Some (most) of the themes use transparency/translucency to make elements blend well with their surroundings, but the transparency only works if compositing is enabled (the KDE devs want to avoid as much as possible the Hacks used to give pseudo transparency without compositing, like were available in some places in KDE 3.5 like the panel and menus). For instance the Air theme (default for KDE 4.3) uses a lot of transparency to mix colors from the wallpaper into the different elements (esp. the panel), but when compositing isn't enabled everything just comes out dull gray (similar to the screenshot given).

Too all:

Thanks for the constructive comments. They really helped. I am not going to quote all of you, but provide some feedback anyway.

Yes, I know developers develop what they like to develop. That is a good thing and without that open source would not exist. However, since those people are developing to get satisfaction in one or another way, like being proud on their product, being better of faster [to implement] than other OS-es, or making other people happy with a useful product. Especially for those who get satisfaction from seeing other people use their creations I have difficulties to imagine that they are satisfied by the avalanche of less positive or downright statements about KDE4. Were I a developer, I would have put more effort in keeping my users happy. This is at least what *I* do when I write some software.

KDE4 will be an awesome product someday, yes, I believe that. It might take some time, because it is extremely complicated code as it seems. What I still hate is that with one upgrade the majority of my hardware is obsoleted. Something *I* was proud of. "See, *I* am using Open Source software and thanks to *that* community I am able to use hardware you had to throw out because *you* chose to install Vista". At the least if I were a developer, and knowing my target "customers" I would have provided them with a compatibility mode. QT4 yes, but as simple and as fast as you can get it.

There is also a vast amount of users completely happy with KDE4, and if you have a GPU monster I am sure it runs smooth. As a matter of fact, I *like* the graphic effects, and they are beautiful and until now quite stable. If this didn't force me to upgrade my hardware, by offering me a frugal basic graphic mode I would quite happy indeed, and put it on some of my more powerful machines with all the bells and whistles installed.

On one of the other Linux forums someone provided me with a pointer to a site for setting some options in my graphics card. http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Hardware/ ... figuration

Not only could the graphic effects be enabled, the interface got *somewhat* faster, and the colors in the panel changed from black on dark gray to something readable. Also not all panels were black on gray, and some are even quite pleasant now. There is a huge difference between "completely unusable" and "I would put this blue a shade lighter". Thanks for the tip of mixing themes, I was already doing that but it didn't have much effect due to the NVIDIA settings which lacked some options.

About the speed, with these settings, the desktop including graphic effects became faster than before without the effects. Resizing window has become a lot slower though, and almost impossible. Whatever, on *this machine, I will put a more powerful graphics engine which I happen to have around, and see what it does. For my other hardware, I should look into a lighter weight desktop, but I am sure that won't make me happy.

I understand that binary compatibility cannot be achieved using QT4, that is quite obvious. I did not understand that the source compatibility still exists for applications like Quanta. It is worth a try, although it would be the first time I am successful in compiling a Qt app. But my latest experience was in 2004 and maybe my installation was not perfect at the time.

Thanks again for all the feedback.

jlinkels

Source comptability does not exist between KDE 3 and KDE 4, but you can have the KDE 3 libraries needed to run Quanta installed on a KDE 4 system, allowing you to still run KDE 3 programs.

Hi,
Couple of days ago I wanted to write angry post about KDE 4 being unusable for _work_ . I don't care about those bells and whistles, my goal is to work productively every day.
KDE 3 was good at it. KDE 4 - not, everything was slow, lagging etc.
I could beleive that my hardware is old (8 years old PC with Athlon XP 2600+ ) and cannot run KDE 4 as fast as KDE 3, but my
laptop is 2 years old and has modern NVidia card and the experience is almost same bad. Perfomance is noticeably better, BUT there
is another show stopper: Alt-Tab switching! The popup window appears after 500ms-1500ms delay which is terribly annoying, when working
at least in 3 windows.

Finally I gave up and switched to XFCE. I also was looking for other alternatives and tried openbox. It was a surprise for me that it's possible to start KDE session using openbox as window manager.
I tried it , and... KDE 4 became extremely quick and usable! I could not beleive it!
Now I'm again happy KDE user
KDE developers, please take into account that using kwin makes so much frustration for KDE users who got used to great
KDE performance. Maybe I did not search well, but googling "KDE 4 is slow" did not provide me this option.
There are many complaints about KDE 4 slowness and answers usually are: upgrade you hardware, videocard, drivers etc etc.

