I found out today that two of my colleagues in the office have the same problem with Firefox - when clicking on a link in a mail client, their open Firefox is brought to the current desktop from wherever it was before. Rather annoying I guess (especially for the normal mode of operation with Firefox, keep-it-running-all-the-time-on-its-virtual-desktop), and I bet they've lived with that for quite some time already.

As some might have noticed among all the praise, some of the features may not come at low cost. One of the biggest memory hogs in KDE4 is (again) something that doesn't have much to do with KDE itself - the OpenGL library shipped with the nvidia driver. It is compiled without -fPIC to gain a couple percent performance increase (if at all, I personally doubt it makes a noticeable difference, but that's just guessing, given it's closed-source).

I recently noticed that although I have already talked about using KDE4's KWin in KDE3 or any other window manager in KDE instead of KWin, there is one thing missing in the mix: Using KWin without the KDE desktop.

As you might have noticed, KDE 4.1.3 has been released, codename "Change" (in line with other C- codenames recently, as a kind of a joke on all those people who fail to see that still writing comments with overuse of K after 10 years of KDE's existence can only be a sign of brain damage). Not many changes in KWin there though, the changelog part for KWin has just one change worth mentioning.

Dear LazyWeb ... erm, I mean DoItYourselfWeb. As you may or may not have noticed, KWin now again defaults to compositing enabled, if possible (the self-check will possibly still need polishing a bit, but that's why it's enabled by default now, right; and the little trick for detecting too bad performance needs some testing too). This is true for both to-be-KDE4.2 KDE trunk and to-be-openSUSE11.1 packages.

Zero as when it does not work. And that's sometimes zero fun. There is a plan to enable compositing by default in openSUSE11.1 when possible (just like e.g. Ubuntu already does), so I've been again pondering the idea of enabling KWin's compositing by default in SVN too, just like it was in pre-4.0 times. The "when possible" part is of course the problem.

I got a bit bored this weekend (ok, ok, I had to do a lot of cleaning and so and needed an excuse) and had a look at two performance related things in KWin. First was fixing the CPU usage problem caused by using vsync, now that Thiago found out why I couldn't reproduce it (I build Qt without Glib support, it just messes the backtraces up). Interestingly it was code that was supposed to save CPU that by mistake caused the increased CPU usage. Oh well.

I would post a screenshot of what this is going to be about, but the screenshot would look remarkably similar to other KDE3 screenshots I could post. Unless I switched the decoration to Oxygen/Ozone, but then yours truly is still quite happy with the KDE2 decoration (and then, also not quite happy with all those people who think that anything that's older than a year, especially if it's not shiny, must be oh-so-bad), so let's just skip that. You can try yourself after all.

As every year, one can see all kinds of articles related to today's date everywhere, ranging from quite amusing ones (it's a pity I knew what day it was when visiting dot.kde.org) to really old boring ones without anything interesting in them. I guess many people are running out of ideas or something. Rather that doings things like that, I think such people should simply stay serious. Like myself, I'm a pretty boring person usually, so I won't join the crowd, but I'll rather try to fight back by trying to be serious.

I guess many people see KWin only as 'the window manager from KDE', but there are actually things that can make KWin beat many other WMs - features (some of them first introduced in KWin, such as the focus stealing prevention), compositing, tested codebase, handling of various broken apps, configurability, window-specific settings.