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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."
or you just don't turn on the optional compositing in the first place? this is a new feature created and intended for newer machines.
No, you can turn off compositing. Unlike akonadi, which already makes KDE unusable.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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
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
Aerated plastic tubs and earthworms.
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.
Eye candy in Linux DEs can make work a good deal smoother -- resources are better shared between CPU and GPU. Plus there are some very useful effects -- expo and scale plugins (both in Kwin and compiz). Transparency can come handy too. Granted, desktop cube is there just for show as there are wobbly windows, fire or water effects.
And advanced effects don't really add that much to boot time -- I still manage to stay within 30 seconds on a rather old hardware, even with P4-class PC.
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.
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.
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?
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,
Well said. I agree completely. If you haven't already, you should check out one of Aaron Seigo's posts from earlier this year on his blog:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html
He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.
In my opinion Aaron Seigo needs to go. He seems like a really nice guy and all, but he still defends the release strategy of KDE4.0 (and this despite being one of the lead devs of the -at the time- completely bug-ridden and barely functional plasma), and seems to always be at the forefront of KDE4's questionable future plans. They've reached feature parity(?) with 3.5.X. Now they need to work on stability and speed. Stability and speed. Stability and speed. The obsession with social networking integration is stupid and shortsighted. The SC naming scheme is lame. And almost as many users are now annoyed by neopomuk and akonadi as they are by that damn cashew.
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
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, ...
Yep. This was my feeling exactly. I had been using KDE since 1.1 or earlier. I've now switched to Enlightenment e-16 (very old but still being maintained). It took some work to customize but now I'm happier with e-16 than I was with KDE-3.5.10. YMMVG.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin