KDE4 slow

[Hans-J. Ullrich]

Am Donnerstag 25 Juni 2009 schrieb Alvaro Aguilera:
> I think something about KDE4 should be re-engineered. The applications you
> are continuously using (a file manager, kicker, window manager, menus,
> etc.) should open/work instantaneously. Having to wait, even for 1 second,
> has a psychological impact and degrades the overall experience.
>
> My computer is not _that_ old (laptop with 2 cores at 2ghz, 4gb ram and
> intel 945 graphics) and I'm still using KDE3 because KDE4 feels very slow
> in comparison to KDE3. The applications from KDE4 work great and fast, when
> they run outside KDE4, so the problem must reside at the window manager, or
> similar. It would be great to have a KDE4-lite version, without plasma, and
> with a very basic, very fast, window manager. Having kde3 and kde4
> installed on the same machine is becoming increasingly a PITA, since there
> are package-conflicts with some files, and sometimes they compete for
> resources like the sound card...
>
>
> I have the same, my computer is simply unuseable with KDE4.
>
> > Am Donnerstag, 25. Juni 2009 03:18:45 schrieb Michael Pyne:
> > > In short, you just need to wait for the video driver support to catch
> > > up
> >
> > to
> >
> > > allow compositing to work smoothly.
> >
> > My video drivers are not supported any more (NVIDIA) because the card is
> > just
> > to old. Does this mean that I'll never  have a fast running KDE4 on my
> > computer?
> >
> > Karl

Yes, same to me. My computer is a laptop (Aspire 7520G) with 2G Ram, Nvidia 
Geforce 8400 (512MB) and Debian-amd64 on it.

KDE4 is also running very slow on it (in comparision to kde3), and I have no 
plasma effects or other special effects activated. Composite is deactivated in 
xorg.conf. Although it is still usuable, It is feeling like running Windows XP 
on a machine with 800MHz and 256MB Ram, which let XP run, but not smooth.

But I do not want to mourne, as I think, the developers know about this 
problem well, and are working on it hard. IMO there is (as KDE4 is completely 
new code), a lot to improve in the code itself. Another reason, and this is my 
very personal opinion, might be the interference with old kde3-libs. So, if 
you take a closer look, you see two kdewallets (which is involved in kded) 
running: the old one and the new one. 

Additionally, there is a problem with a lot of kio_http processes (search 
after it in the bugreports), which is dramatically slowing down the machine 
(especially older ones).

I think, the developers know of this, too, and as the background of kde is "to 
make a computer mure usable for all", they will aim to speedup KDE4 to the 
speed as in KDE3.

Let us hope for the best and look forward!

Cheers

Hans-J. Ullrich