On Saturday 03 March 2012 02:36:00 Tiago Marques wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
Hi Trinity developers,
it is great that you start to find reasons for Trinity. This is really needed and can only improve your product.
But please stop comparing to KDE. I have pointed it out before and I say it again: for a successful Trinity you may not be in competition with KDE. Finding arguments for the existance of Trinity based on "shortcomings" of KDE is not the right way. It only makes KDE developers not wanting to have anything to do with you. And also there is (like in this case) a high risk that you embarrass yourself.
Now I placed "shortcomings" in quotes. Why? Well because you are pretty bad informed about the state of KDE and ARM based devices like the Raspberry Pi. Have a look at for example [1].
What you have to understand is that lightweight hardware and old hardware are two different type of kinds. While it is reasonable that Trinity works better on old hardware than KDE the same is not even closely true for lightweight hardware.
Let's have a look at the application I maintain (KWin) which exists both in Trinity and in KDE 4. Trinity's answer to compositing is either no compositing or XRender based compositing. Now hardware like the Raspberry Pi is not meant for no compositing or XRender. The driver just does not accelerate the rendering there. So if you use XRender or no compositing everything is rendered on the CPU. That's quite bad. What the GPU does really good is OpenGL ES based rendering. That's what KWin 4 uses on such hardware. KWin 4 is optimized to run well on lightweight modern hardware, but is not optimized for old hardware which does not provide OpenGL (ES). So this is a nice example to understand that old != lightweight.
May I ask how much experience the Trinity project has on working well on ARM? My guess is pretty much none. Do you expect any of your software to be optimized for ARM? Do you have any software running on ARM? Do you think Qt 3 works as well as Qt 4 on ARM?
Well let's check the facts. Trolltech has been bought by a major mobile devices company which uses ARM CPUs in all of their products after Qt 4 has been released (also after KDE 4 has been released). Since then Qt has been optimized for the usage on ARM. I have here a Maemo (N900), a MeeGo (N950) and a Symbian 3 (C7) based device which uses Qt as the primary toolkit. Do you really think Qt 3 is anywhere up to what Qt 4 provides?
Now what about KDE? Did you know that the N9 ships KDE based software on the default installation? Did you know that there are quite some applications available in the OVI store (e.g. Marble) and some applications have been packaged (like Kontact touch)? Did you know that many developers have had ARM based devices like the PandaBoard for quite some time? Did you know that there are distributions actually testing that everything of KDE at least compiles on ARM? Did you know that you can very soon buy an ARM based tablet with KDE Plasma Active preinstalled? It comes also only with 512 MB of RAM, so no big difference to the Raspberry Pi.
I have taken the time to write this mail not to upset you, but to show you how dangerous such statements may be.
Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin