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

[Paul Hartman]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:16 AM, BRM<bm_witness@×××××.com> wrote:
> 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.

You can get a GeForce 9600 for around USD$50, which comes near the
performance of the famously-expensive 8800 series (or at least near
enough for costing hundreds of dollars less), and has an H.264 decoder
so you can use vdpau with mplayer or mythtv to allow even very slow
computers to play high-res video smoothly. Many people spend that much
to fill up their automobile or go out to to the movies or a dinner
with the family. I don't think it's an incomprehensible amount of
money to spend on something that will greatly improve performance on
your computer for quite a long time, but I also understand that
everyone has their own budget to live by, things are more expensive in
some countries, and some people are not technically inclined or
physically able to do things like changing a video card.

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

That seems about right to me, though 4 or 5 years in computers is a
lifetime. I know some people who are still using Windows 95 machines
at home (so old, even the viruses aren't compatible anymore!). And
most people are using Windows XP which just had its 8-year birthday. I
personally seem to upgrade about ever other CPU generation. I went
from an XT to a 386 to P2 to P4 to Core 2.

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

Look on the bright side, the work they are doing now will be mature
and run smoothly on your next new computer and last you well into the
future another 4-8 years after that. :)

According to KDE FAQ on kde.org: "To run KDE it is recommended that
you have at least a pentium II processor, 64MB of memory and 500MB of
free disk space for a basic installation." Definitely not cutting-edge
hardware requirements. I think the requirements to compile KDE are
probably greater than the requirements to run it.

If you're trying to use all of the special 3D effects etc then of
course the requirements will be higher, just like windows vista 3D
effects require newer hardware. And it'll make things slower in many
cases, just like windows vista 3D effects. :)

My computer is fast compared to the ones you mentioned, but is not
cutting-edge: it is more than 2 years old, Abit motherboard (Abit
doesn't even exist anymore), Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (no longer made),
Samsung 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive (current price new: USD$50), 8GB of
DDR800 RAM (USD$110) and a Nvidia Geforce 9600GT video card (USD$70),
but I disabled the desktop effects/3D stuff in KDE4 for a few reasons.
Primarily because everything feels a lot more responsive without it.
Also, none of the desktop effects that I used had any utility, they
were just "eye candy" (there are some which have real use, like
zooming out to see all windows, but I didn't use those) so I can live
without them. I would also have weird issues when using some 3D
programs, usually when pop-ups happened (new mail) it would get really
extremely slow and flicker, which does not happen when effects are
off. There was also the "X uses 100% CPU" problem that started around
the time of KDE 4.3; don't know if it's the fault of KDE or xorg or
nvidia-drivers but it does not happen when desktop effects are off.

I also have Gentoo on my laptop which is a little older. Athlon64 2.0
GHz with 1.25GB of RAM and ATI Mobile Radeon 9700 video card. Not a
bad laptop overall, but compared to the Core 2 it takes double the
time to compile things on average. KDE4 performance was actually not
bad on this machine, it felt about the same as the desktop machine
honestly, but the compile times were a killer to me. I don't know how
you guys use gentoo on such old old hardware, your machines must spend
more time compiling than not. :) For a laptop which is not my primary
device, it was a bit ridiculous in my case. Sometimes I may go 2 or 3
months without even turning the laptop on, so then I've have like a
weeks worth of compiling and updating to do. Gentoo is -definitely-
more manageable when you do the updates often (I do them daily on the
desktop). So, on the laptop I switched to XFCE (which has 3D effects
now too, by the way) primarily because of the much shorter compile
times and less frequent updates. If I used a different distro and
compiling wasn't a factor, I would probably still use KDE4 on that
machine, though. Too bad Gentoo is the best so I'm not going to
swtich. :)