[NBLUG/talk] Speeding up KDE, I'll try anything

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 10:06:56AM -0700, Bob Blick wrote:
> Thanks everybody for your input. It sounds like nobody thinks KDE 4.x
> can be made much faster. I wonder if the KDE team thinks that's a
> problem. It may be that KDE has peaked with version 3.5

My hardware handles kde 4 fine, and I'm not one that can handle waiting for
my computer to catch up.  I rarely use the menus though ('cause they suck)
and instead use krunner as a quicklauncher much like the awesome
quicksilver for OS X.  My gear is not by any means crazy-fast -- dual core
3.2 ghz + 4gB RAM + a video card that was $170 12 months ago.  

> But that leads me to another thought, if lots of people stick with KDE
> 3.5, doesn't that squash development of KDE applications? Will programs
> written for version 4 run on 3.5?

I think some of the kde4 apps are pretty good (please, let's not speak of
the abomination that is ama**K 2), and I've heard that people generally
like the API, so kde4 is probably here to stay.  That said, I also think
that it's just now worthy of being called a 4.01.  What the kde dev team is
trying to do is a hell of an ambitious undertaking and they've come up with
lots of interesting (and new!) ideas, so hats off for trying.

My feeling is that there are and will be plenty of people with the gear to
run a DE with the overhead of a KDE 4.  I run KDE4 not because I
particularly like it, but because I no longer enjoy dicking around with
this stuff and the setup I use (compiz + wmctrl) makes the DE largely
irrelevant.

-t