Quoth Martin Gr��lin.....
On Wednesday 18 September 2013 18:48:11 Russell Brown wrote:
Management Summary - TDE Chaps: Please carry on as you are.
We tried KDE4 and the latest Gnome and for us (lots of users on X Terminals with a central server) they were completely unusable as they demand 3D graphics acceleration
at least for KDE Plasma this is not true - we do not demand 3D graphics acceleration in the 4.x series.
OK obviously my mistake in understanding the root cause; Sorry... but the bottom line was that we have up to 90 X-Terminals (modest hardware, pretty low grade graphics chipsets, some with 64 or 128 megabytes of RAM, no local storage; no local swap) running on KDE3/QT3 for years (TDE since late 2012) on a modest network (the terminals are on 100Mbit ethernet from a couple of 48 port hubs being fed by a single 1Gbit ethernet connection from the Linux terminal server).
This works very well.
When KDE4 came along (and the LTS on Hardy came to an end prompting a need to change) I tried very hard to get it to work at an acceptable performance level and just failed :-( The 'user experience' really wasn't nice. I Googled and tweaked, tweaked and Googled but couldn't get the interactive feel anything like KDE/QT3 on the same hardware. It was painful to use or just blew away the terminals with small amounts of RAM (my memory is possibly a bit fuzzy here as it was well over a year back when this all happened).
Changing the infrastructure for high bandwidth connections and more powerful machines on everyone's desk just didn't make any sense when the net benefit was 'only' a slightly different look to the desktop and some widgets and concepts that they didn't understand (this from a users perspective; I'm not denigrating the efforts that the KDE4 team have obviously put in).
Hence my delight at the whole TDE project :-)
X11 is unfortunately although claimed otherwise completely unsuited for terminal setups. It mostly works because bandwith is enough, but in general it just sucks.
Hmmmm.... it's suited us since the mid 1980s !
Obviously we have 'enough' bandwidth for TDE but not enough for KE4/QT4. That might sound like a backhanded compliment but it's not intended that way; I'm just saying it as I found it.
KDE4/QT4 seems to be aimed elsewhere than our sort of usage. It's sadly not alone there with things like Firefox and Openoffice assuming that the display device has both a lightspeed connection and infinite resource. The whole concept of X11 client (lots of resource typically running on a powerful server grade computer) and X11 server (limited resource merely a device to provide a mouse/keyboard and screen) seems to have been forgotten.
It's a bit like all those graphics heavy flash ridden websites that obviously looked great when the 'designer' demo'd them to the client on his powerful laptop in a meeting room but are just awful when accessed via the congested and limited internet that we mostly have to live with.
On a positive note, you offered to tell me how KDE4 can be configured for a Terminal Server environment and I'll take you up on that; if only for my own education and to find out what I, and many others it seems, did wrong.
However, if TDE carries on the way it has been then I can't see myself moving away from it.
Thanks once again to the whole TDE team.