trinity-users@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

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Month: October 2010

Re: [trinity-users] Furture of KDE3 questions

From: "Timothy Pearson" <kb9vqf@...>
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:25:53 -0500
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Timothy Pearson
> <kb9vqf@...> 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.

It won't matter at all.  Qt4 will fall back to software based overlay if
it needs to, in which case the performance difference between the KDE3/Qt3
software overlay and the Qt4 software overlay should be minimal to
nonexistent.  Also, there will still be the Qt3 version available...

>
> 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?

Not sure OTOH, but I would expect that any non-vesa-framebuffer drivers
(e.g. ATI, Intel, nVidia, etc.) would permit at least partial GPU
acceleration of alpha blending functions.

>
> As for Amarok, I don't use it.  MPlayer is my media player.  A Qt port
> of Firefox would be great tho........

Try gtk-qt-engine-kde3 and kgtk-qt3-kde3; they will skin GTK apps with Qt
widget and allow the use of Trinity file open/save dialogs, respectively.

>
>> 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
>