL 1.1 - style rendering (fixed-function rendering pipeline) to a programmable one using vertex and fragment shaders. This way, it'll be easier to port it on embedded devices that uses OpenGL 2.0 by default
Good luck with that.
People will be blaming KDE for the following issues until they abandon the idea:
1. Half the Intel users will blame KDE for the kernel panics you get when using a Hello World shader with some of the Intel drivers..
2. The other half of the Intel users will blame KDE that they can't use any of the items listed (frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers) because they still only support OpenGL 1.5 from 1865..
3. Then there will be the Linux people complaining about it running very slowly because some software driver is used by X11 due to distribution issues with distros and proprietary drivers.
4. The AMD users will probably be using some old buggy version of their driver that has buggy implementation of frame buffer objects or whatever.
5. See #4 but replace AMD with Nvidia.
6. Then there's the army of Linux users that do have a Nvidia or AMD card, but their card is from 1765 and therefore doesn't support OpenGL 3.0.
But besides all that OpenGL 3+ is pretty neat and you can do some fun shaders for your compositing. I wish them the best of luck!
This seems like it can only be a good thing. The major place where we're lacking (AFAIK) is in driver support, and having a major software suite such as KDE use OpenGL 3 will help the driver writers manage some of these bugs (the same way Compiz appearing on the scene majorly improved graphics drivers in Linux a few years ago). Perhaps this will also help to push Intel to OpenGL 3 (or 4 - I mean, COME ON!). At the same time, I have some Linux machines that don't have OpenGL 3 support (one has a GeForce 6600), so I really hope they keep functionality with OpenGL 2 for a while (that machine isn't getting upgraded - the next thing I do to it will be to replace it).
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
You cannot expect new software to work on old hardware forever. So if you have a system with really old hardware, well then you are going to have to stick with older versions of the software. This is just the way of things.
Definitely a troll, considering the token ring and defrag comments.
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
The title is wrong. Is not appropiate to say that KDE SC may use OpenGL 3. Is KWin, the window manager (KDE apps don't call OpenGL directly). KWin can be used in other desktop environments, and other window managers can be used in KDE.
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/KDE-SC-4-4-Fresh-breeze-for-KDE-926340.html
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3865126/KDE-Review-KDE-44-Comes-in-from-the-Cold.htm
http://www.internetling.com/2010/02/17/kde-4-4-review-screenshot-tour-and-kde-4-0-comparison/
first page on my google search for reviews of the initial 4.4 release. the rest were also positive, but remained ballanced by pointing out one or two things they still wanted to see improved. fair enough, balance in writing is good, and f/oss writers tend to apply it in buckets.
if i'd gone thorugh more of the results pages i bet there would be even more such positive reviews.
so i guess it's time for you to try it again.
I don't know that we need any more eye candy in KDE 4. It already has a ridiculous amount of aesthetically pleasing features. How about we squash some existing bugs and add more usability features.
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
Wait, wasn't there a story a few days ago about OpenGL 4.1? What's with the 3.0?
I am using KDE4, but I am probably going to go back to fluxbox on my next machine I am building.
Oh for god sakes people. Kwin provides pluggable back ends for rendering engines for compositing. Currently we support xrender and OpenGL 1.1, soon we will support the next version of OpenGL. Big deal. You can turn compositing on or off, or choose which engine is best for your platform. We will not remove the old engines or force everyone to use compositing. So stop your trolling.
Rofl, that's one of the more useless trolls Ive seen in a while :-)
As computers get more powerful, things become feasible that were not in the past. People want those features. Problem is, making software that uses them doesn't work with older systems.
That is just life. Now as for your example with mainframes, in that case someone chooses to pay for support for a system. They cost a ton to maintain. Also, you do not, in fact, get new software, just support on what you have. If you own an IBM/390, as we do, you don't get to run the new version of zOS on it. You are stuck with old software. Supported software, but old software.
Nowhere did I see anything that said support for old KDE would stop, just htat new KDE may need hardware to do composition. I fail to see the problem here.
Had the article said "may add support for OpenGL 3.0" instead of "may use OpenGL 3.0" then it would have been more obvious that they weren't getting rid of the fallbacks.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
What would be the big deal? Unless you immediately end all support for an old version when a new one comes out, who cares? Part of the march of technology is that sometimes, old hardware gets deprecated. New software requires features and power not found on it. So you have to use the older versions, or update the hardware. Nothing wrong with this unless it is done in an abrupt or forceful manner.
