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Comment by reledi | Hacker News Reader

The content on the page does a very poor job of explaining what it is and why we should care. It's only until I saw the KDE developers at the bottom that I realised it's a graphical desktop environment but for your mobile phone. It's FOSS so it's hackable, as in you have access to the source code and development is done in the open and contributions are encouraged. The target developer phone seems to be the LG Nexus 5. I guess it's running some Debian-based OS as apt-get is its package manager.

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Yea, the Plasma Mobile home page doesn't really make a strong pitch towards a potential user.

For mobile developers, the biggest difference is that they'd be using the Qt framework instead of the Android framework.

So the pitch at least for mobile developers, should be why it's a more pleasant and better (and more productive) experience to develop mobile apps with Qt vs the Android frameworks.

I'm not how much better Qt is going to be since I haven't used it. But I've been a long-time desktop Linux KDE user, and one of the biggest gripes I have with KDE is that its quite unstable and buggy compared to Mac and Windows.

KDE 4 became almost very-stable with 4.13+, but the early version of KDE 4 were horribly unstable. With Plasma 5, from what I hear, things got worse again.

This is the biggest problem, I think. To the people who have actually used KDE on deskotp Linux for a long time, how many of you have enough confidence in the stability and reliability of a mobile Qt/KDE environment to use it everyday?

To answer your question, I'm a user of KDE since its 3.x days. KDE 4 was as bad as they say it was - buggy, terrible theming and impaired customizability. The stability did improve in its later versions though.

I switched to Plasma 5 about a year ago, when the first stable version landed on Arch linux. It's been a daily driver since. Initial versions had lots of bugs in them - persistently high CPU usage. Sometimes the desktop hung for no fault of the user. Proper resumption after standby/resume was a lottery. On the plus side, the Breeze theme was a breath of fresh air compared to the older Oxygen theme.

Since version 5.6 was released things have improved and keep getting better with every new version. There are still occasional cockups with Intel graphics drivers leading to high CPU usage. The problem though seems to stem from the Qt libraries. Some GTK 3.x apps don't show proper widgets (blame Gnome devs for not having consistent themes for 3.x versions). I did give other DE's a go - Gnome 3.xx, Cinnamon, XFCE etc., but always ended up switching back. Plasma offered the best mix of customizability, performance and aesthetic appeal for me.

Actually I don't see much benefits from using Qt. C++ is pretty old language that doesn't have a GC and its syntax for me is worse than Java's.

Qt developers are nowadays pushing for JavaScript instead.

Qt5 programming model is that C++ Widgets are legacy and you are supposed to do the UI in QML, a JavaScript dialect, while coding in C++ the business logic or the hardware interaction of new widgets you might create.

> Qt developers are nowadays pushing for JavaScript instead.

Uh. I've used JavaScript in a production environment, and I really really don't like it. It feels like a massive step backwards to me, when there's so many good languages out there. I wish developers would stop pushing for JavaScript everywhere.

Having to use it in the browser is horrible enough. Please don't write servers and other back-end code as well in it now. I personally wouldn't even use it for web front-end--- I would rather use a language like Elm, that cleanly compiles to JavaScript.

C++ has gotten a lot better with C++11/14/17. It's almost like a new language now. I agree the syntax is not the nicest. But not having a GC is not really that big of a problem. I honestly (literally) never have memory-related problems while writing C++ because I either use smart pointers, or always allocate/free objects in the constructor & destructor. I rarely even find myself calling 'new' because everything gets allocated by the STL containers. There certainly is more effort involved in this, vs. using a language with GC, but that's the (small) price in effort you pay for far more efficient memory usage and no arbitrary GC freezes.

> ...and its syntax for me is worse than Java's

Both C++ and Java have been improving their syntax in recent years. I'd recommend reintroducing yourself to the latest version of either.

But the header files are still there, aren't they? One still has to write a method name and arguments twice.

You're talking C++, clearly. First, you could write things header-only and avoid repeating yourself if that's your concern. Much of boost is written this way. There are advantages and disadvantages to that, but it's less code.

Second, there are experimental modules systems available that avoid many of the disadvantages of header-only code. If things go well, modules will be standard in C++20.

There are certainly things I would improve about the syntax of Java and C++, but both are improving quickly in that regard.

KDE3 is the best desktop environment I've ever used, and rock solid. I'd be confident in a KDE3-based mobile environment. But post-KDE4? No.

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