Anne Wilson wrote: problem doesn't occur. You answered with what I already knew, of course. Growing pains. This is simply a bug that has not been fixed yet. I do like the 4 different activities on 4 desktops, as it finally, after 10 years of fedora/redhat, actually makes having virtual desktops useful to me (I usually close programs when I have finished using them, so it is rare that I have more than 3 open at a time and it is rare that I need to move one to another desktop). I will likely continue to use this feature, despite the glitch, as it is not totally unusable. Do plasmoids on activities that are not being used eat up cpu capacity?

Anne Wilson wrote: Sounds good. On my desktop computer, weather and rss update only every 30 minutes here, so should be minimal strain. Picture frame, when I use it, changes every 2 minutes or so, so that would suggest somewhat increased load, but also minimal. Again, you have stilled my concerns, so I can likely even begin using plasmoids on my 3.5 year old laptop, where I always refrained, due to concerns about sapping processor power :-)

Anne Wilson wrote: I observe that plasmoids mostly just duplicate applications, and I prefer the full-fledged apps with all of the bells and whistles, as opposed to scaled- down plasmoidal apps. Also, you have to minimize or clear away everything from the desktop to use a plasmoid, so you might as well just use the real thing in a window. I do, however, like the weather report, a calculator, a notepad and an rss aggregator (mostly for scanning headlines, but generally I then move to google reader to do serious reading) on the desktop. After reading an article about the future of the desktop, I tried removing the panel entirely and putting all of the functions - time, s-tasks, sys- tray, kmenu - on the desk as plasmoids, but, firstly, it was not functional, as I had to constantly rotate to the virtual desktop with those plasmoids, and secondly, having quite a number of plasmoids really does not make for an aesthetically pleasing desktop, as it looks like a messy jumble (I always hated shortcut icons on the desktop, and this appears much the same). If they were all standard sizes, it would be easier to arrange them to make it look classy. Plasmoids have a limited value, primarily for system functions, but you don't see people showing off screenshots of their beautiful desktops since the advent of the plasmoid. Luckily, I have Intel graphics on both computers and don't have to disable anything to watch video. Intel rocks, these days, after a very rough 18 months that ended when I moved to f12α in late August. Firefox problems? Luckily, none here at all, but I use the desktop 99% of the time, so the laptop is just for the bedroom, and I rarely use a computer in bed, re: proper sleep hygiene ;-)

Anne Wilson wrote: That thing is more than enough for desktop effects. Even the most basic Radeon 7000 should be sufficient. Kevin Kofler

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Anne Wilson wrote: It does. The netbook (with accel) does them fine. The 2.0GHz Core2Duo has noticeable lag with translucency (Normal animation speed, fine with instant). The 3.0GHz Core2Duo machine was able to do it well enough that there's not much difference. Definitely improves XRender as well. - --Ben

Petrus de Calguarium wrote: I had noticed that both fedoraforum and kde-look had removed their screenshot sections, so this thread was interesting. I see that a lot of the shots date back into 2008, but some of the latter pages are for 2009, ie., somewhat current kde. It seems that most have found a similar solution to mine: use plasmoids very, very sparingly on the desktop, as they create clutter and disorder and do not harmonize well or even interfere with the background, and reserve them mostly for the panel.

Petrus de Calguarium wrote: Looks like it's adding an unwanted additional activity whenever it feels like it? Kevin Kofler