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Thu, 10/02/2008 - 23:18 — kyle

It isn't often that I come across something as cool as this. It's something that's simple, but really amazing. First, watch the video, then read the details.

These are the kinds of things that we should be aspiring to. Being on Linux (mostly), we can throw open the doors to make improvements. Maybe KDE should have a goal of a fully composited a usable desktop in ten seconds.

But more than that, I think the video says something about approaching problems; about not accepting the status quo. So here is to the future of KDE. May we never constrain ourselves.

Comments

Fri, 10/03/2008 - 07:15 — renoX (not verified)

Boot time is the easiest part

Unfortunately the boot time is the easiest part to optimise (you can summarize it with only one measurement) compared to responsiveness..

Currently Linux is light years behind what BeOS provided years ago (on much slower hardware), if Arjan's optimisations are used by a generic distribution then the boot time will be comparable, but for the application responsiveness this is going to be much harder.

For example Firefox show exactly how *not* to design your application for responsiveness: as their design choices imply that everything share the same thread so a busy tab can freeze the whole browser, this kind of 'base' assumption is hard to change..

Also BeOS was coded for SMP station from scratch so everything was heavily threaded which provided a very good responsiveness even on PCs with only one CPU: I'd be curious to know how many KDE application use heavily threads..

Fri, 10/03/2008 - 03:27 — maninalift (not verified)

wow

The article is really interesting. Great stuff. Perhaps a linux desktop boot-time and responsiveness working group should be formed to research this further and communicate with distros, and upstream providers. On the specific issue of KDE. KDE 4 certainly seems to start slower than KDE 3 but I see that until now it hasn't really been a priority.
Fri, 10/03/2008 - 01:27 — Quintesse (not verified)

Are you actually suggesting

Are you actually suggesting that after starting up the entire machine in 5 seconds we should be content with KDE needing another 5? (and that is considering that in the 5 seconds that they need in the video they already show a desktop)

I think we should at least aim for the same 5 seconds! You have to think that the people who did this are convinced they could still drastically lower the 5 seconds it takes now! Now THAT is the spirit :)
Fri, 10/03/2008 - 03:13 — kyle

Spirit

That is the spirit. But starting in 2 seconds like XFCE is a very ambitious goal, especially for a more featureful desktop environment.

Fri, 10/03/2008 - 01:47 — fish (not verified)

yeah

I have always preferred the WinXP style bootup...show me the desktop first and then load the fucken rest! Definitely sth to improve in KDE4...
Fri, 10/03/2008 - 03:11 — kyle

5 seconds to working computer

When the 5 seconds is done it is ready, after 5 seconds the CPU utilization and disk IO drop to zero (or near zero). Check this out. As far as I can tell it should be more or less usable after 5 seconds.