Re: [kde-linux] Desktop widget like Windows Vista sidebar/clock thing?

On Tuesday 06 October 2009 18:43:52 Duncan wrote:
Werner Joss posted on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:51:58 +0200 as excerpted:
for me, the reason to stick with 3.5 is solely kde4's darn
slowness/unresponsiveness, which just drives me nuts every time I boot
into it.

Have you tried mine? =:^)

Seriously, while I'm running reasonable hardware in most respects, my
graphics card is an aging Radeon 9200 -- with which I'm running dual
1920x1200 monitors stacked for 1920x2400! Since the OpenGL limit on the
card is 2048 px square and I'm running a 2400 px high combined desktop,
that well nixes any OpenGL, tho I do get reasonable xrender composite,
for transparency, etc, ONCE I CONFIGURE KDE CORRECTLY.

First, for Radeons, you'll want to verify they're in EXA not the old XAA
mode (search the xorg.0.log file for EXA or XAA and see).

Now, the two critical things that made kde4 at least close to match kde3
here, with composite and transparency but with fade effects and etc
disabled (same as I had them on kde3), are as follows:

1) This one isn't such a big deal with 4.3.1 or better, but was
absolutely so before that, due to a repaint bug fixed in 4.3.1. Keep the
desktop clear of plasmoids, or at least dynamic updating plasmoids such
as temp and cpu gauges, clocks, etc. Panels aren't so bad. You can
leave it set to the normal desktop/plasmoid view if desired, as I did, or
(I think, didn't test) set it to folderview, thus getting the full
desktop as a folder effect of kde3.

2) Either don't use transparency/translucency, or if you do (I saw no
sense in having it off in kde4 when kde3 could run it just fine), be SURE
the fade time is set to zero. There are two ways to do this, both in the
desktop-effects kcontrol (aka systemsettings) dialog. One, on the
General tab, set animation speed to "Instant". Two, on the All Effects
tab, find translucency, configure it, and set fading duration to 0 to 10
or so. (The spinner increments are 100 ms, so the 10 ms suggestion is
only a tenth of that.) I actually discovered the second method first --
I'm not sure the first was actually there in 4.2.4 when I was working on
this, but the first, on the general tab, should do it as well, plus
possibly make other bits of the system more responsive.

Those two items, taken together, were what it took for me to get a
reasonably responsive system, here. YMMV of course, but it's worth
trying, if you haven't.

With that as a guide, I'll give it another try on my aging ATi Mobility Radeon
X600. First impressions are that it's certainly not as slow, so I'll stick
with it a while and see whether it helps.

Meanwhile, would you mind writing that up on UserBase? The right place, I
think, would be http://userbase.kde.org/GPU-Performance#systemsettings

Anne
--
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