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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."
No, you can turn off compositing. Unlike akonadi, which already makes KDE unusable.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
More like the winds of stupidity. GNOME is still designed for idiots, and the KDE developers decided that being a rock solid DE with a good OLE model was less important than having cool looking visual effects and trendy desktop applets.
Palm trees and 8
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.
I can tell you that 4.5rc2 automagically loads up akonadi and all of its fluff/garbage/helpers if you have a clock plasmoid. Without option to turn it off.
Akonadi and Nepomuk are simply jokes. Enforcing them on the user, specially considering how useless both services are, is a really bad idea©.
Nepomuk can be disabled easily, not so much for Akonadi. You literally need to cheat it by giving empty path strings, or no clock.
I'm a major KDE advocate, but those two services get on my nerves way too much, specially because they are rather hefty for what they do (for me, nothing at all, for others, very limited usage).
Rant mode ON:
KDE seems exceedingly dependent on itself right now. And integration efforts (with popular apps out of KDE) are pretty much non-existent or unknown even among devs (I discovered after a friendly rant about the current "closed" state of things, that Krunner now does index Firefox bookmarks. The person who corrected me learned it by pure chance it seems, as no "user friendly media" (getting deeeeeeeeeeeep into mailing lists and all the bulk of svn commits is not user friendly, it costs more than mere minutes to check all that) reported on it at all).
I don't know who is to blame but whoever is responsible for this, is not helping the already damaged (by 4.0) reputation of KDE. Half-baked and/or mandatory apps are not helping. Neither does the silly "KDE SC" gimmick.
I can only think something in the management chain is broken, leading to absurd/rushed/experimental decisions pulled off. Either that or the exceeding majority of the 6-month release cycles is translation/bugfixing. As new features talked about during the release of "KDE 4.X" are implemented in "KDE 4.X+1" in the same state shown during the 4.X release (Look at tiled windows in the 4.5 branch. It's there, but...)
Rant mode OFF
Sorry, I really needed to put that up for discussion. Whenever Akonadi is mentioned I go berserk as I am reminded of stuff like it being a requisite for the standard clock.
The worst is that I am an enthusiastic KDE user and I follow development closely, trying betas and reporting bugs. I don't feel "betrayed" or anything like that, but some things are too annoying/habit breaking/RAM eating. Krunner, a Quicksilver/Kupfer-like launcher, can't be disabled and I was told by KDE people that it governs over logout functions (WHY THE LAUNCHER? why can't I just have my alternative of choice without option to take it out or disable it?).
Well, at least the project is dynamic and a good fix/decision changes for better can happen eventually.
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