KDE Neon review
verummeum.com
verummeum.com
It's possible to make a user interface that's both functional and well-designed. Indeed, good UI design improves functionality by making it more accessible and understandable. Things like consistency of elements and appropriate use of whitespace help to avoid mistakes and confusion.
I have to agree with the parent – it's also surprising to me how often otherwise excellent open-source projects are let down by poor user interface design. A large part of this is probably down to the more technical nature of the teams building them, who are probably the group for which design matters least. But I see this a lot in things like internal admin tools too – developers can quite often develop UIs that are so bad they actually become dangerous, and I wonder if some kind of "useful design skills for software developers" might be a worthwhile thing to work on.
If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
Colors, font and layout are of the utmost importance when designning a ui because they convey meaning. Which is what a GUI is all about ( otherwise just use a terminal).
If all you see is a big gray panel, there's something seriously wrong indeed, because a panel without any content is useless. But that is not the case here.
> There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason.
The background color does not need a particular reason to "take up space". It is there when nothing else has a reason to be there. That's how a background works.
> If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important.
If the fonts look tiny, it means they're consistent with fonts elsewhere, including places where space is at more of a premium than in the installer.
> If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
In the screenshots, nothing especially requires your attention. There are no warnings, errors, etc...
Of course something does requires my attention. There is content, and content has structure and different levels of importance. A screen in an installer is a step. A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome. If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc
Those are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself when you see a screen like that. Just based on visual layout and style.
Of course something requires your attention, the content of the screen. But if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing.
> A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere.
It is.
> Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome.
They're on the left. I'm seriously wondering whether you even looked at the screenshots.
> If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc
If the background is the thing taking up the most space, it means that your screen is unnecessarily large for the task. That's unavoidable and not a problem to begin with. You can't just put multiple inputs in one "step", else you'd have a step with no coherent topic like Installation type+timezone.
In case someone reading this happen to be involved with the design of kde screens, i would suggest reading this kind of design 101 articles : https://www.canva.com/learn/visual-hierarchy/
Which is exactly the case in these screenshots. It is an installer step. The only "important" part is the next button at the bottom and it is full screen because it is an installer, hence lots of blank space (or slideshow distractions in other installers).
My favorite design these days is an extremely minimal UI. A tiling window manager (StumpWM), Emacs, a terminal (xterm) and a web browser (Firefox). It's very efficient, and solves the design issue by having almost no design at all.
It can actually look really nice. See e.g. a some images from a random user with a similar setup: https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html
StumpWM is essentially Ratpoison reimplemented in Common Lisp. It's really good and stable, plus it resembles Emacs a lot. There's even a winner-mode.
There's not much to say except that you can tweak it till infinity and extend it in CL. But for me most defaults are pretty good already.
Some core devs are employed or have been employed by companies such as Novell, Nokia and Blue Systems.
Actually, the only apps shown are system settings and the update manager. Hence, I am somewhat confused what you are basing your (strongly worded) criticism on.
I might just be replacing Lubuntu with this as my default "just need Ubuntu with a graphical environment" dist.
I like the concept of "Stable OS, Updated GUI". I've been running it for a while on my laptop.
Good:
* Things just seem to work. The notifications and system settings are pretty easy and slick. The start menu is good.
* Annoying: I miss Ubuntu's Unity keyboard shortcuts. Not just that, but holding down "meta" key showed the shortcuts. I also had trouble doing... I think it was adding a hidden network? There was something in the network manager I couldn't do. AND: To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows.
I never liked KDE (Been using Linux since 2005) but this 5.1.x is making me swing my vote over.
Right click on the task bar at the bottom, goto "Configure Task Manager". There's a setting for how many rows to allow.
The only other thing needed is to have the panel tall enough (You'll have to play, I don't know what this height is) and it will then start doing multi-row/line task bar when you have enough windows.
Also you can check the "Always make rows box" in that same settings dialog to force it to always be multi-line.
It is there by default. Simply make the panel a bit taller. You can also right-click to adjust the number of rows and to always arrange in columns.
So yes, if one day I found that an advanced tiling window manager is what I want, maybe I would keep the rest of the KDE environment.
I've found that clipboard is wiped on application exit in X11 when no clipboard manager is running. Annoying when this happens. KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.
