Plasma 5.18
kde.org
kde.org
On one hand I do like that the desktop does not try to re-define basic muscle memory things, like changing the shortcut if you try to switch between two windows of the same application. (Seriously Gnome, WTF?).
On the other hand it crashed left and right after install (less so now that it settled down a bit) and there are a million QA type problems. I have a 4K 27" screen and everything is tiny by default, so I put scaling to 1.3 and Kate + Terminal are full of lines. The computation of the window update is broken.. I browse the internet and the ticket is open - since two years.
Then there is Wayland, which I got used to on Gnome and think is a great achievement - not in KDE though, that is still highly experimental and so back it goes to ancient protocols. Yay!
So yes, we are building fancy new stuff on an eroding foundation is the message I am getting from KDE nowadays. Compared to Gnome - which is stable but weird.
Thinking back on the Gnome 2 / compiz / beryl days we have gone downhill so much it's not funny..
ps. I know I'm complaining too much and that's unfair to an open source project. And I still perceive Liunx desktops as superior to Windows which has it's own issues (technical and non-technical). Just wondering what all the effort was spent on in the last decade or two. I just don't see it.
The fractional scaling could use some work, agreed. The foundations seem rock solid, but work on new stuff (e.g. wayland, fractional scaling) could be quicker.
I will say that in my experience initial releases are often kinda glitchy or something, and that it can take awhile for brand new hardware etc to be supported well. But it's usually solved by just waiting a bit for the second version.
Classic flamewar statement here, but I've had fewer headaches overall with kubuntu than gnome flavors of Ubuntu (which Ive had to use for work). Deb+kde is a great combination. Maybe there's a better way to get that but I've always gone back to kubuntu when I've tried something else.
Not for me. I switched to Kubuntu in 18.04 LTS (after many years of OpenSUSE, so I've got a pretty good idea of how a polished KDE distro looks.) No complaints at all. Kubuntu use to be a poor rendition of KDE but it's working great now.
I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu generally; kernel-hwe is outstanding. With 18.04 LTS you still get updated kernels; it was released with 4.15 but with "hardware enablement" updates it's up to 5.3 now.
Sure, if you only ever need a text editor you don't need to care about scaling anything but fonts, but that is not the case for most people and unrelated to which WM or DE you use.
But hey, at least there is an Emoji Selector now (???).
KDE honestly seems the best for this, although on the latest version of GNOME has fractional scaling available behind a flag (although also buggy and very slow).
That assumes non-Nvidia hardware. If you have one of those you are on a potentially very different timeline, that I do not dare to predict.
https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-release...
Testify :(
I'm still struggling to get my (IMHO, extremely vanilla) setup working (Ubuntu on Thinkpad T430 + 2 external QHD monitors), and I'd appreciate any pointers to any resources that can help me resolve this.
I have a Thinkpad X1C and an external monitor, both with QHD resolution. What I ended up with is using xrandr scaling to increase the resolution of the external monitor (probably should have gotten a 4K instead...), and tweaking font sizes and Firefox's UI scaling until it looks okay on both screens. For QT apps I also had to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0. Some proprietary apps are still too small though, so I tend not to use them ;-)
The xrandr scaling is applied through a script and not persistent, so I mapped it to a keyboard shortcut I can press when I reconnect the monitor.
My script looks like this:
xrandr \
--output eDP-1 --pos 0x0 --scale 0.9999x0.9999 \
--output DP-2 --pos 2560x0 --scale 1.25x1.25
Works fine for me on i3 (X11).
Bug was opened 6 years ago, and is still open. GDM handles this by default.
If you have a large UHD monitor, why would you still use the small lowres screen? Conversely, if you are willing to use a large lowres screen, why not simply set the other screen to half resolution to get the same dpi?
My first impression is that it looks good. Lots of useful features. But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again.
That said I have a question:
It seems that Plasma has tiling WM features. How useful are they?
One thing about tiling WM is that typical it's only part of a package. Another part is that people are typically looking at a lightweight hotkey driven workflow and the ability to script where and how windows appear with occasional non tiling things to fit applications that don't work well for tiling systems.
The other question I have is that one of the reasons why I go for these "lightweight" setups. Althouh xfce-settings daemons + tiling wm is what I do is also because of power usage. How is KDE in terms of power usage?
And yes, I realize that firefox, blink based browser, slack are the biggest power drains.
There are multiple different Kwin script that add the tiling functionality now. Like this [0] and this [1]
Regarding being lightweight, KDE is very very light these days. In terms of memory usage it rivals XFCE. Not quite sure about power usage, but since Plasma Mobile is being developed and it shares a lot of code with Desktop, I assume it shouldn't be too bad.
There are kwin extensions for more extensive tiling support such as: https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling
The OMGUbuntu site did a decent write-up:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/kde-plasma-5-18-lts-feat...
Anyway, updating KDE Neon as I'm typing this. Looking forward to new bits of polish :)
The tiling features are all scripts now, they're not part of the base Kwin code anymore. They work pretty well in my experience. (That being said, if you haven't used Kwin in a while, it's worth noting that it also lost window tabbing along the way, so tiling is far less useful than it could be).
In terms of resource use, Plasma 5 is a lot more lightweight and snappier than we've come to expect from KDE in the post-4.0 era :). You can tell it's QML all the way down because the latency is nowhere near as good as in the 3.x days, but it's not too bad, and in terms of resource consumption (RAM, CPU, whatever), it's better than it's ever been in the last 10 years. And it's very good overall.
