Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Heads-up: KDEers: Particularly kde3-ers,

[BRM]

----- Original Message ----
From: Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2009 7:15:38 AM
Subject: [gentoo-amd64]  Re: Heads-up: KDEers: Particularly kde3-ers,
Volker Armin Hemmann posted on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:13:51 +0200 as
excerpted:
> > they do nothing with recent enough graphics hardware :P
> And you know why?  It's because the graphics hardware accelerates the
> repaint, and is smart enough to realize that the entire desktop doesn't
> need repainted, despite the instructions it was handed. =:^)  But qt's
> still handing the hardware bad instructions.  The hardware's just smart
> enough to recognize and ignore the parts that haven't actually updated
> and thus don't actually need repainted.
> But of course not everybody has that level of hardware acceleration yet.
> >> That's bad enough as it is, but when it's just the bare desktop, still
> >> tolerable.  But now consider what happens when that's being filtered up
> >> thru multiple layers of semi-transparent windows!  No *WONDER* people
> >> with older or not well accelerated graphics cards are having issues!
> >> And on a desktop the size of mine, say 1920x2200 after the panels top
> >> and bottom are removed, still running on a vintage Radeon 9200, that's
> >> a HUGE performance issue!  No WONDER I was having problems with it!
> > and now we are getting down to the interessting facts.
> > The short version of all your text:
> > 'I had tried some graphic demanding stuff, turned into a even bigger
> > workload by a small programming mistake on hardware that was even
> > considered slow and underpowered when it was released 6 years ago.'
> May be, but that doesn't change the need to do the tweaks to fix the
> problem, which was what the entire post was about.  Given the problems
> others have posted, it's likely to be helpful to them as it was to me,
> and there's no reason they should have to do all the same work I did to
> rediscover what I already know, after learning it the hard way.
> >> But meanwhile, its the stack of bugs such as this, that really
> >> shouldn't be appearing in an X.0 release let alone X.3, that's
> >> distressing.  And it's even /more/ distressing when support for the
> >> previous very stable version is being dropped, before the current
> >> version even gets up to normal X.0 version quality, let alone the X.1
> >> that many wait for before they consider it safe to switch.
> > you mean bugs that only hit when you use modern graphics on a 6 year
> > old, slow even then, graphic adapter?
> Could be, but regardless, there's people out there using such hardware,
> and the posted information both explains how I discovered the issues, and
> the workarounds and configuration tweaks necessary to get decent
> performance anyway, despite the age and speed of the hardware.

I have to agree with Duncan on this one. (not that that's a bad thing - I've really enjoyed his insights on this thread.)

Not everyone upgrades their video card every 6 months.
Most probably get a video card upgrade only when they buy a new computer;
and most don't buy a new computer every other year either, probably more like 4 years or so.

I typically buy a new computer about every 8 years; and most people I know are probably between 4 and 8 years.

So yes, KDE4 must be able to handle older hardware as Duncan describes.

Glad you have the cash to burn on more frequent updates, but you're in the minority of computer users in general.

One of the things I love about gentoo is using my older hardware - my server running gentoo (and hosting portage for my internal network) is a PII 233 from 1997.
My gentoo laptop is a Pentium M from 2003; and my desktop is an AMD64 from 2005; both run KDE3 and will be running KDE4 in time - just waiting for Gentoo to mark stable on respective architectures as I don't want to play with testing on these systems at that kind of level.

And I'm sure there are plenty of users in the same boat as me. I may be a computer enthusiast, but I don't have cash to burn on "frequenty" hardware upgrades. I make the hardware I have last as long as I can - I just retired a P90 Slackware-base server last spring, but then only b/c the hard drive (from 1997) died due to the system being placed badly the truck during a move.

Ben