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KLyDE: Lightweight KDE Desktop In the Making
jrepin writes "During Hack Week 9 at SUSE, longtime KDE hacker Will Stephenson started working on a project codenamed KLyDE. This project's aim is to bring KDE Plasma to the lightweight desktop market. It applies KDE's strengths of modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop." Better said, Stephenson was able to devote lots of time to it; he's been working on the project for a few years now.
Removing the more bloated 'features' KDE is laden with by default would get most of us there. I suspect 99% of KDE users would be just fine without the Akonadi MySQL instance in their home directory.
FTA: "Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan't fit in the same sentence. I think they can."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
KDE Lightweight = Razor-QT, it's already been done MATE. ;-)
Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.
are for people that want linux to be windowsified.
Real h4x0r5 use the CLI. Anything else is just n00b. I'm browsing slashdot and posting with lynx, because I'm 1337.
People buy KDE installs now?
I bet it could be even faster if you run it from a console and skip that pesky startx command too.
Look I'm not knocking the guy's efforts. But who are ya gonna believe? Me or some random Slashdot article?
Why does goat.cx still only have the pumpkin? Is the .cx domain still bitching about inappropriate content?
While I applaud the programmer's efforts, I must say that it's efforts like these in the Open Source Community, that end up as wasted!
You see, everyone who is talented, ends up "doing their thing," resulting in duplication and waste. One wonders why the talent of this programmer doesn't get absorbed into the larger KDE project. What would the harm be?
My idea of lightweight do not include unity or any recent gnome desktop. compare against xfce or lxde... anything else is uselessly fat and slow.
Tomorrow is another day...
openbox is faster.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
Lightweight is no longer about size... cheap systems are coming with 8GB of Flash and 2GB of RAM these days.
What's important is speed on relatively (400MHz) slow/weak low power processor cores.
To make a lighter KDE, you have to use less code, so while this sounds good in theory its impossible unless you leave out whole lilbrarys of stuff you may not need. Then if you need it you can call it up from the repostitory. So in effect you could make a lighter version but then as you add programs that need components you dont have,just add them back in and then you have the same bloated mess.
Same on gnome, download Kate and you get half of KDE desktop as part of the deal, nothing you can do about it unless you choose a different application to use.
KDE and lightweight is an oxymoron.
So lightweight, to you, means size of the package, vs. code actually running?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Lightweight means, runs very snappy on hardware less than 12 years old without discrete GPU...
Tomorrow is another day...
So the Kool Ly Desktop Environment?
Makes no sense.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
If KDE's "modularity" makes it faster, when will I start to see these modules in my favorite Linux distros.
Yeah, the MS astroturfers are all over this as usual.
It's impossible to have a sensible discussion about an interesting FOSS project without them squirting Ballmer-bile over the whole story.
Microsoft?
Oh, same thing.
Oh wow, I am so informed by this insightful and thoughtful comment.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
--
BMO
you mean the OSX that is a spiffy UI on a freetard OS, and people USE OSX?
laughing my fucking ass off
Modern Linux doesn't run right on hardware that old (and I don't just mean GNOME/KDE). Just try and run Fedora (or Ubuntu, etc) on a Pentium III with Intel i845 graphics. Driver support is no longer existent. You could try on 12yo hardware with real graphics, but I still don't think it'll work right (I hate KMS drivers).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
KDE 1.x ran fine on my Pentium I 120MHz with 48MB RAM, 1MB Cirrus Logic graphics and a 1GB HDD.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Look at this! http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/package/xorg-edgers/precise/main/base/xserver-xorg-video-intel A driver for i845 chipset. Not install this and try lxde on it.
Tomorrow is another day...
Just try and run Fedora (or Ubuntu, etc) on a Pentium III with Intel i845 graphics. Driver support is no longer existent.
Huh?
I have Linux Mint Debian running on exactly the machine you're saying has no driver support. I upgraded the original 512MB RAM to 2.5GB with salvaged parts, but that's all. It's still a nice useful machine.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yeah, the MS astroturfers are all over this as usual.
It's impossible to have a sensible discussion about an interesting FOSS project without them squirting Ballmer-bile over the whole story.
The thought of ballmer juice squirting onto anything is enough to make me sick.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Openbox + tint2 + Compton is love.
Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.
Except for kmail/akonadi, an unmitigated disaster.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Except speed and size are highly correlated. Computer architectures are still designed in such a way that if you use as little RAM as possible, and have a small computation footprint that's highly localized, then your performance skyrockets. So the available 2GB RAM is irrelevant - if you actually make full use of it, you'll be running a lot slower than if you can fit everything you need to do in 4K.
