Slashdot Mirror
KDE Plasma Active 3 Improves Performance, Brings New Apps
jrepin writes "KDE has released the 3rd stable version of Plasma Active, KDE's device-independent user experience. The Plasma Active user interface is touch-friendly and works well across a range of devices. Its Activities function gives users a natural way to organize and access their applications, files and information. Plasma Active Three noticeably improves the user experience with its enhanced and expanded set of apps, improved performance and a new virtual keyboard."
Do they even have xfce for a tablet? Plasma active is KDE's "touch screen" interface, which they say is for "everything" but is clearly targeted at tablets, since all their graphics show it being used on one.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
The standard desktop KDE has done nothing in the touchscreen area...
Plasma active is another environment designed for touchscreen devices, while Plasma desktop sticks to the old desktop paradigm...
Nothing to rant about
at least iOS and OSX are kept separate.
Just as KDE Plasma and KDE Plasma Active are kept separate.
I agree the naming should be clearer, but Slashdot posters should also RTFS.
Sounds like classic PEBKAC to me since the full KDE suite loads faster than that on my 1Ghz netbook.
And you can make it as basic as you want, even down to using openbox as your window manager in KDE if you don't like kwin.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
The KDE team has worked a lot on the performance of these components. A modern KDE release won't expose those problems. The Akonadi/Nepomuk combo is certainly not even the bottleneck on Atom-based hardware of three years ago.
There were performance problems in the beginning, but they're firmly under control now. Please update your bias accordingly. :-)
A lot of the blame KDE gets comes from the many services that the various distros run at startup/login that are not part of KDE. However, on the same system, KDE is less resource intensive than Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell and loads faster. On Ubuntu systems, the same can be said for KDE vs Unity.
However, if you are loading a lot of background applications when you log in, the speed and resource improvements will be less noticeable as other factors come into play.
A 1ghz atom processor with 512KB ram is quite responsive. If one is going to spend a lot of time in something like LibreOffice, then 1GB ram might be a better choice, simply because the additional resource required for LO.
Of course that would be the case for XFCE and LXDE and others, too. We get so hung up on the resource of the base desktop, when it is the choice of applications being run that determine the real resource need (ie LXDE will run happily on 256KB ram, just don't try to open firefox or libreoffice).
I like KDE myself but I can see why some people think it's too top heavy.
I prefer the term 'bloated pig'.
I tried KDE again recently because Canonical are about to obsolete the version of Ubuntu I'm running (the last with Gnome 2) and I took about a minute just to log in on an i5 system. A lot of that is probably loading the fancy graphics from disk rather than waiting for the CPU to do something, but I can live without fancy graphics.
You can turn off the 3d rendering of KWIN in the settings. However, unless it was your first boot where it is creating a bunch of configuration files for the user, etc. It sounds like there is something else wrong. You might check your logs as that is definitely not the norm.
... Since the average PC user now measures their RAM in gigabytes this isn't a concern for some people. But if you want your DE to have a smaller memory footprint then KDE is the worst choice.
That's not true anymore. KDE is currently the more resource friendly than Gnome or Unity, at least according to Phoronix. On the otherhand, the KDE developers, dismiss such comparisons as they can vary widely from one release/update to the next.
Quanta hasn't been updated in five years.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I really cannot understand why there is not more interest in this. This is HUGE: It's the first and only fully free working environment for tablets. And it presents a new way of working with tablets (activities) that seems to be more suited to our brains than other paradigms. And it's beautiful to boot.