Sure, I want to contribute and give it back to community and am doing my bit (tiny) by hanging around in support forums and IRC channels of Linux Mint, promoting KDE and Linux amongst friends and social networks, raising bugs :-P, etc. But, yes I need to go beyond these and contribute in regular and proper fashion. I am not a programmer but can surely contribute in documentation part once I am comfortable with various aspects of the system.

I personally lost interest in the blobs of nvidia and AMD and am not using any of their drivers. If they don’t work, that’s bad, but it’s not something I can change. The right address to complain is NVidia, and the right way to do it is to not buy their products.

As to your suggestions, maybe that’s your chance to get involved and improve KDE in these areas? We simply can’t do anything we’d like, as we’re still bound to those pesky 24 hours in a day, but with more people caring about different aspects, we can make our software and ecosystem more accessible to a larger group of people.

If you’re missing a certain dataengine, maybe that’s your opportunity to dip your feet into Plasma development? It’s quite fun. :)

As to performance in general, I’d recommend a read over: http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.7/qdeclarativeperformance.html

Yes, we’re very aware of these things, in fact I spent most of last night on performance improvements in the containment shown. The result is massive, number of object is more than halved, less than half of the code is loaded initially, and more things are unloaded from memory once they’re not used anymore.

As to delay loading … that’s exactly what we do in the Plasma 2 shell, pieces are loaded bit by bit, and you can actually see the elements appearing one by one. Startup of the shell itself is almost instant.

There’s a reason why we do not call it KDE4 anymore. For your convenience, let’s go over this once again:

The community has grown to big to put everything it does into one big release. We’ve seen this tendency around KDE3 times with Extragear, 4.0 showed it in a very painful way: The platform was ready, many apps were fine, the desktop shell was not up to the task — yet its bad quality made the whole of “KDE” look bad, while it was really Plasma that caused the uproar.

This is exactly what we’re trying to fix, we’re untangling the different products, so they are perceived as that. This is nothing more than bringing our naming in line with reality, with what makes sense, and clarifying our structure in our naming.

You can be all “I’ll keep doing it like I want”, but that simply suggests to me that you’re not understanding why we’re are doing this, or, and that would be a lot worse, you get kicks out of throwing sticks into our wheels.

As to my example: You are sure you read *and* understood it? The development platform is at 4.x, and that’s different from the program version. This is the same for many other apps (I’ll leave it up to you to verify it, it’s really easy!) and has been like that forever.

I realize that discussing version numbers are a fine way to spend your time, I don’t consider it a productive way to spend my time over and over again. It’s a shame you lack the respect for that.

I have two laptops and one is an Optimus setup (screw Nvidia for their Linux support) and am missing those nice KWin effects which work perfectly in my other laptop. And I have not found an answer for making desktop effects work with Optimus laptops . (We thankfully have bumblebee for other applications to take advantage of graphics card)

I had a steep learning curve understanding desktop containments – workspaces, activities, desktop widgets, panel widgets. You guys are doing an amazing job in development and design but perhaps not adequate time for building tutorials / documentation. Why not a demo video included as part of KDE? My vision for KDE is to be idiot-proof desktop and you can already boast as am quite a living proof of it. :-)

Finally, one humble request – I know you development guys are very busy but please do spend some time on user forums and see for common issues that users face

Thanks for reading through. KDE rocks.

You may call it Plasma 1, but the rest of the world calls it KDE4.

The OpenGL need for QtQuick2 has nothing to do with compositing on the window manager level. That is KWin will require OpenGL due to QtQuick2, but doesn’t require compositing. User interfaces like the one done with QtQuick2 are not as demanding to especially memory and bandwidth as compositing.

On the long run of course we will require compositing and OpenGL. We are getting more and more in a direction that even ten year old hardware is capable of running OpenGL. That’s the point where one has to ask whether it’s better to sacrifice for every user of modern hardware or sacriface for users of ancient hardware – who could as well just run the Qt4 or Qt3 based version. Nobody is forced to update to new software, but nobody should expect new software to run on old hardware. And as a matter of fact – facebook won’t work on that either.

I have a question about KDE5. You say here KDE Framework 5 is “on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack”. Does this mean that KDE Framework 5 will require 3D accelerated graphics drivers to work? I currently really admire the current KDE 4 implementation, which can be configured to work with openGL if desired, but if not it runs fast and light using xrender without any special 3D drivers. Currently Gnome is virtually unusable without good 3D graphics drivers, despite the llvmpipe implementation that offloads the heavy work onto the CPU. I think it would be a major step backwards for KDE 5 to require 3D rendering and compositing.

Thanks!