Duncan wrote:
[...]
I can't say that Linus was wrong switching away for awhile,
Linus said he never tried 4.2. And if he was happy with 3.5, why did he
go Gnome? That doesn't make any sense. Just because 4.1 isn't up to
your standards doesn't make 3.5 worse?
The only feature I'm missing from KDE 3 is sticky
keyboard layout switching and HAL mount options.
I'm still missing several. Speed for one.
My video card is an older Radeon 9200SE as that was pretting much the
best available with freedomare drivers for several years, and even still,
full support on the newer cards isn't yet stable -- tho it's improving
very fast and looks to be headed there by the end of the year. The
problem is that the R2xx series chips (of which the Radeon 92xx is one of
the last) only support upto 2048x2048 OpenGL acceleration, and at
1960x1200 stacked for 1960x2400, the bottom 352 pixels of my viewport
aren't OpenGL accelerated.
That means none of the fancy OpenGL stuff works reliably. On older
versions it would crash. On 4.2, it simply doesn't enable them and I use
XRender.
That's not an argument at all. Are you telling me those things are
working in 3.5? Er, 3.5 doesn't have compositing at all!
The problem is that while it disables the effects themselves, there's
little if any hint in the GUI what depends on OpenGL. I can checkmark
them on and only by actually trying to invoke them and "nothing happens"
do I see (rather, am left to /guess/) that said features require OpenGL.
That's a bug then. Or I don't get what you mean. If I disable desktop
effects, all the checkboxes here (Improved Window Management, Shadows,
etc) become gray and inactive.
And the features that work... without good OpenGL, are still relatively
slow. Sure, they can be turned off, but there goes much of the reason
one might otherwise find kde 4.x better, to date at least.
Are you sure you have EXA acceleration enabled in the radeon driver?
Default is XAA which is slow as molasses :P That's:
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
In the "Device" section of the "radeon" driver in xorg.conf.
Without OpenGL and with some of the composite effects turned off that
actually work reasonably well in 3.5 because they're too slow in 4.2...
Hmm, last time I checked KDE 3.5 only had some kind of buggy
compositing. At least here all hell is breaking out if I enable it
(crashes mostly with lots of graphics glitches).
For a .2 release, that's... well, honestly, I'd expect MS to be pulling
stuff like that, and from what I've read, they actually did, with Vista.
Heh, at least I didn't pay good money for the privilege of getting
crapped on, like all those "Vista Ready" folks did!
That's not a good attitude. You're not given a product. You're given a
project and people are expecting constructive feedback rather than "I
demand you fix the bugs or else!" :P
But it's still nothing the FLOSS community can be proud of
I totally disagree. KDE 4.2 is a milestone in GUI design and everyone
can be proud of it.
Really, the experience would have been /much/ better of they had just
disabled in the GUI all the effects that weren't actually available since
I couldn't enable OpenGL. That's something they obviously know, whether
an effect requires OpenGL or not
I still don't get what you're talking about. What effects?
and the infrastructure is already
there, so why are they still forcing trial and error to find out what
works and what doesn't, especially by X.2 (I could see it for x.98 betas,
feature complete but rough aroudn the edges)? That makes no sense at all!
I'm not playing dumb or something. I *really* don't understand what
you're referring to :P
Meanwhile, khotkeys sort of works now... but the "extra" key I had most
of my app-launchers stacked on (two-key sequence invocation), XF86WWW,
works fine in 3.5.x and has since before 3.5, and it's detected on 4.2,
but the message when I try to set it is, "Qt 4.x doesn't support the
selected key." or something to that effect. WTF!? It can SEE the key
and knows I pressed it in ordered to give me that message. It worked
perfectly fine in 3.5 (and before)! What's this about not supported?!
That's the only key that doesn't work. I suspect you're just angry that
KDE 4.2 isn't a perfect clone of KDE 3 with just the theme being
different and now every little thing that doesn't work seems like the
biggest bug ever to you.
Me, I looked at KDE 4 with a positive eye from the start.
