On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Timothy Pearson kb9vqf@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.
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?
As for Amarok, I don't use it. MPlayer is my media player. A Qt port of Firefox would be great tho........
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