I'm running Karmic Koala on an Acer Aspire 3100 laptop with 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, and a 1.8GHz (single core) processor. The builtin video support is an ATI Radeon Xpress 1100. A respectable year-old machine, if not the latest and greatest. And it is grinding to a halt under KDE4, almost literally.
The most recent symptom was the message "KDE compositing was too slow and has been disabled". So my system is apparently insufficient for the demands of the default version of KDE4. But that is only the latest in a recent string of disasters that I attribute to system overload. The most vexing one came when I was running VirtualBox with a Win 2000 Pro guest, and the installation of the OS simply slowed down and stopped, along with almost everything else that was running.
The favorite description of the KDE visual interface seems to be "way cool", and I won't dispute that in general. But unless you have a system with octo cores, a hundred GB of RAM, a 10 GHz processor, and the finest video card ATI or whoever is turning out now, it isn't way cool because no way can a system that moves like an asthmatic turtle be way cool no matter how elegant and beautiful the eye candy.
Until KDE4 came out and became the Kubuntu default, I was happily using KDE3. I managed to stick it out for a while with the KDE3 compatibility package until that became too awkward because of software that had become unusable because it was out of date. So I bit the bullet and moved to KDE4. And since then I've had nothing but trouble with the OS.
We've seen this happen before, and its name is Vista. Microsoft thought they too had the latest and greatest (in their own world, at least) and fell flat on their faces. Hardware inadequacies, driver incompatibilities and such helped to sink Vista. Awkward usage, where accessing almost anything required overriding a safety protection, did the rest. When Microsoft discovered that much of their world was hanging onto XP for dear life, they realized they had made a big, big mistake.
The word for what KDE4 has done is "overreach". KDE4 involved two things at once: a major paradigm shift and an enormous increase in the hardware resources required to run it acceptably. I've looked on Google at some of the threads about the "compositing was too slow" issue and discovered that the developers are squabbling among themselves as to who is responsible for the problems.
It could have been done differently. The defaults could have been chosen for maximum backwards compatibility with KDE3 and minimal use of resources, with upgrades to the fancier stuff as an option. For instance, compositing could have been off by default and the interface preconfigured to permit different colors for different desktops, something I've missed terribly and finally got working. But I still miss the KDE3 color gradients on the desktop, and I haven't heard a peep about how to get them in KDE4. Like the physicians say, "above all do no harm".
Look, I love Linux. I've been using it for over ten years or maybe more, along with Windows when I'm forced to in order to do stuff that Linux, even with Wine, doesn't support, like TurboTax or decent CAD. Now I use virtual Windows machines -- minimal ones -- running under Linux to get the best of both worlds. And I still have an alternative to the KDE4 behemoth: Gnome. I may take it.
There seems to be something approaching schizophrenia in the Linux world. On the one hand, Linux advocates say that anyone, even the most naive and casual user, should be able to use it instead of Windows. On the other hand they react with disdain when users encounter problems that they can't solve without considerable technical expertise. We can't have it both ways.
The most recent symptom was the message "KDE compositing was too slow and has been disabled". So my system is apparently insufficient for the demands of the default version of KDE4. But that is only the latest in a recent string of disasters that I attribute to system overload. The most vexing one came when I was running VirtualBox with a Win 2000 Pro guest, and the installation of the OS simply slowed down and stopped, along with almost everything else that was running.
The favorite description of the KDE visual interface seems to be "way cool", and I won't dispute that in general. But unless you have a system with octo cores, a hundred GB of RAM, a 10 GHz processor, and the finest video card ATI or whoever is turning out now, it isn't way cool because no way can a system that moves like an asthmatic turtle be way cool no matter how elegant and beautiful the eye candy.
Until KDE4 came out and became the Kubuntu default, I was happily using KDE3. I managed to stick it out for a while with the KDE3 compatibility package until that became too awkward because of software that had become unusable because it was out of date. So I bit the bullet and moved to KDE4. And since then I've had nothing but trouble with the OS.
We've seen this happen before, and its name is Vista. Microsoft thought they too had the latest and greatest (in their own world, at least) and fell flat on their faces. Hardware inadequacies, driver incompatibilities and such helped to sink Vista. Awkward usage, where accessing almost anything required overriding a safety protection, did the rest. When Microsoft discovered that much of their world was hanging onto XP for dear life, they realized they had made a big, big mistake.
The word for what KDE4 has done is "overreach". KDE4 involved two things at once: a major paradigm shift and an enormous increase in the hardware resources required to run it acceptably. I've looked on Google at some of the threads about the "compositing was too slow" issue and discovered that the developers are squabbling among themselves as to who is responsible for the problems.
It could have been done differently. The defaults could have been chosen for maximum backwards compatibility with KDE3 and minimal use of resources, with upgrades to the fancier stuff as an option. For instance, compositing could have been off by default and the interface preconfigured to permit different colors for different desktops, something I've missed terribly and finally got working. But I still miss the KDE3 color gradients on the desktop, and I haven't heard a peep about how to get them in KDE4. Like the physicians say, "above all do no harm".
Look, I love Linux. I've been using it for over ten years or maybe more, along with Windows when I'm forced to in order to do stuff that Linux, even with Wine, doesn't support, like TurboTax or decent CAD. Now I use virtual Windows machines -- minimal ones -- running under Linux to get the best of both worlds. And I still have an alternative to the KDE4 behemoth: Gnome. I may take it.
There seems to be something approaching schizophrenia in the Linux world. On the one hand, Linux advocates say that anyone, even the most naive and casual user, should be able to use it instead of Windows. On the other hand they react with disdain when users encounter problems that they can't solve without considerable technical expertise. We can't have it both ways.
Comment