Hello,

I've been experiencing a strange phenomenon in Dolphin 2.0 and I don't know if it's really a bug or if I'm just to stupid for it. So I though I'd better post it here before creating a bug report on bugs.kde.org.

I was using Gentoo until a few weeks ago. When I upgraded from KDE 4.7.4 to KDE 4.8 I was a little surprised that these shiny new Dolphin animations didn't work for me. Also the folder view performance seemed to be not exactly what it should be. Although it had no lags concerning the navigation etc. it sometimes took a while to show the appropriate folder icons. When opening a folder, Dolphin always needed some time to replace the "unknown file type" icon with a folder icon for all the subfolders (even if there were not so many).
I tried recompiling Dolphin and I tried creating a fresh KDE profile. No luck in getting the animations to work. Neither did it work in icons view mode when resizing the window, nor did it work in details view when clicking the little triangle to show/collapse subfolders. No animations whatsoever and often could I see Dolphin taking some time to show the correct icons.

I didn't bother much because I planned switching to Sabayon anyway. When I did that, everything worked just fine. I had smooth animations and Dolphin seemed to be a little quicker in showing the folder icons.

That was until yesterday or so. But now I have the same strange issue again. I tried starting a new session with another user, no luck in getting the old behavior back. I deleted the Dolphin settings files for my account, also no success.

I've googled a lot but I can't find anything related. Maybe it's an incompatibility between two packages, maybe it's KDE 4.8.1, maybe it's just me. I don't know.
Does anybody else experience such issues? Is there any solution or at least any way I can examine what's happening?

When I start Dolphin from the command line the only output is "QPixmap::scaled: Pixmap is a null pixmap". I could find some bug reports and forum entries with that, but nothing very helpful. I don't even know if this has anything to do with the missing animations.

Some of the animations in Dolphin have been turned off on purpose for 4.8.1 due to the user feedback we got from the 4.8.0 release. Still if you e.g. delete a file in the icons-mode or insert a file, the icons will get animated smoothly. If this is still not the case it might be that the graphics effect level on your system has been set to the lowest value. To check: Please go into systemsettings -> Application Appearance -> Style -> Fine Tuning and assure that a high value at the "Graphical effects" is set.

However especially the animations when resizing a window or zooming have been turned off (exception: the number of columns/rows stays equal).

Regarding the "unknown icons": Does it occur only in directories with previews turned on or also if previews are turned off?

Ah, okay, then it's just the new version. I was a little confused because I couldn't find anything on the Internet about it.
But has the animation for expanding or collapsing subfolders in details view also been removed? I liked that little animation a lot.

Concerning the directory view performance: I'm not sure if it happens only when previews are turned on. Dolphin seems to be faster without previews, but I don't know if that's the reason for this since previews are calculated after the icons are shown.
I'm not able to reproduce this behavior every time. It mostly happens when I open a fresh Dolphin window an when the hard drive is in use.

> But has the animation for expanding or collapsing subfolders
> in details view also been removed? I liked that little animation a lot

Yes, but probably we'll introduce the animation again if we have some time for finetuning it (it looked "ok" but was cumbersome e.g. when going back in history where an expanded tree gets reopened automatically). Most users complained about the zoom- and resizing-animations where the items moved from one edge to the other, the expanding-animation of subfolders was not really a big issue (although there also has been a bug-report about the animation).

> It mostly happens when I open a fresh Dolphin window an when
> the hard drive is in use.

Dolphin tries to stay "unlocked" as much as possible: When loading the icons it leaves the icon-cache around 200 ms to reply. If Dolphin does not get a reply within this timespan, an "unknown-icon" will be shown temporary and the icon gets retrieved asynchronously. Usually 200 ms should be more than enough assuming that KDE has already been started. But when starting Dolphin from e.g. Gnome it might be that initially the 200 ms might be too less. I'l wait for further feedback, probably we can increase the timeout at least on startup or something like this.

I have two 7200rpm SATA-II hard drives combined in one LVM. That's an average setup concerning the speed. When Dolphin is already loaded into memory, I rarely see unknown file icons for folders, but when I cold-start Dolphin, my hard drive makes some noise and then Dolphin comes up showing some of the folders with their folder icons and some of them with "unknown file" icons before they also get the right ones. As far as I can remember, this didn't happen with Dolphin < 2.0. However, Dolphin 2.0 seems to be faster and more responsive, so it may be that older Dolphin versions just showed nothing while the icon cache was still loading.
Making Dolphin 2.0 less responsive just to prevent icon flickering is of course not an option. But maybe the situation could be improved by specifically caching the default folder icon in the same way the "unknown file" icon is cached. So instead of showing an "unknown file" icon for folders as well, you display the default folder icon if the file is actually a directory. Having two different default icons for either files or folders makes this flickering a lot less obvious than just having one icon for both files and folders.

The issue of the incorrect icon being shown on initial startup is probably due to a "cold" icon cache, as the Folder, file type, etc icons have not yet been loaded into the cache. If you subsequently start Dolphin again, then it should show up properly instantly.

Is this the case?

Seems so, yes.
But since Dolphin is able to show such an icon there must be some hardcoded graphics or so. It would be nice if there were two such graphics One for files and one for folders. That would make such icon flashing less obvious.

EDIT:
Just woke up the PC from sleep and had the problem again. So after some while Dolphin seems to "forget" the cache (probably when it has not been used for some time and the kernel removes Dolphin from memory).