I guess technology is passing me by. I really liked KDE 3, but the new plasma push leaves me a bit cold. I like my programs in an organized menu, rather than littered all over the desktop in panes.
Not sure if this is a performance “boost” or just fixing performance lag to catch up with the others.
I installed and ran KDE4 on top of Ubuntu 11.04 for a week. It was a painful experience. To be fair, Gnome 3 was nearly as painful.
It seems the upward trend parallels Win98, WinXP, Win7, ...i.e. MORE resources consumed. Much more. And, of course, they are all trying to look like a Mac, too. That fly’s in the face of the Linux/Ubuntu philosophy.
Unity? Oh, techie, please! Are you serious? Really? That’s it?
I’ll keep my Mint9, for it’s simple elegance and function, and my Ultimate Edition for brutish and blingy, all encompassing abilities to accomplish ANYTHING, right out of the box!
P.S. Desktops are NOT itty bitty teeny tiny Tablets that we operate with our fat fingers. Give us our Danged MENUS! lol
Here's the output of glxgears in the initial window, and full screen(1280x1024)
KDE 4.6.5 on Fedora 14
Video: NVIDIA GeForce GT 240/PCI/SSE2
I'm using the NVIDIA drivers
25475 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5094.886 FPS
26175 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5233.910 FPS
26374 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5274.770 FPS
26354 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5270.770 FPS
26243 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5248.497 FPS
26256 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5251.155 FPS
9037 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1807.123 FPS
3930 frames in 5.0 seconds = 785.885 FPS
3941 frames in 5.0 seconds = 788.098 FPS
3938 frames in 5.0 seconds = 787.504 FPS
3952 frames in 5.0 seconds = 790.120 FPS
3925 frames in 5.0 seconds = 784.633 FPS
I've gotten better results on the same box in the past, but for me, this isn't bad.