Using your RAM makes your computer slower? You're joking, right? The major issue is how much your code causes cache misses.
Yup, and how big are L1 caches? 32KB or so? RAM is the new disk. Don't use it unless you have to.
Already been several mini-distros (the whole system is under 100 MB) that do use KDE. Things like Nimblex come to mind, though that's been a few years ago now. Admittedly not sure they kept Plasma though ...
But as KDE is supposed to be able to run on phones now, it should be easy enough.
It's clear what lightweight means just from examining its two parts: "light" and "weight" both allude to there not being much there, little mass or volume. The words are of course a physical metaphor when applied to software.
When something has little physical mass and volume then it tends to move fast for any given force, and so as a consequence we tend to associate "lightweight" also with higher speed, but it's only a consequence, not the primary meaning.
In software, being lightweight and being fast are properties that do not always track each other. As a first rule of thumb, smaller code tends to have more locality simply through being smaller, and hence it can run faster through producing fewer cache misses. However, small code is often somewhat dumb code, and a large and complex beast of a program can be designed to have greater locality in its innermost loops and hence to be more cache friendly and run faster. As a result it is hard to generalize whether lightweight also means fast. You have to examine each case separately.
As a counter-example to "lightweight == fast", the browser Midori is extremely lightweight (very small), consisting of little more than a simple graphic Gtk+ wrapper around webkit. Firefox in contrast is a huge monster of a program and could never ever be called lightweight. However, Firefox runs much faster than Midori, because its designers have used its complexity very productively to make its performance top notch.
So, you really can't generalize beyond observing that smaller programs load faster from disk and, everything else being equal, tend to have better cache locality and hence higher speed. However. heavier programs can buck this general rule by using more complex designs and algorithms to boost their runspeed.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It's listed as "supported" but unless something has changed recently the X.org driver is broken on i8xx series. Features that used to be supported (like say, hardware rendering) were broken when I last checked (last tried about a year ago). Gave the same performance as the vesa driver.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/i8xxUnsupported
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Ok, compare lxde and kde on a vesa driver then. It still prove the point I wanted to make before you cherry picked this scenario.
Tomorrow is another day...
I think it is good that he did this. Not just to make KDE lightweight. There are DEs that are lighter, but that he did it.
This is what hacking is about: because he can.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A handful of years ago I ended up switching from a custom window manager / desktop setup (WindowMaker based, if you care) to Gnome2. The driver for this was simply effort required to get something useful running in a short amount of time. As a developer I'm not getting paid to faff around with getting a desktop environment up and running. Gnome served me well, and even convinced me to switch away from xterm/uxterm. On a fresh Ubuntu install, all I needed was a few tweaks to the terminal config, a keyboard shortcut or two (launch terminal + virtual desktop switching), and I could feel "home" enough to be productive. Fantastic.
== Caution: incoming rant. ==
However, as of a few months ago I'm back to using WindowMaker. Why? Because of the unholy fustercluck which is known as Ubuntu / Unity / Gnome3. I had a perfectly fine desktop environment running on my 10.04 install. After upgrading to the next LTS release, my entire desktop was, to put it mildly, fubared. Whoever thought they were entitled to completely replace a user's desktop environment, and not provide a fallback option is worthy of being C-level at EA.
Even after manually adding "gnome-shell" back to the system to try to get my desktop environment back in a working order, I discovered that my keyboard short-cut settings were gone, as were half my panels and virtual desktops. Evicting the gnome-shell and loading up MATE didn't improve the situation (it kept missing keyboard shortcuts, amongst other issues). I tried KDE, but it was, quite frankly, far too "flashy" for me. Oh, and the screenlock refused to work. After having spent over a day trying to get my workstation back into a state where I could actually _work_, I said "stuff it" and installed WindowMaker, grabbed a few dock-apps by source, hacked my xsession to configure my dual-screen setup, set up the ssh-agent, xlock, etc etc. I really haven't missed having to do all of that manually, but by golly, right now there doesn't seem to be an easily usable alternative!
I've installed my last Ubuntu system, that's for sure.
Here endeth rant.
I've been using Linux since Slackware in 98 and CDE on Solaris before that. I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
A classic example of this is back in '08 I switched to a 16:9 monitor. Well thanks to a 6 year old bug in gnome #86382 this rendered gnome unusable for me.
