KDE Blogs 

No, not really. But it's quite close (and it actually also depends on how you twist the benchmark ;) ). When my desktop machine could start KDE in less than 4 seconds I was curious what would the situation be with this slow laptop, the one which started KDE in 5-6 seconds at aKademy. But that was with almost no fonts installed, no XIM, no wallpaper, the simplest splash and other tricks from the KDE performance tips page. Well, now it can do it in the same time even without that. It leaves GNOME few seconds behind and gets very close to Xfce startup time. Read More

If we now spend 1/3 of time in the dynamic linker, of course it helps not forgetting to run prelink. Here's the second bootchart for KDE again (and the Xfce one for comparison, although that one doesn't really change). I wonder if we can call it a draw for now :). Read More

[13:17:58] <Seli> boy, this machine sucks ... how am I supposed to benchmark anything if it fires up KDE in 3.7 seconds? Yeah, right, it's kinda stupid to work on performance when the machine is so fast that even sysprof sometimes doesn't produce enough samples and the machine has no support for CPU throttling or anything like that :(. I'll need to transfer the build from this AMD 2800+ to this slow 900MHz laptop I used at aKademy for the performance talk. Note that while I cheated a bit at aKademy, this is normal KDE startup. Still with warm disk caches, but fc-list says 249 fonts, I have a splash (the SUSE one, that is, ksplash is not exactly fast), I have a wallpaper, and while it is a bare KDE it is fully usable. And adding Konqueror, KWrite, Konsole and some of the default systray apps to the startup still keeps it slightly below 5 seconds. I'm curious what the laptop will do. Read More

Seems I scared some people with my 15 fonts story. So no more worrying, a SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha3 (pretty standard system) can be pretty quick: That is with 280 fonts - and as you can see my bash is up after 4 seconds. Of course this works only if your kdm will preload your data in the background, which it already does in 10.0 though. Read More

Sorry for the slight abuse of the blogosphere, but I did post this request (twice) on kde-devel, and got no replies. I'm having trouble getting my custom widgets working in Qt4 designer; read on if you think you might be able to help, or if you want to learn more about how to use custom widgets in the new designer. Read More

Last month nookie was on irc and we were talking about the msn clients out there. all of them functioned really well except for the look and feel of it. gaim is good but it looks as ugly as gnome it self. then we have kopete which works well with yahoo and other protocols but not so well with msn ( i think we have to blame Microsoft for that. kopete is wonderfully done.). Then we have kmess which is also really cool. but what all these clients lack in common is the themability the look and feel is fixed and there is very little the user can do to change the look and feel of the application.These day's we are planing things to write a client that is themable . but we don't really have an idea about how many people actually want some thing like this. Read More

One of the cool things about Qt that seems to be ignored is the QLayout classes. Most of us are content to use simple things like QHBox and QVBox layouts to get what we want. But what happens when you need more complex behavior? Well the trolls gave us the ability to create new layouts with a trivial amount of code... Read More

It's great to see the progress fontconfig does performancewise after such a long time without much progress. And it's great that Dirk and me are referred to as "perf guys" in the fontconfig changelog now :) Read More

KDE 3.5 has been released (press quote: "The newest version of KDE will have users happy that vendors have recently decided to keep supporting it"), the really last feature release in the until now three and a half years successful KDE 3 series. KDE 3.5.x will be the versions most users will use for likely more than a year (time until KDE 4 release + time until distributions pick it up + time until users upgrade). And KDE 3.5 will also be the version on the next year upcoming business desktop products which currently still ship KDE 3.2. Read More

Jan Muhelig from OpenUsability.org did a usability review of Guidance with Sebas back at Malaga. The report is now up at OpenUsability for those who are interested. I like to think that I know something about usability. I've been studying/reading about it since the mid-90s and applying it to the software that I design and construct. I thought Jan had some very good comments that we'll be soon putting into a future version of Guidance. After working with the code for so long you get blind to its usability faults. :-) It is really good to have someone who is still "fresh" go in and have a good look at what can be made better. Read More