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On Fri, 18 Sep 2015, David C. Rankin wrote:
Well, I have wickedly fast load times with all applications, no complaints, kde is blazingly fast on my 7 year old laptop ... KDE3 that is...
I've run both Windows 7 and various versions of linux on the box. The load time differences are pretty much 'nil', and in fact, in a pure systemd environment, I can boot in a fraction of the time it takes to load windows, including starting full bind9 dns, dhcp, apache, postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, etc.
It all boils down to a good configuration. Where you can spend $100 bucks on an OS and then sit on hold for hours to get a semi-competent tech that can hopefully solve your issue or help you with a config, with linux the price you pay for the OS is learning how to configure it.
Yeah well that actually never happened to me. Windows is so generally often-used that every problem already has a solution existing on the web. That's why it never was a problem (for anyone) using illegal Windows versions. You don't need to talk to Microsoft, ever, unless activation fails, these days :-/.
Given the symptoms you describe, it sounds like there is either a display driver issue forcing all the rendering to be sent to the CPU instead of being handled by the GPU or similar generically used module or config issue that is causing KDE to spin it wheels on application launch.
That could be. But it is not any configuration choice I made myself. I don't see how I can be held responsible for the choices others have made ;-).
That is the best anyone can do until you can provide an actual error message or log file snippet hinting at what the specific problem could be. I don't know what kind of video chip you have, but make sure you have the correct driver for it. You can literally see a 100 - 500% improvement in desktop response on the video driver alone.
It's just an Intel Mobile series 4 chipset, as part of a Core 2 Duo L9400. If there is an issue, I have been having that issue for at least 6 months now, starting with Kubuntu in January.
Look at `/var/log/Xorg.0.log` along with `lsmod` and verify you have to proper driver loading for you video card.
Aye, I could see nothing fancy that was off.
As root, type `dmesg` and pipe the output to a file and look at the system startup and see if there are any issues that stand out.
Also nothing really. I could check again.
You say kwrite is slow? Then open konsole and type 'kwrite' at the prompt and see what kde messages and warnings are written to stdout or stderr. If there are any -- post them.
When it is *really* slow there are bunches of DBUS messages. Sometimes not having to do with KWrite at all. Like, there are DBUS messages about NetworkManager. I never understood them. That is on the rare occassion that KWrite takes 10+ seconds to launch. On other occassions, it generally still takes about 2 seconds to launch every time. It is just a general slow feeling. You just twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to launch, and it greatly disrupts the flow and concentration of what you're doing. If you're saying that's abnormal, I have no clue how to troubleshoot it myself. But I'm also no KDE developer. I don't know what million things it needs to do before it launches. But I also don't much feel like being the guinea pig that is going to solve it for everyone. It's just that I like doing other stuff with my time.
That's pretty much the starting point for chasing things down. There is no reason your desktop should be significantly slower than on Windows. Just the opposite is generally true. If your isn't, then it time to roll up your sleeves and work off a little bit of the cost of the OS ;-)
See that's the whole point, I rather spend my time making money and using that money to pay someone else to do stuff I am ill-fitted to do. But if almost every end user (?) is going to have to go through this ordeal, that's just ... ill-spent money, because who knows whether anyone else will benefit. There must be millions of laptops using this chipset. That means every one of them is having this problem; - if that is really the case. It might also mean that every one of these people, if digging deeply enough like I am now, might go through the ordeal of trying to find some problem or bottleneck. What if each and everyone finds that tweaking the video driver or whatever does nothing good? How is that for time ill-spent? Because those results will never be shared with others. So you see, it is rather an ill investment. There is no guarantee for success, and it means you are doing a developer's work but, although you may be a software developer yourself, it is not in your area of expertise and hence costs a lot of energy. You also get a bunch of people running crazy about your system and you have to supply them all data and you don't even feel like it. And besides. Even if I only made $5 an hour. My time spent on Linux in trying to get it to work the way I want, in the sense of doing hard stuff that could have been made so much easier by competent teams, easily runs in the hundreds of hours and