Unfortunately this was also about the time KDE 4 was released. After giving a dozen other DEs a shot, I joined the the dark side.
To this day that 11 year old gnome bug remains unpatched. In an Apple or MS OS this kind of major usability issue would never make it out if Alpha never mind a "stable" release.
In the early days of Linux when It was for hackers by hackers this was acceptable and expected. They want to add cool features not fix bugs. Fine.
But now there's some serious money in Linux. Between Redhat and Ubuntu How the Linux Desktop can remain in such a sorry state. And I fail to see how another fork will make this situation any better.
Sorry for any grammar errors/typos, this message was written on my phone in topically useless all hands meeting.
Well, It' very good idea to have KDE without Akonadi and Nepomuk. Only this can make KDE lightweight. :)) That are the parts I always turn off and I'd love to get rid of entirely. MySQL is another piece of shit that must be cleaned out. If some developer needs "select my,shit from config where other=shit and blahbalbal" to read simple app config, then it's clinic. I used Kmail for years and when it started to use mysql and Akonady I switched to Thinderbird because I do not need all this smartass stuff done by e-mail client in background. So, there's a lot of stuff to simplify in KDE.
But "Less tuning" sounds as not good idea because users love KDE of it's flexibility.
the astroturfers can't get enough of it... they just grovel at his feet jerking him off all day so they can get a taste of his googoo juice
it's sick and pathetic, but only to everyone else
maybe they need some "obamacare"
If your desktop software performance depends on cache optimisation, you are either doing heavy-duty multimedia editing, or doing something spectacularly wrong.
Also rant: cache sizes have been going down to make place for more processors. I personally do numerical calculations, and I find this trend to be a disaster. At this point, my only hope is that eventually, with thousands of cores on chips, we'll be back to something which looks like a vector processor.
I actually works well for me and has for a while. It used to be that first-time-loading of IMAP folder was slow, but now, even very large folder load just fine on my netbook.
It's not perfect, though: replied/attachment state of emails stored on an MS exchange IMAP server gets lost. Oh, well, they are aware, and it will get fixed.
No one will be able to spell your product name correctly if you use a weird combination of upper and lower case letters.
You don't need to focus on the fact that it is a DE. In fact, you already decided that when you came up with a name, instead of an acronym. Make a choice: is it an acronym, or a proper name? You can't have both, it confuses.
Just name it "Klyde".
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Yes, generally the i8xx series is kind of broken. Starting from i9xx, everything is premium though.
How about Xubuntu?
CentOS still has that old environment. Of course you can't run the new gimp locally at the same time due to the gnome people managing to bring something very much like DLL hell to *nix for the first time since linux was thought of.
Funny thing is that since 1998 I've been using Enlightenment 16, it's still available and I still use it as my work desktop. There's a few others from then still in use as well. Your consistent UI has been there all along while MS and even Apple changed a few times.
Thus I don't think your suggested complaint is the reason for your post - it looks instead that you are trying unsuccessfully to find a means to fit your goal of a bit of bashing.
If your desktop software performance depends on cache optimisation, you are either doing heavy-duty multimedia editing, or doing something spectacularly wrong.
Or perhaps he's doing graph algorithms. You know, most things profit from good memory access patterns these days. Your CPU can execute something like 2000 instructions in the time needed for a single random read from the main memory!
Ezekiel 23:20
'cause that is clearly a desktop-oriented application...
Plasma is not a problem. The trick about KDE on low end hardware is to know if you should run KWin effects using XRender, OpenGL or disabled. I would usually bet on disabled, but XRender can be surprisingly well optimized on old GPUs.
how about debian + openbox?
seriously, I do java and php development and have had squeeze installed since it went stable. Currently have iceweasel 20 and linux 3.2 kernel from backports as well and haven't met a hitch that wasn't self-induced yet (touches wood)
You should revisit those tests. There are new ones where KDE pretty much got its ass kicked by Unity: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNDk
KDE 3.0 happily ran on 64MB of ram, with a pentium III, and walked 15 miles to school. If Linux really wants to cut into the end of life of XP markets they should look at old versions of Linux first
Now off my lawn, and this post sent from my Windows 8 pro workstation with 24GB of ram.
'cause that is clearly a desktop-oriented application...
Well, granted, if you're only using simple applications, a ten year old machine will do the job anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
Will this be different than the Kubuntu meta package "Low Fat Settings"?
