[arch-general] Gnome 3 + KDE 4 are both large disappointments.

[Yaro Kasear]

On Sunday, April 10, 2011 12:42:57 Arthur Titeica wrote:
>  On Sun, 10 Apr 2011 21:50:41 +0200, Dennis Beekman wrote:
> > [flaming]
> > I though KDE 4 was bad and bloated and that i couldn't get any
> > worse...
> > it seems i was wrong.
> > Boy this new Gnome version is even more bloated and buggy then KDE 
4
> > wich is quite the atchievement from the gnome team...
> 
>  Please stop calling KDE bloated. As a former Windows user I find both
>  Gnome and KDE over simplistic and both lack some kind of bonding 
between
>  various parts like Windows does.
>  In that regard tough, KDE SC is doing much better than Gnome and I
>  guess that's what the SC part means.

The SC part is the KDE devs realizing that KDE has gone way beyond being 
a desktop environment and went on to be a full-scale software compendium 
and community. It's almost become the Microsoft of Linux (But in a good 
way.) in that it covers almost everything.

> 
>  What you may find bloated is the fact that the two major video card
>  makers do a terrible job in supporting their
>  over-heating-barely-2D-60euro-windows-only-cards and rely on the FOSS
>  devs to build drivers for them.

I dunno. nVidia seems to do a good job, driver-wise, for their cards on Linux. 
Keep it up to date, don't leave out new Xorg/OpenGL features. ATI's not too 
great at Linux support, unfortunately.

>  Both NVIDIA and AMD do a semi-lousy job with drivers in the Windows
>  world and I don't expect better anytime soon.

Again, I've had no issues with drivers in Windows or Linux nVidia-wise. 

>  Add this to the fact that the kernel isn't exactly desktop optimized
>  (stuff like let me move the mouse while I extract that damn 4G archive)
>  and you'll probably get what feels like a slow system.

This is largely because the kernel devs (accurately) figure that the typical 
application for Linux is more for servers and high-performance computing. 
Desktop optimization is pretty low-priority. When kernel 38 comes out (Might 
be tonight, I think.) we'll have the Wonder Patch which will make a desktop 
speedy, or so I am told.

> 
>  Now what could a DE could do in this situation? I know that kwin does
>  extensive checks in regards to video driver capabilities and maybe Gnome
>  just isn't that far on this.
> 

They're generally pretty good functionality checks, though sometimes I don;t 
like KDE to turn off my eye candy when things get slow.

>  That said, KDE SC with the free radeon driver in 2.6.38 is
>  outperforming the catalyst driver with 2.6.37 in regards to desktop
>  effects (I can't say anything about nouveau).
> 

I couldn't even get Nouveau's Gallium driver to work with OpenGL. nVidia's 
proprietary driver is still way ahead of Nouveau on this. Pretty much the 
chief feature of Nouveau is KMS for nVidia users. Personally, I'd rather have 
good OpenGL support than KMS.

>  IMHO!

My humble opinion, too.