In terms of power consumption, I can't say I've noticed a difference between KDE and the more lightweight setup that I use. I haven't ran numbers though -- so all I can say is that, if there's a difference, it's small enough that I haven't noticed it. Probably because the biggest power drains account for so much of the power drain that KDE & friends don't account for much anymore :)
Doesn't seem to work anymore on youtube though
The scene with the keyboard with crumbs and hairs tells me that they do not respect their own product enough. A good example on how the effort of hundreds of people that contributed to this awesome release is being ... not appreciated.
It has been my observation that tech people tend to place less emphasis on aesthetics or, god forbid, marketing or sales. This functional fixation is unfortunate - many people do engage in emotions, enjoy looking at pleasant things, tend to appreciate harmony and subconsciously associate themselves with things that bear the same values as they believe themselves to possess.
I don't think a lot of people will find a way to associate with this presentation.
A former KDE user, looking to come back.
I am a dedicated follower of Plasma and to be honest counting features this is a lame relase.
BUT it's also a LTS release. Some will upgrade specifically for that somehow quality statement. You do not want a ton of new features without time for stabilisation in such a release?
I'll upgrade as soon as I can, so I can check out the quick audio device switching. Audio routing in Plasma is featureful but not intuitive.
I still use KDE apps, I find that a lot of them are perfect; but the DE has been limping along since the 4.0 re-write.
Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help, you are making it worse.
Side note: I really liked the music in that video.
The DE "app-store-thing" is a front end to packageKit and packageKit is a front end to your package manager.
They're sure as hell not making it worse for regular people that manage software using graphical interfaces. The world doesn't revolve around power users.
Even then - I consider myself a power user, and I enjoy using Gnome's equivalent from time to time. I might be a power user, but I like pictures and discoverability. This might be a shock to some, I'm sorry.
> There are quite a few new things in Plasma 5.18's System Settings. First and foremost is the optional User Feedback settings. These are disabled by default to protect your privacy.
> That said, if you do decide to share information about your installation with us, none of the options allows the system to send any kind of personal information. In fact, the Feedback settings slider lets you decide how much you want to share with KDE developers. KDE developers can later use this information to improve Plasma further and better adapt it to your needs.
So you often get "kde as it was two years ago". The horror! After all, we all remember how using computers two years ago was pure agony until things radically changed...
I tried yesterday (5.17.3 IIRC, mind you): plasmashell crashed, then followed by systemsettings5, and konsole. Drkonqui popped up for the bug report, but crashed halfway. Then popped up again with a link for manual bug reporting. Clicked it, it crashed again.
Sometimes QML applets crash (there was a bug with the CUPS one recently, if there were duplicated job IDs), and bring down plasmashell with them. But that also happens on X11, which can leave the environment quite empty, and hard to debug for my non-techie family.
On Wayland, I miss primary clipboard buffer (selection), which works on sway. Also, default popup placement is wrong. Besides that, not much.
I really like KDE plasma, but started using sway for Wayland, and stayed for the tiling. I might think about writing a kwin module to ingest my sway config, and only that... :)
GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox
That works on Gnome and sway, not on plasma. Intel GPU. Still open bugs on bugs.kde.org
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox
This makes firefox a full wayland app. But I only use sway, so maybe there are KDE specific bugs.
- User intuitive widgets that can be easily dragged around in panels with a third party store directly in Plasma itself, containing useful widgets such as calendar events sync and todo lists
- Complete customization but also pretty by default and getting better; browse third party colorschemes, plasma themes, global themes, panel layouts (latte), application styles (kvantum), etc etc
- Powerful notification system that allows you to reply inline to telegram messages, embed screenshots so you can drag those around [https://postimg.cc/q6qLMXK1], embed files that you can also drag around + interact with, sticky notifications for ongoing operations - still having the ability to go with a do not disturb mode for a custom time and set notification importance in a granular way
- Powerful integration with phone (see phone battery, see and send messages, see incoming calls, see/stop/play videos [youtube / vlc] playing on the pc from the phone, see phone notifications, and so on) and integration with browsers (native notifications, native downloads [see notifications above], search and open browser tabs from krunner, etc)
- Powerful search (krunner) that can check spelling errors, find browser tabs, convert units, do mathematical operations, search the apps store, run command line programs, open locations, see recent documents, add task to the todo list (zanshin), supports third party runners, etc etc etc
- System tray that only shows relevant widgets so you can keep it minimalist but without loosing any possibly useful option (system tray elements for usb drives, night color, display configuration, clipboard, vaults, media playback, printers, kate sessions, etc etc)
- Third party stuff like Latte and Kvantum that allows you to customize your desktop in any way imaginable (quick browse for "Plasma" on r/unixporn will confirm this)
- Consistent apps that follow the general theme, some of them also convergent, e.g. all maui apps (index [files], vvave [music], buho [notes], pix [images], ...) work exactly the same on desktop and on your Android phone as well, so you don't have to learn to use different applications on each OS
- Light and fast. Yeah, I know xfce is very light and fast, but Plasma 5 is very light as well recently. I have a pinebook, the $100 machine, and it's usable both with Plasma and xfce (both uses around 340mib of RAM there).
- Kontact suite with Akonadi integration that allows for various apps all integrated with each other (todo from one app will appear in the other), with the generic Kontact app containing all them and being able to show a dashboard with all recent notes, to-dos, events, mails etc.
- Support for phones with Plasma mobile and other tech things (e.g.: TVs afaik and the mycroft thing), with Plasma Mobile using the same underlying plasma base component, so it's consistent + compatible
- Any application you could need, there are a lot of those all made by the KDE community, and those are all following the KDE human interface guidelines and following the global theme, so that's nice
...I kinda lost track of time, sorry for the essay, I just think that Plasma is great and this is how I can best explain why
Wait, TVs? Where can I read more about this?