I've no doubt some day KDE will jettison software rendering. It will be so rare to find a non-accelerated computer (getting harder all the time as it) that it won't be worth including in the new version. However I've also no doubt that you won't go and delete the old versions off the net.
Oh, shut it. OS X 10.0 was barely beta quality as well, and somehow people stopped complaining when it started becoming usable, even though the upgrade to 10.2 cost money. Same with Windows Vista (6.0) --> Win7 (6.1). With KDE4, you were even warned not to use 4.0. But you still had to run off and use it, didn't you?
about OpenGL decorating my windows.
DO care about things like "desktop works" and "can find a fast, professional theme that makes taskbar look like window title bars," neither of which is available with KDE since KDE 4 was released.
Yes, I have recently tried KDE, up to and including KDE 4.4.5 on Fedora. It continues to suck eggs. KDE 3 was professional and powerful. KDE 4 seems to have all the options I don't want, none of the options I actually used, no way to get a unified KDE/GNOME/Plasma theme (hell, you can't even get a unified kwin/plasma theme), ugly artifacting with 3D compositing off, craptacular stability and a distinct inability to remember many settings, dog-slow previews compared to Nautilus, no "compact" mode in Dolphin, either, poor dual-display support that fails to automatically handle them elegantly, and a distinct lack of KDE4-specific, complete alternate icon themes at kde-look.org to do away with the bright colors (I don't want red icons and blue icons both on my desktop at the same time; my desktop PC is not an Icee machine, it's totally unprofessional).
In short, I find KDE 4 totally considerably less usable than GNOME or KDE 3.5 and I'm fairly sure that pouring more development hours into 3D compositing is not going to make it moreso. How about just fixing the artifacting with 2D rendering? That I could actually give a damn about, though it would be one problem solved amongst many, many problems that didn't exist until KDE 4.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
To truly hate akonadi, you need to be logging in with $HOME on an nfs mount. And shutting down the box from time to time.
What happens is that KDE issues telinit 6 without waiting for akonadi and mysqld to terminate, which means that your nfs mount is still active at shutdown, so when the system forces the unmount the database is not coherent. Thus you get the dreaded "akonadi could not start" error on next login. Well, that's easy enough to solve by just whiffing $HOME/.local/share/akonadi -- as long as you don't have anything useful stored in there.
Which the KDE team is making harder to do all the time. Good thing the system backs up that akonadi database on a regular basis.
Oh, wait ...
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I've been "trying" KDE 4 for maybe a year or so. I like some things, but I hate most of them. At 4.5 it still feels like someone's abandoned alpha. Every new release brings new UI candy, yet breaks long-standing functionality or fails to address real usability problems (like that stupid desktop peanut - whose idea was that?).
What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.
Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...
It seems the KDE people have forgotten that, above all, we just want a GUI to make our lives easier. Streamline it, trim off the fat, we're Linux users for fuck's sake. People are flocking to minimalist interfaces like Fluxbox, just to get out of KDE hell.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
windows and macs aren't penguins, duh, they're windows and apples. they might be getting all the fish but they sit around with piles of fish looking sheepish cause they don't know what to do with them.
Bah, old hat Trolling. I read the exact same story almost 10 years ago. It was not true then and is not true now.
Not even a nice try.
Really. OpenGL is nice. The one thing that the KDE team could really do to make the DE better is fix the contact manager in Kontact. Please! Fix it. On every install I have, the DE whines about Akondi can't start, and the contact manager does not work. Everything else in the PIM works, but what good is a PIM if it can't keep contacts?
The rest of the DE is great. It looks nice, works well, and is more stable than Win7. I will go so far as to say I love KDE 4. But the contact manager is horribly broken. If any of the KDE devs are watching, please fix it. Or maybe someone can make a working contact manager plugin for Kontact. Dam, I wish I could code.
Cheers, RM
Nobody's as dumb, as I appear to be
Have you reported this as a bug? It certainly sounds like one.
Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).
What with XDG (I think) now also encouraging the use of ~/.local, I fear it's only got to get worse. :(
I ended up just having a truly local ~ and just rsyncing it to the server every night for backup. (But I don't actually have to access my ~ from mulitple locations, so YMMV.)
HAND.
