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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.
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...
What about blackbox and awesomewm? Are you shades of grey blind?
Tomorrow is another day...
Will has been contributing to KDE for many, many years and was on the OpenSUSE KDE team until quite recently. There's a lot of work by Will in various KDE projects, and when this is ready for prime time I am sure it will also appear in some form in shipping product.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about Xubuntu?
It's not the byte size. It's the number of objects. Also you forgot, senders. status (can be fairly complicated -- where is the data, for example), attachments. Threads. Lists.
Oh, and the full text should be indexed. We live in 2013 after all.
Basically, unless you are going to confine yourself to the performance and possibilities of pine, you have to do what the KDE guys did. And yes, it is harder and takes longer to debug.
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
The point is that the file-based indexing is the wrong thing. Of course everything ends up being stored in a file.
The key is not the storage, but the indexing. And that is where DBs are vastly superior to flat files.
That's not how it works.
You're making an assumption that a developer will devote the same amount of time and enthusiasm to any project, and therefore any "Me-too" development is a loss to an established project.
That's more or less how it works in commercial development - you have a developer working 8 hours a day on whatever project you give him. It's not how it works in FOSS, which is actually a selfish development model: you work on whatever you want, as much as you want.
It's better to have someone sit down & bang out a yet another variant of X than to have them not turn out anything at all. The new version of X might be enough of an improvement to attract other developers and get you a new killer product. Not doing anything will result in nothing.
He wants to build a lightweight KDE, so he goes off and writes some code and with any luck creates a working KLyDE WM. If he tried to do this within KDE itself, he'd hit a load of politics and entrenched views and spend all his time arguing. He'd get nothing done. Nobody wins.
What you see as duplication and waste is a vital and useful part of FOSS development. Your recommended alternative would result in stagnation as people stop working on what interests them to fight against each other to drive existing projects towards their vision.
That's what the harm would be.
So.. it has come to this
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
That's what the "from" is supposed to indicate. I wish people would read before they reply :(
The stupid fad of doing everything with a database is one reason why I was running a print server for a vector graphics format on a 40MHz SparcStation 10 until 2010 when it was getting better performance than a 2GHz linux box running an updated version of the software - about two minutes per plot versus three and a half (for 42 inches by about ten feet). I've since, thanks to a few tweaks, managed to get the original software running on Solaris10 for Sparc (on a Netra I got for $80, 1.5GHz or so) and its down to under thirty seconds, once again just doing the fucking job instead of farming out an entirely sequential task to a relational database it doesn't need.
Email is mostly sequential as well and when it isn't you get a similar performance hit searching through a small number of indexed files as you get with a database and with far less fragility (although most databases are more robust than the with the sickly child running MS Exchange). When mbox stuffs up you have dozens of options. When a strange database format understood by three people stuffs up (why don't they just use mysql, postgress etc) you are screwed.
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