3.2 Response

[George Staikos]

   I've been receiving quite a bit of response from my clients and users of 
Kst regarding KDE 3.2.  I think it's of value to post a note to all the 
developers so they know how people feel about it.  Overall the response has 
been VERY positive.  Users love the new features and new applications.  Many 
of them were not using KDE before using Kst or Qt applications I develop, and 
are pleasantly surprised when they try out KDE for the first time.  However, 
the most overwhelming response is how many people say "wow, KDE 3.2 is so 
fast!"  People have really taken notice of the performance improvements in 
KDE 3.2.  The performance of KDE - startup time, application launch time, and 
general runtime performance (such as displaying dialogs, etc) - is extremely 
important.  While we should keep in mind that average computing power is 
constantly increasing and making some optimization relatively less 
significant, every little bit -does- help the overall picture.  It makes KDE 
much more pleasant to use.  I plead to developers, keep this in mind for KDE 
3.2.x and 3.3.  Be very careful not to degrade performance.  Use KCachegrind 
on your applications regularly to find existing hotspots and watch for new 
ones that crop up.  Be careful of extra mallocs that are unnecessary (as seen 
in a thread on kde-cvs today).  Don't suck in loads of libraries that we 
really don't need, and don't subvert the work to prevent unnecessary 
relocations.  I think most of you know all of this, and of course the many 
other ways to keep KDE fast.

   I think KDE is improving in very significant ways lately, and all 
indications I have are that KDE is gaining users very quickly, including 
existing Linux users who were not previously using KDE.  This is very 
important for KDE, and we need to be very careful to preserve this trend.  
I've seen it with business clients, I've seen it with Linux/OSS community 
interaction, and I've seen it at Linux shows and conferences.  Good work with 
3.2, and let's keep KDE fast in the next releases too!

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/