On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Timothy Pearson
<kb9vqf(a)pearsoncomputing.net> wrote:
Well, KDE4 performance is not indicative of Qt4
performance; rather, it
shows the level of bloat that KDE e.V. introduced with their
rewrite/reboot of the KDE series. Qt4 should in theory be faster
compared
to Qt3 when it is executing equivalent code, primarily due to the
improved
graphics support.
How much is this going to matter for older video chipsets tho? My
Thinkpad 390X has a Neomagic 256AV chipset with 2.5MB VRAM. It's not
like that's going to support any fancy graphics. I'm not against it
so long as I can TURN IT OFF, which is something that the KDE4 devs
can't seem to understand.
It won't matter at all. Qt4 will fall back to software based overlay if
it needs to, in which case the performance difference between the KDE3/Qt3
software overlay and the Qt4 software overlay should be minimal to
nonexistent. Also, there will still be the Qt3 version available...
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Neomagic_MagicMedia256AV
I am currently looking at the possibility of
absorbing most of Qt3 into
the Trinity project, and only using the core portions of Qt4 for the
abstracted access to low-level system interfaces. The Trinity project
needs to add support for multitouch, true window transparency etc. to
both
stay relevant on newer hardware and to improve performance of existing
components where possible. A good example of this is the Amarok OSD;
since it uses fake transparency it both presents a very dated/bad
appearance to the user and eats CPU cycles unnecessarily. Graphics
devices from 15 years ago have had hardware shader capability, and if
the
Qt4 base components will allow such tasks to be offloaded to the GPU
instead of slowing down the CPU, I would consider that an improvement.
Which chipsets? The ATI Mobility M3(Rage128 Based)? Or
Radeon/GeForce and higher?
Not sure OTOH, but I would expect that any non-vesa-framebuffer drivers
(e.g. ATI, Intel, nVidia, etc.) would permit at least partial GPU
acceleration of alpha blending functions.
As for Amarok, I don't use it. MPlayer is my media player. A Qt port
of Firefox would be great tho........
Try gtk-qt-engine-kde3 and kgtk-qt3-kde3; they will skin GTK apps with Qt
widget and allow the use of Trinity file open/save dialogs, respectively.
The last KDE3 version of KOffice is part of the
Trinity distribution,
but
no active development is occurring at this time.
Not an issue so long as it's maintained IMO.
You may want to ask Robert Xu; he is in charge of
the
OpenSUSE/RedHat/Fedora packaging. You can find him on the trinity-devel
list.
Will do. Thanx