preformance issues with oxygen style and window decoration

[Robert Knight]

> IMHO computers with 500MHz-1GHz are still quite common (especially in offices),
> so we shouldn't support only the highend computers if we want a broad adoption
> of KDE 4.

Ultimately for really old hardware of the sort that you are describing
and thin clients I suspect that the Oxygen
style just isn't going to work because of the large gradients and
other effects that it features as part of the design.
On older hardware you may also run into color banding problems if they
can't do 24 bit color at the native display
resolution.

I agree that KDE 4 should be able to be run acceptably on older
hardware, though not necessarily with the default style
and all its effects.  For consistency and 'branding' it would be nice
if users didn't have to switch to an alternative style which has no
resemblance to the high-end one though.  Oxygen Lite perhaps?

Regards,
Robert.

2009/2/6 Tobias Koenig <tokoe at kde.org>:
> Hej,
>
> when using a KDE 4.2 desktop with Qt 4.4 or 4.5 RC it feels
> really slow on not up-to-date hardware. The problem is not the
> hardware as KDE 3.5 works fine and also not Qt (what my first suspicion was).
> In fact it is the oxygen style _and_ oxygen window decoration.
>
> When switching a window between normal and maximized state, the
> window decoration is drawn 3 times for no obvious reason!
> The slowness of the style can be checked by switching between menus
> in a menu bar. With, for example the Plastique style, the menus
> appear nearly immediatly, while with oxygen style one have to wait for
> them...
>
> Also when closing a window, the window below needs more time to update
> when using the oxygen window decoration then when using another decoration
> (no idea why that is though...)
>
> I don't want to bash oxygen here, I really like the style and want to use
> it, however in the current state it is unpleasant to do so...
>
> Could some of the style developers please take a look at it what could
> be wrong there? If your CPU supports it, please throttel it down to 500MHz,
> then you can see the problems quite well.
>
> IMHO computers with 500MHz-1GHz are still quite common (especially in offices),
> so we shouldn't support only the highend computers if we want a broad adoption
> of KDE 4.
>
> If I can help by testing patches or so, feel free to drop me a mail.
>
> Ciao,
> Tobias
> --
> Separate politics from religion and economy!
>
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