4 ms·

Thank you for this. I have a personal peeve with the direction that KDE has been taking with the semantic desktop - the tremendous slowdown because of that and

Thank you for this. I have a personal peeve with the direction that KDE has been taking with the semantic desktop - the tremendous slowdown because of that and absolutely no focus on usability. Plus the desktop looks like an 80's Eurodance video (as compared to Gnome 2). They continue to use konquerer and KJS (built into the core desktop) rather than webkit or V8. Power management with linux on laptops has been going downhill since sometime and today I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 (maybe Phoronix is right with its power regression hullabaloo) Suspend and resume still sucks (https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=28739 https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=28739 presumably fixed in 2.6.38 but still gives me problems frequently). Displayport/HDMI out on my laptop does not send out audio and until I used a custom PPA kernel, multi-monitor out on my laptop used to lockup frequently. All of these things work seamlessly on Windows 7. I am willing to pay good money for a seamless Linux desktop (~100$ for something that works seamlessly and timely updates) - if that's what it takes to get someone to focus on something of value, like TuxOnIce, rather than placement of close buttons on the left vs right.

jrockway 15y ago
$100 is not what it will take. It will take a vendor that's willing to build the laptop out of supported hardware instead of whatever they can source most cheaply. Apple does it and that's why their hardware mostly works. (But to be fair, I've had plenty of issues with Windows and OS X. Software sucks. Hardware sucks. That's why you get a supercomputer with 15 hours battery life for $500, though. If you wanted it to be perfect, it would cost you $100,000.)
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >$100 is not what it will take. It will take a vendor that's willing to build the laptop out of supported hardware instead of whatever they can source most cheaply. I imagine it's cheaper just to support the hardware you are using for other OSs though? Dell were shipping Linux based laptops and presumably chose this route over the "create hardware specifically for Linux" route. Why did Dell fail in this respect?
  - sandGorgon 15y ago
    take that thought one bit further. Say you only support hardware from the last 5 years (Drop all pre-2001 compatibility.) - 5 major laptop makers,3-4 hardware/motherboard lines. Can a software player not raise 20K$ to buy hardware and build in full out-of-the-box compatibility ? Diaspora raised 200K for vaporware - can this not be funded ?
nl 15y ago
I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 oh, oh.. jumps around excitedly. I know this one! sudo apt-get install powertop sudo powertop Express mild surprise to find that npviewer.bin is using a huge amount of power pkill npviewer.bin Yay for flash!!
- sandGorgon 15y ago
  flashblock on chrome FTFY P.S. I dont completely trust Phoronix, but I'm beginning to think that the power regression thing is real http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_power_partial&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux...
- evilduck 15y ago
  Can't stress powertop enough. I have a N455 Atom netbook, with 11.01, just now installed it (I knew about it but always forget to install it after reformatting), and using powertop's suggestions, I brought idling down from an average 8.5 watts to 7.9 watts, giving me almost another 30 minutes of battery life.
sho_hn 15y ago
> They continue to use konquerer and KJS (built into the core desktop) rather than webkit or V8. FWIW, this is somewhat incorrect. First of, Konqueror is an application, not a browser engine; you're thinking of KHTML. Now, it's true that KDE is still developing KHTML and KJS (and it has to, considering KDE commits to ABI/API stability within a major release series and the Qt port of WebKit wasn't close to ready by the time KDE 4.0 was released). However, Konqueror offers support for using either KHTML/KJS or QtWebkit/JavaScriptCore - technically, both are just KPart components, along with the Okular PDF viewer and various others Konqueror embeds to display documents of various sorts - and some other parts of the "core desktop" use WebKit exclusively (e.g. the Webview and Web Slice widgets).

jrockway 15y ago

$100 is not what it will take. It will take a vendor that's willing to build the laptop out of supported hardware instead of whatever they can source most cheaply. Apple does it and that's why their hardware mostly works. (But to be fair, I've had plenty of issues with Windows and OS X. Software sucks. Hardware sucks. That's why you get a supercomputer with 15 hours battery life for $500, though. If you wanted it to be perfect, it would cost you $100,000.)

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>$100 is not what it will take. It will take a vendor that's willing to build the laptop out of supported hardware instead of whatever they can source most cheaply. I imagine it's cheaper just to support the hardware you are using for other OSs though? Dell were shipping Linux based laptops and presumably chose this route over the "create hardware specifically for Linux" route. Why did Dell fail in this respect?
- sandGorgon 15y ago
  take that thought one bit further. Say you only support hardware from the last 5 years (Drop all pre-2001 compatibility.) - 5 major laptop makers,3-4 hardware/motherboard lines. Can a software player not raise 20K$ to buy hardware and build in full out-of-the-box compatibility ? Diaspora raised 200K for vaporware - can this not be funded ?

nl 15y ago

I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 oh, oh.. jumps around excitedly. I know this one! sudo apt-get install powertop sudo powertop Express mild surprise to find that npviewer.bin is using a huge amount of power pkill npviewer.bin Yay for flash!!

sandGorgon 15y ago
flashblock on chrome FTFY P.S. I dont completely trust Phoronix, but I'm beginning to think that the power regression thing is real http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_power_partial&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux...
evilduck 15y ago
Can't stress powertop enough. I have a N455 Atom netbook, with 11.01, just now installed it (I knew about it but always forget to install it after reformatting), and using powertop's suggestions, I brought idling down from an average 8.5 watts to 7.9 watts, giving me almost another 30 minutes of battery life.

sho_hn 15y ago

> They continue to use konquerer and KJS (built into the core desktop) rather than webkit or V8. FWIW, this is somewhat incorrect. First of, Konqueror is an application, not a browser engine; you're thinking of KHTML. Now, it's true that KDE is still developing KHTML and KJS (and it has to, considering KDE commits to ABI/API stability within a major release series and the Qt port of WebKit wasn't close to ready by the time KDE 4.0 was released). However, Konqueror offers support for using either KHTML/KJS or QtWebkit/JavaScriptCore - technically, both are just KPart components, along with the Okular PDF viewer and various others Konqueror embeds to display documents of various sorts - and some other parts of the "core desktop" use WebKit exclusively (e.g. the Webview and Web Slice widgets).