After several people said KDE 4 is sutible for low end hardware and works just fine on it I had to give it a try on my laptop which I use when I travel. It is a second hand Sony Vayo PCG-Z600LEK, about 6 years old, super slow and I called it gna since it is giving me headaches repeatedly. Working on it with KDE 3 is doable but not a nice trip to the Caribbean if you know what I mean 😉
Today I installed RC2 on it and damn I am impressed. It is so much faster. Everything works just snappy. Windows switching happens instantly. And so on…
I already loved KDE (and KDE 4 especially because of all the awesome new stuff) but this is fantastic.
Thank you everyone who put work into it. We rock!
Yes, same for me. I’m using KDE4 since RC2 on my 4-years old Dell Latitude D600 (1.4 GHz Pemtium-M, 512 MB RAM). It appears to be much more smoother than KDE3.
All Developers have done a good job so far.
It does, however, not seem very smooth on my quite 3.2Ghz/1Gb RAM machine. I guess there is still a lot of potential. For example, the speed improvement in kwin from RC1 to RC2 was enormous. KWin’s speed is all but perfect yet, but at least it’s in a usable state.
However, I feel like it could be faster on 3.2Ghz. It’s not as smooth as I’d like it to be. It has nothing to do with application startup times which are awesome, but a lot with plasma and kwin I guess. Well, let’s see what 4.0.1 brings =).
Could you please tell me what is your distro of choice and are you using svn version or binary packages? My experience on Kubuntu with the official KDE4 RC2 packages is exactly the opposite – it feels slow and sluggish (esp. things like dragging docks, selecting files or browsing them in column mode in Dolphin…) I’d love to know that’s not the fault of kde4 itself but of Kubuntu or poorly built packages….
@Konrad: I am using Kubuntu packages as described in the announcement on kubuntu.org.
I’m also using Kubuntu 7.10 with the Kubuntu packages. On my old Dell-Laptop it runs very smooth, but on my desktop PC (Athlon X2) there are some glitches like high CPU usage when loading web pages with konqi4.
I also am using RC2 from the Kubuntu PPA. It VERY smooth for me, and compositing work better than with compiz (ATI Xpress1100 with the 7.11 AIGLX drivers). My measured wattage actually went down 1 watt at “idle” as well. My memory usage is another matter(500MB), but I really can’t judge very well since I do run several kde3 apps (kmail) and gtk ones as well (firefox). Good job everyone, kde4 is rocking…
After 45 days my impression is that it is the best looking desktop ever, and that compared with KDE 3.5 it is both faster, with window movement being silky smooth, and the fonts and graphics are very clean.
I’m using OpenSuse 11 and KDE 4.0, Athlon 2.4 GHz, 1GB RAM and and NVidia 128 MB card.
It has been a bit buggy, with some crashes in Kontact, but it looks so good that I’ll stick with it, and try the 4.1 release which is just out..
http://www.linux.com/feature/142661