So , unhappy KDE users, give openbox a try, install openbox package and choose openbox/KDE session when logging in.

@chernyh

Well, since you have a 'modern NVidia graphic card', you should probably install a modern NVidia driver, and not the one Debian repos provide. Or turn off compositing (aka desktop effects).

If you searched for 'kwin nvidia' or 'kde nvidia' you'd find a plethora of explanations and instructions on how to improve buggy nvidia driver experience in KDE.

BTW, registering on the forum with a sole purpose of writing one rant post really misses the point.

@ivan

The same old song. Try understand, for users with this buggy (nvidia, ati, intel) driver, other WM's works fast, kwin not. Whole world is buggy only not KDE...

@iria

'The same old song' is starting a discussion held a thousand times before on a completely new thread. Registering on the forum for the sole purpose of doing so, and, naturally, complaining that the answer one can get is the same as it was in all other discussions held before.

KDE SC has bugs, will always have it like any other non-trivial software, but in the case of KWin, credit should go where credit's due.

ivan wrote:
Well, since you have a 'modern NVidia graphic card', you should probably install a modern NVidia driver, and not the one Debian repos provide.

I use sgfxi script which does this automatically.

ivan wrote:Or turn off compositing (aka desktop effects).

Ha-ha-ha. I did it from the beginning. I hate all that flickering on my desktop( except cases when I show the effects to my Windows pals to say "look how cool it is" ).

ivan wrote:If you searched for 'kwin nvidia' or 'kde nvidia' you'd find a plethora of explanations and instructions on how to improve buggy nvidia driver experience in KDE.

Actually I even did not know where do search the solution, >I< found that kwin it THE reason, only accidentally. Google only returned complaints on slowness and answers like this.

ivan wrote:BTW, registering on the forum with a sole purpose of writing one rant post really misses the point.

I was watching for KDE evolving during last 1,5 years, installed KDE 4 and, being disappointed, downgraded back 3 times. This time I decided that it will be he last one. So I registered just to say goodbye to KDE.
But you know the my previuos story

chernyh wrote:Ha-ha-ha. I did it from the beginning. I hate all that flickering on my desktop( except cases when I show the effects to my Windows pals to say

Compositing is not all about eye candy only. I actually use effects (such as desktop grid and present windows) and they help me a lot when I have a cluttered workspace.

Actually I even did not know where do search the solution, >I< found that kwin it THE reason, only accidentally. Google only returned complaints

Your experience does not match the ones of many others, including mine. I even wrote a piece in the old Plasma FAQ telling about slowness with NVIDIA (because it is NVIDIA's fault - their drivers do not accelerate certain operations, which are then done in software, hence the slowness).

So I registered just to say goodbye to KDE.

Which is, frankly, not a very sensible decision.

chernyh wrote: BUT there
is another show stopper: Alt-Tab switching! The popup window appears after 500ms-1500ms delay which is terribly annoying, when working
at least in 3 windows.

This can be disabled, the amount of time it takes to pop up can be configured, its appearance can be configured, some of them have sizes that can be configured, etc. If you don't like this there are numerous ways you can change it.

Where?

With desktop effects off, alt-tab is the classic style, and is instantaneous, at least here on my 7 year old laptop with its 32mb ati gpu. With effects enabled, you can adjust overall animation speeds for all effects in System Settings -- Desktop -- Desktop Effects at the bottom of the first pane, I set mine to to 'fast' - it's a little quicker but you still see some animation.

You can also set which type of animation is used by default for alt-tab in the same area.

In the All Effects tab, you can change some settings for each effect individually. The Cover Switch, for example, you can tweak a number of settings like disabling open/close animation, as well as animation duration. 40ms makes it quite snappy.

It wasn't so long ago that Ati had dreadful drivers, and Nvidia were the darlings of the Linux world for gpu's.

With recent kernels (2.6.34+) and updated X.org/Mesa stacks, effects are pretty smooth on ATI cards (tested it myself).