I would say I have already spent a $1000 on Linux. But the issue is that /everyone/ is needing to spend that same amount, or something related to it. And that makes it a very expensive system. You can't let the end user do all the work. That's what I'm saying wherever I can: this system is time very badly spent. A user can spend a hundred hours but the benefit to the developer is only minimal. You are just like collateral damage. The system does not advance that way very quickly, and I don't even know if there will ever still be benefits reaching KDE4. It's up in the void if my work here will not be in vain except for me, and if that's the case it is a *very* costly operation. So I have been hunting around the web for "2530p" and "Linux" but there is no information on failed performance. http://blog.philippklaus.de/2012/05/hp-elitebook-2530p/ https://gist.github.com/pklaus/2604286 The second link is everything you could want except Xorg logs. I could go and hunt later today through that Xorg log, but I rather doubt I would find something myself. Everything just seems to be okay. Unless there would be a way to profile the whole system (ie. to see what is taking so much time) and get some graph/display of that, I rather don't consider this a good spending of time. And besides, there are many other reasons why I rather not use (GUI) Linux. I have probably spoken of it before. There are a million things that are just not right to me. There are a hundred thousand things I would improve. But I'm not that KDE developer. I can't be these thousands of people. I can't do all of their work. I would keep doing it forever and never get anywhere, and my own whole life would be wasted before me. It's like buying a car but you have to tune the engine yourself as well as perhaps even assemble it, and maybe after 5 years of study you will be able to drive it. I can't spend that much time on a computer system. I don't even have that much time. Even if the speed was up to par there would be a gazillion other things that would remain. What about KWin not honouring application's requests (Opera, Chromium) to get rid of the title bar? It's so ugly in Linux. Even after spending at least 2-5 hours on it, I still don't have a good Window Switcher. All of them are bad. Maybe that figure seems exaggerated. But the thing costs you a lot of time already because it is so dysfunctional. I can instantly tell you why the Windows 10 thing works much better. It's not perfect - it also confuses me - but ever more slightly than that of KDE. (I would like its thumbnails to be still smaller and its text to be stil larger). It's like, some people are meant to write operating systems. Some people are meant to use operating systems to write other things ;-). I can't keep writing my own OS.... Filing bug reports etc, takes my attention away from the stuff that matters in my life. It is a constant attention drain. Dealing with inconsistencies and half-finished user experiences / interfaces, is a constant energy drain. Ever since the start of this year, 80% of my computer time has been spent on operating systems instead of on doing stuff with operating systems. In the past, that used to be around 10%. It has gone up so much because I need Linux for my software development and systems development. And before I didn't. Not yet. So I have just been spending time on ensuring that eventually it would start working for me and that figure would go down. And Windows 10 is an alien experience. It is just spooky. All of it. Windows 10 is just a creepy system. Perhaps I am a creepy person but I'm not that creepy ;-). All of the black surfaces, the eery transparency, the tiles that have no visual distinctions, changing by themselves, flipping, rotating. The fast pace of everything. It feels like a void. Can I get accustomed to that?. So I have no home anymore. Windows 7 used to be my home, at least for a while, and it was reasonably safe. Then Microsoft started going down a rat hunt. And Linux has lost its track, mostly. There is no cohesiveness, no congruency. I find that much of the world has lost its footing in recent years. Everything has been getting more destabilized. Think of the world and the 'terrorism', that whole ISIL was unthinkable 5 years ago. Just think of software: Python 2 versus Python 3, SQLite 2 vs 3, KDE 4 vs 5, the madness about "cookie" notifications, and much more. You can think of it. Everything is in upheaval. Software as a service? The cloud? What happened to files on your harddisk? Spotify? Where are the torrent networks going? TPB? Isohunt? What's up with buying a movie for €14 on Google Play and they you have to buy it again for €14 just to be able to watch it with the Microsoft player (or any way on your harddisk). Privacy statements these days are all about how you have none left. "Microsoft cares about your privacy" means "Microsoft does not care about your privacy." Any company that has a privacy statement can be read with "not" inserted everywhere. And then a library employee telling me he knows what's best for me even if I don't want it. I just want to be cared for once in a while ;-). Silly world.