On 10/26/2009 06:57 AM, RedShift wrote:
I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels very sluggish and incomplete. I can't enable the desktop effects because that makes things even slower. I'm doing this on a fairly decent setup, an AMD Sempron 2 Ghz with an nVidia FX5500. My laptop suffers from this sluggishness as well. On top of that, lots of things annoy me in KDE 4.3, see the end of this post for my top annoyances. Yesterday I had to reboot to my Windows XP installation on this computer and I was shocked when I arrived in XP's userland. Everything was ridiculously fast. When returning to my linux desktop everything felt even more sluggish. That's when I decided to go back to KDE 3.5. I restored my old KDE 3.5 profile, installed the necessary packages and logged back in. WOOOOOF, everything is fast again. Opening new windows is instantaneous, hell even bringing up context menus is faster.
I'm with you about hating KDE4. I was dragged kicking and screaming into using KDE4, since no one supports KDE3 anymore. (Even the kdemod3 packages are in limbo - although you can install the last built packages, the packages can no longer be built without error.) After finally, grudgingly upgrading to KDE4(.3) and kicking it around for about a month I came to the conclusion that I was extremely disappointed: * Performance, as you noted, sucks. * Loads of cool little features that I either relied upon heavily or liked a lot are gone. And although I've filed bug reports asking to bring them back, no KDE dev has even responded to them. * And of all the "cool new" features they've added, I don't use a single one of them. Finally this past Friday I gave up. After an intense 5 year love affair with KDE, I switched over my desktop to XFCE. It's lightweight, it's fast, it looks slick, things work, and all the little nice features I loved in KDE3 are there. As I said in an earlier email, I've come to the conclusion that KDE has "jumped the shark". Maybe try giving XFCE a go? HTH, DR