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Comment by hexo | Hacker News Reader

Did they already add "turn off all animations and needless movements, fades and transparencies" option? I guess not, and I'd really appreciate it. KDE would became useful for me again. Seriously, I've booted live USB on thinkpad x240 and there was some current KDE running. For a few minutes I thought there was something very wrong with laptop, but it was KDE making feel core-i7 like lowend celeron. It makes me wonder if authors use that environment on very high-end machines exclusively. Also "start menu", sorry for the naming, feels like unstoppable carousel to me (those sliding tabs). All this is a pity because I really do like QT for development, but unstoppable animations are no-go

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>Did they already add "turn off all animations and needless movements, fades and transparencies" option?

Yes, ~10 years ago.

This highlights the difference between defaults and options.

Options that would solve a users problems often go unused leaving the user with a negative opinion.

Maybe as part of first run it ought to set a default useful based on current performance.

It might also be worthwhile to think about how it degrades under pressure. Is it possible to notice frames dropped or delayed and degrade more gracefully.

I think there are some blacklisted video cards. I assume is is not as easy as you think to write the code that detects the perfect thresholds where animations are smooth all the time. I would like to assume that most KDE users are competent enough to at least google the answer on how to turn the animations off and desktop effects too (I mean somehow they installed a KDE distro finding a checkbox should be much easier).

In theory but never overestimate human competence or underestimate the value of good defaults.

There will always be some people that will disagree with the defaults. plus metrics/telemetry is disliked by many users and is not built into the software. Knowing what settings are changed often could help, though it depends on project, I see many GNOME users changing defaults with adding a system tray extensions and nobody cares.

> Maybe as part of first run it ought to set a default useful based on current performance.

Given how NVIDIA drivers are installed, the first run may not be representative. First run for each new xorg config maybe. But that could lead to random changes in behaviour as well on updates.

Maybe login would be better. The setting could be x y or z or "set automatically based on performance" with the last being the default

Please, how? i've spent a few days trying to stop those with no luck. I can turn off only some of them and even that gets ignored by some applications :( (like "start menu", or settings manager itself)

Yeah I think you’ve been able to do it for a while by turning off the compositor?

You don't need to disable the compositor. You can set its speed to "instant" and it won't do any animation.

> I've booted live USB on thinkpad x240

I think I found what was causing your performance problems. I'm running KDE Plasma 5.16.5 / Ubuntu 19.10 on an old 3rd gen core-i5 (i5-2520M) and it's crazy fast. It's performance has been on par with light DE's I've tested like Budgie, beats Gnome3 and just crushes Windows on this laptop. I even turned compositing on just for the extra effects (I like my wobbly windows) and it still outperforms Gnome 3 and Windows.

> All this is a pity because I really do like QT for development, but unstoppable animations are no-go

The animations aren’t because of QT, but KDE itself

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