...Oh, and the screenlock refused to work. After having spent over a day trying to get my workstation back into a state where I could actually _work_, I said "stuff it" and installed WindowMaker, grabbed a few dock-apps by source, hacked my xsession to configure my dual-screen setup, set up the ssh-agent, xlock, etc etc. I really haven't missed having to do all of that manually, but by golly, right now there doesn't seem to be an easily usable alternative!
I've installed my last Ubuntu system, that's for sure.
Just a wild ass guess here, but it sounds like you were hacking on a Debian-based system as if it was Slackware. This may be helpful if you decide to give it another chance.
P.S. Switching to a different theme is a good and fast way to wipe all the flashiness off KDE (and especially Plasma) in short order. I must admit though, it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.
Lxde is terrible IMO. The menus just don't feel like they work right. I had similar issues with black box.
xfce though is fantastic, buy I wouldn't want to run it with 2001 ram levels (though I can't think of any apps I use that'd I'd want to do that with).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If OS X was free and open source (at least to the amount my linux system at the moment is) I'd *begin* to consider it.
To use the same "matter of fact" tone you are:
The goal was to develop an open system that meets my needs. Linux has won.
The time X space trade-off is one of the basic concepts of optmization theory.
Rethinking email
Try to receive 500 mails a day with it. This used to be no problem. Try to do anything with a large folder. Thunderbird is at least ten times faster, somethings 100 or 1000 times faster, and infinitely less buggy.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My opensuse 12.3 with KDE 10 idles at around 400 MB and that is with all the bells and whistles turned on. Not terribly bloated. I can cut it way down my killing akonadi and its bastard children and the 3D effects without any loss of functionality, which of course raises the question: "If it doesn't add functionality or improve productivity why enable it?"
What this means is for someone who listens to music and does everything in a browser a system with 512 MB will run just fine, assuming a decent processor of course. Let's see Windows 7 or 8 do that.
You should be railing against MS for producing truly bloated operating systems not desktop environments like KDE which manage just fine on years-old low-end hardware.
Why would I want to run 12 year old hardware? Sure if I have it laying around I could run a headless Linux OS and use it as storage for all my media, but other than that what possible reason is there to want to run a modern OS on such an ancient system? I run 5 year old hardware that was fairly high-end then and runs everything today fine and I could build an identical copy of it today for not much more than 12 year old hardware.
it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.
The window shadow is a giant blue glow.
I succeeded in installing Gentoo and XCFE on a now 16 year old SGI Indy (one 150MHz MIPS R5K, 160MB 60ns ram, Fast SCSI HDD, framebuffer-only Linux graphics driver). It's not snappy by any means, and it makes it very obvious which programs "do it right" and which ones rely on hardware to cover up bad algorithms. Yet none the less, it boots right up, I can login and start the GUI no problem, I can play music back and do ssh consoles, IRC (with a gui client no less) and even browse the web with a WebKit browser.
Can't imagine what even kde 3.5 would do to the poor thing, let alone kde 4 or gnome 3. Kde 3 might actually have been borderline usable... When my desktop had 256M ram, kde 3 started grinding the hard drive after about 6-7 tabs and 3-4 konsoles were opened.
Also rant: cache sizes have been going down to make place for more processors. I personally do numerical calculations, and I find this trend to be a disaster. At this point, my only hope is that eventually, with thousands of cores on chips, we'll be back to something which looks like a vector processor.
Instead of using a CPU to do these calculations, maybe you should use a vector processor instead. Every computer these days has one, it's called a "GPU". Google for "GPGPU".
I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
Well you'll need to give up on Windows then, thanks to Win8. Your argument had merit about 2 years ago, with Windows UIs being quite stable all the way back to Win95, but that's all out the window now, pardon the pun. Now we just have to wait to see if Apple jumps on the "let's royally fuck up stable UIs!" bandwagon and completely screws up OS X.
All I seem to be able to do currently is change the desktop colors, which often results in poor BG/FG combinations for the tool bar.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
GPUs aren't great for latency sensitive calculations, however. It takes time to read/write into the graphics card. If you can set everything up in advance they're great though.
Yeah, that can be irritating at first, indeed. :(
Luckily, you can turn it off at System Settings > Workspace appearance > Configure Decoration > Shadows tab.
Oh, right, because Phoronix is totally credible when it comes to properly executing benchmarks...
Windows 7 would not only run slowly while swapping to disk every time the browser sneezed, but it would also nag you every 12-15 minutes with a system alert popup about updates or some sort.
Isn't this where the APUs shine? Or at least are trying to?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg