KDE4 Very Slow

Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:54:35 +0100
From: Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net>
To: dng@lists.dyne.org
Subject: Re: [DNG] Detailed technical treatise of systemd

On 16/10/2015 20:39, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
> Neo Futur <dng@ww7.be> writes:
>>> I pretty much stopped reading after the following line in the
>>> composition:
>>> ======================================================
>>> Fourthly, I will only be dealing with systemd the service manager (of
>>> which the init is an intracomponent subset, and also contains several
>>> other internal subsystems and characteristics which will prove of
>>> paramount importance to the analysis), and to a lesser extent journald.
>>> ======================================================
>>   Same here, if systemd was just an init system, i d probably still
>> avoid it and fight it, but the main problem is that its much more than
>> that, eating everything around it (
>> http://neofutur.net/local/cache-vignettes/L200xH133/arton19-b28db.gif
>> ), and that is the main problem, for sure.
>
> In case you like a nice piece of irony: Both GNOME and KDE perform like
> shit. According to the opinion of both the GNOME and the KDE developers,
> the reason for this must be somewhere in all the code they didn't
> write. Hence, it has to be replaced. Especially considering that it's
> all "But that's not how Microsoft does it!" stuff --- and you can't get
> more fishy than that, can you?

The performance of GNOME3, KDE4 and Unity are all terrible.  Too much
shiny bling and too little care for *real* usability.

A couple days back, I was playing with Trinity on a PCLinuxOS live CD.
Starting the applications **from the CD** was faster than doing the
same from a KDE4 desktop *from an SSD*.  At the time, I recall GNOME2
and KDE3 being slower than their earlier incarnations, but the sheer
bloat and inefficiency of the current forms of all these desktops is
incredible.  In Trinity, I was shocked that I could click on
System->Konsole and get a terminal... not in a second or two, or even
half a second, but right there and then.  That's how bad the current
desktops are.  I shouldn't have been surprised at being reminded how
snappy a user interface could be--it should be a standard expectation.
I'm not even using low-end hardware; it's an 8-core 4GHz CPU with 16GB
RAM and a 4GB GPU!  Using a current KDE system, I found the amount of
sliding-fading-semi-tranparent bling really got in the way of using
the thing.  When every hovering popup on the taskbar slides in from
random directions as you moved the mouse around, I found this
massively distracting, and that's only the start of it.  The other
major flaw is the use of animations and transitions; they typically
only start after you initiate an action, leading you to wait until
they complete to avoid getting confused as to what will happen;
previously such actions were immediate.  The most jarring example I
can think of is the alt-tab switching animation where you have to wait
while there's visible movement of the selection, but the modern
kickoff menu is also victim to this, and it's seen in many other
places.  These little details all make the system less efficient and
less predictable--they make you second guess what action will take
since you're unsure of what will happen due to waiting on the
animations/transitions to catch up with your input.

Roger