Off topic: by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland compositors is sadly the main thing that keeps me from using Wayland. Which is too bad, since my WQHD screen support in X is so so. I hope this gets fixed in a not to distant future, I rely on this feature.
I've never encountered this behavior in any DE before moving to KDE5 and even with KDE5.
> KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.
Although I admit clipboard history can be useful and even I used to have a task made easier with it, now I really don't want a clipboard manager to keep history.
> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland
It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11 with KDE5.
For clipboard history, I understand that you don't want everything saved. I think most clipboard managers allow you to delete entries. (But you have to think about it)
>> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland
> It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11 with KDE5.
I'm curious, in which situation it does not work correctly?
I can't remember particular cases already but sometimes middle mouse click won't paste anything or will paste old clipboard content and only Ctrl+V works the meant way. It seems this happens either because Ctrl+C/V and MMB actually use 2 independent clipboards that are not always synchronized correctly or because some UI toolkits have some quirks with this part.
Edit: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/139191/whats-the-di...
Could you elaborate what you mean by that? Whether you run an application on a qt-based DE or gtk-based or motif or no DE... does not matter at all in my experience. The only difference is the default gtk or qt theme used (easily changed) and what the window decorations look like.
> (I believe the problem only affects apps build against KDE frameworks and not against pure Qt).
Not in my experience. It is just that some of the more basic qt apps behave better with missing icons or wrongly configured colors.
But there's other like https://github.com/faho/kwin-tiling
I really liked KDE 4 once. It was near perfect with 4.6. But then along came Plasma 5. Downhill from there. Instead of introducing new features and design they should've focused on bugs and stability.
I've found one person to admit they preferred KDE 4 series.
Everyone else seems to prefer the older 3 series or the newer 5 series, me included.
I'm not sure what the point of kubuntu is any more since that's what most people will get and they'll get an old and outdated experience as a result. IMO KDE Neon should become the new Kubuntu.
There are still bugs here and there (which is perfectly understandable), but it's the most polished KDE experience I ever had. I'm actually wondering if it's not the most polished linux experience I ever had - except maybe a vanilla Ubuntu using as much defaults as possible, but I just can't help moving from defaults after a short while (that's the main interest of gnu/linux, to me).
EDIT: oh btw, worth mentioning: I'm using the user edition (the LTS one). I initially used the developer edition, but I found its constant updates annoying, and things were a bit less stable than the user edition (as one could expect).
* audio, including Bluetooth
* network
* display
Unfortunately, little care is taken on security.
KDE Wallet simply offers an API to all your passwords, without any separation. Users cannot tell which application just accessed the "wallet". Certificate warnings randomly pop up, asking for "yes" or "no" without any explaination. Plasma "integration" will ask you for full access to your Google account, but it is unclear what for. The calendar integration will require separate authentication -- to the calendar only.
I think Linux desktops were ahead of others, some years ago, but right now I struggle to recommend it to anyone.
This was my first experience with KDE Neon, so I can't compare the installation to an installation of an earlier version.
Was there any information missing that you would have liked to read? I would appreciate any feedback you can provide!
Stuff like that, otherwise you provided yet another installation process screenshots and we have enough of them lately.
Thank you for your feedback!
Might also be fun to show various end user activities using KDE Plasma 5 oriented software (photos with digiKAM, music management, audio applications &c) and if they have got the desktop indexing and search sorted out yet.
Features, software, etc.
It still scared me few times when the lock screen didn't really lock after waking from suspend. Hopefully the Arch rolling release means I will get a fix soon.
I would really like to hear what information or topics you missed in the review.
The installer is used only once and not very interesting. Default preinstalled apps are nice to know, but again not important.
Interesting things would be: - How does this differ in practice from other similar distros like ubuntu with kde, debian (stable or unstable?) or fedora? - Is package management different? E.g. other repos, are snaps supported? flatpak? - What additional software is added or missing in the repos compared its ubuntu lts base? Is this actually a standalone distro or "just" an added repo? - What are the drawbacks or advantages of this distro compared to ubuntu+kde (kubuntu is just a flavor of ubuntu, not really a separate distro)? - How many people are working on this distro? - What about security? Do they have their own team? - Can you contribute packages to Neon or only to ubuntu?