I want HOW the API being used updated. Our desktops should be a perfectly rendered 3d wheat field, gently rustling on a cool summer's eve. Think Far Cry, but no game, just the desktop eye candy. This field would have a button not unlike the start button in the bottom left. It would open many very useful free and open source applications. All of your email contacts with DreamOS would be automagically merged and synced with your iphone or android. If you were at home, your phone would know to route the call through google voice to the computer screen. There, in the field, your contact would appear, either webcam fed background culled, or as an avatar, or more interestingly a blend of the two. Think, just the head on any body imaginable, man or beast. There your friend's disembodied representative would speak with you in perfect 5.1 audio. This OS would also have a plugin system allowing these avatars to conduct basic games real time. Nintendo 64 games, chess, cards....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
It'd be nice if they updated it sometime.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
The problem developing ClanLib's SDK GUI was the lack of Linux driver support for OpenGL.
This currently will not work with any Intel graphics cards. Even the nouveau driver would be very slow. The only option is an official driver from ATI/NVidia.
http://clanlib.org/wiki/Examples#GUI_examples
i cant wait for KDE 4 to come out!
what? no KDE 4 has come out yet! LA LA LA! I CANT HEAR YOU!
Bah, old hat Trolling. I read the exact same story almost 10 years ago. It was not true then and is not true now.
Not even a nice try.
With the bits about token ring and ext2 I think he copied a 10 year old troll...
The problem is that they stopped supporting KDE 3.x so we, the KDE users, were given the only option to use a broken desktop or switch to something else...
'Hey Guys, we are releasing KDE 4.0 because we need feedback to improve it faster. It is plagged with bugs, it crashes a lot, you can consider it as an alpha version. So DONT use it in production, DONT use it at home, DONT even try to use it to show off how cool your fire effects are 'cause you'll be publicly embarrased. It's only usable for testing. Use it at your own RISK.'
I just hope at least those who complained about KDE 4.0 would have died. We need Natural selection back in business.
The software does what it does because the people that MADE it wanted it that way. KDE, nor any other free software, is not being made for YOU - you don't pay for it. It's being made to suit the developers and if you get some use out of it, great!
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Because Linux doesn't have that problem either.
Windows Vista with onboard Intel video chips had problems with compositing. Linux didn't, despite having more bling.
KDE4.0 was released as a "please run this and let us know about ALL the problems because that's the fastest way to find the problems". Like the widespread beta release of Win Vista/ Win7. Did you complain about the crashes for RC1?
Only SuSE dumped KDE3 to use KDE4. And that's not a Linux issue.
And even then "these problems" appear seldom as part of the 3D compositing in KDE, even 4.0.
So the question I ask you is: what problems?
KDE 4 drove me to IceWM and I've never looked back.
KDE 4 is a developers masturbation fantasy run amok, so much so it makes GNOME look better and better all the time.
The desktop is not a toy, it's an interface to accomplishing a task and the KDE devs forgot that when they put their O-face on full time.
Yes, they did. The last 3.x release was 3.5.10, released days before 4.1.1. A good, solid and mature desktop you could use for a year while contemplating whether upgrading to the then rather usable 4.3.1 or moving to a different system. Sure, Microsoft is better at maintaining old versions of the OS. Apple is worse. Gnome's latest major version was back in 2002 or so, and I'm not going to bother with digging up the release history of 1.4, the last Gnome version I used (although I've stopped complaining about Gnome 2.0 now).
If only this would all work with Xinerama.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
All the above comments aside, it sounds to me like linux *did* work in this troll's example. The part they didn't like was that they believed they had to give away all their work "for free", which while probably true, doesn't mean "linux" didn't work, as it clearly did. The troll even mentions (s)he (and/or their company) was pleased with how it worked, and had planned to expand its usage.
Really, troll -- if you're going to spit this crap unto the comment system, at least come up with something that makes sense.
bork bork bork!
Let me know when they manage to fix all of their fuck-ups from the 3.5.x to 4.0 transition.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I used (yes past) Linux on my Work desktop for 10 years. I always used KDE. I know it from the first version until know.
Until KDE 3, KDE really improved, but KDE 4 was a horrible start. I actually didn't start to use it until 4.2, and still it didn't have all the features for KDE 3.5. And it felt slow. Really slow. On the same machine I just suddenly had 15~20% x.org/kde cpu usage. And when I updated to 4.3 and so on it became even worse.
At the end just focus move the mouse took about 3~4s. Well, I ditched, I now work with OS X. It is not perfect, but at least I can do my work compared to KDE 4 which didn't let me do it all.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919