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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: REQUEST: 3d window and mousepointer shadows
From:       Dave Leigh <dave.leigh () cratchit ! org>
Date:       2001-10-22 22:03:16
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On Monday 22 October 2001 16:18, Wilco Greven wrote:

[snip]
> Please stop whining and spreading this fud (10x faster, yeah right).
> Remember that most people are working for fun on KDE, so they are free
> to work on the things they like. Besides that, if you compare KDE2.2
> with KDE2.0, you'll see that KDE2.2 is significantly faster. So your
> statement that no work is being done on improving the speed is false.
>
> Wilco

Wilco, for what it's worth, I see Thomas' point. And for accuracy's sake I'll 
point out that he never said that "no work" is being done to improve speed, 
only that there is room for improvement.

Personally, I don't care whether Konqi or MSIE is faster (I tend to think 
Opera beats them both, and I use it, Konqueror, Netscape AND Mozilla for 
various purposes... all browsers suck, but in different ways). But the point 
has nothing whatsoever to do with browsers.

The point has to do with eye candy provided by the window manager and X. If X 
doesn't provide the mouse shadow then you have to provide it yourself by 
hiding the actual cursor and providing your own replacement.  This is 
inherently slow, and no matter what other work is done to speed KDE up, this 
feature is guaranteed to have negative impact. In my opinion it's terribly 
counterproductive to say, "well it's much faster now, so let's squander that 
hard work by putting in some useless stuff." (I'm sure that some people 
think it's not useless, but that's my opinion.)

Nick mentioned earlier that these effects were "needed."  I don't think so... 
nobody "needs" a mouse shadow.  They might *want* it, but that's a different 
thing entirely. Don't get me wrong... I think drop shadows look GREAT (check 
out LyX for a good example), but nobody's going to suffer from the lack of 
them. 

Now that I've said all that, I should follow up by saying that I think people 
should work on what they want to work on.  You're absolutely right that this 
is a volunteer effort.  The efforts of some people on optional eye candy will 
not necessarily affect others who are working on functionality. So by all 
means, folks should keep working on stuff like this. Personally, I think such 
things should be provided by the proper components; X and QT among them, and 
that the volunteers should be targeting their efforts there. But it certainly 
won't hurt me if they put it elsewhere.

-- 
dave.leigh@cratchit.org
http://www.cratchit.org

Just because he's dead is no reason to lay off work.

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