KDE Plasma 5.20
kde.org
kde.org
A personal wish however would be that we got a more modern look to more desktop environments. Both Gnome, Plasma and Pantheon (default in Elementary OS) are talked about as the best looking desktop environments, but I'd be lying if I said that any of them looked awesome. There's just something about them that make them feel weird. Sometimes it's just margins and whitespace, sometimes the font scale that seems inconsistent and sometimes it's the default icon packs that look a bit dated. I don't know, I'm not a designer, but it is definitely worse than both win10 and macOS 10.15.6
I think that if we want to grow the unix user base there's a bit of progress to be made in this department. Customisability is where we win today - but the defaults need to get better to attract more non tech oriented people.
(And if you do find specific problems e.g. regarding margins or fonts, please report them on bugs.kde.org, and we'll take a look.)
I'd argue that your comment is somewhat elitist - what does it even mean to say that someones interest are "primarily superficial and not aligned with the core values and spirit of linux/foss"? Plenty of linux users already care about how their interface looks, that does not mean that they don't care about open source.
I guess I'm obliquely commenting that keeping the project small and in the hands of open-source developers, may be pointless. Otherwise, why agonize over what others are doing with it? Either we want others to use the open-source version too so its a popular desktop with lots of attention, or we don't and becoming a popular desktop with lots of attention doesn't affect those open-source die-hards at all. Either way, a successful project becomes popular on a lot of desktops.
First, to explain my setup: I've got a Dell UP2718Q in landscape, 3840x2160, 10-bit in DCI-P3 colorspace at 1.5x scale at 60Hz, side-by-side with a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 in portrait, 1024x1280, 8-bit in sRGB colorspace at 1x scale at 75Hz
10-bit support isn’t there yet, color calibration support isn’t there yet either, but that’s something where I’ll just have to wait for the future. Discover currently fails to install due to mismatched dependencies, but this is also something the future will solve.
So far: KScreen still refuses to save changed settings, so on every boot I have to manually set my Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 to Portrait at 75Hz again.
The scaling somewhat works, but not properly, especially GTK applications are upscaled rather than downscaled. (See Firefox in the screenshot linked below)
The plasma panels overlap about half a virtual pixel at 1x, or 1 pixel at 1.5x, so the panel on the right monitor opens the dashboard on the left one, and the panel on the left monitor sometimes doesn’t even open a panel at all. Screenshot: https://i.k8r.eu/sEDfiQ.png
Overall it’s a good start, but still not quite there yet.
But that is GPU scaling, not framework scaling.
If you don't care about hires, why not simply set the Dell one to a lower resolution and not worry about scaling at all?
The thing is that scaling works just fine if all your displays use the same one. Two 4k screens -> awesome. Two fhd screen -> works just fine. It is only the combination of one hires and one lowres screen that is problematic.
So my maybe naive take away is that if you care that your main screen is 4k, then no your old screen is not good enough. And if you think it was good enough, then why did you feel the need to upgrade your main screen?
Even if money was no issue and I could have two screens of the same quality, I’d still keep the old screen as a third screen.
For most people, more screens = better, but for me there’s also the fact that to actually design content, you need to be able to verify what this content is going to look like on the devices the users are going to use.
You probably also have encountered websites which are designed for tiny monitors, and end up with text stretched across 40cm (e.g. HN) or websites with razor-thin text that is basically unreadable on cheaper monitors.
As I work in UI/UX design, I want to avoid that issue :)
Or designed for non-maximized windows. It gets pretty frustrating when sites serve me a mobile version just because my window isn't 3000 pixels wide.
I also have a 4k and a 1080p. The 4k is my primary work monitor - i want crisp text. The 1080p is actually a gaming monitor (plus 244hz), since my card can't push 4k for gaming at 244hz hah.
Could i have two 4ks? Yes, but originally this setup was used by my macbook pro, and i wasn't confident it could push two 4ks. Futhermore my 1080p gaming monitor would have to go somewhere, and i'd like to not have two different desk setups.
My setup these days is to scale everything x2 (in KDE or XFCE, currently i'm on XFCE), and then scale my 1080p _down_ via xrandr (as i'm not on Wayland).
Sidenote, Mac handles these two monitors _perfectly_. I complain a lot about Mac, hence me being on Linux at the moment - but these monitor scaling issues were entirely gone in OSX. I never noticed a single scaling issue. Where as on Windows there are lots of quirks, and Linux i could barely get it to work.
Hopefully Wayland makes this experience better.
*(Sidenote: i'm on XFCE atm because KDE on NixOS felt a bit sluggish. Maybe it was just the animations, hard to say. XFCE felt a bit snappier. GNOME was a laggy mess, hah. KDE and XFCE were both good though, XFCE was just a bit better for me on unmeasured performance feel)
If you mean Wayland, both the linked article and the video within the article acknowledge this, calling Wayland a work-in-progress. I too am looking forward to the day they get there.
It’s getting better, but no linux distro is currently on a similar level as windows or mac in this regard
I remember being quite happy when I heard this, as it might be paving the way for a renewed SteamOS initiative, or another Linux offensive, but I don't follow KDE closely and I haven't heard anything since around the time of this article.
Any indication of what was achieved and what has happened since would be interesting to me!
[0] - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Fu...
Both parties seem very reasonable to me. So far, the jury is still out on where things will end up - KWinFT has some good momentum and ideas, while upstream KWin with David Edmundson and other steady contributors are also continuing to fix lots of Wayland issues with every release. Either way it looks like we'll be in a good spot soon.
This is what is holding me back at the moment: heterogenous scaling is only available in wayland, but color calibration (colord-kde) only works in X11.
I think I'll give Gnome another try this time around.
After using it for months like that I solved this by simply setting the resolution on the laptop to 1920x1080, and scaling to 1. I felt really stupid after that I did not do this sooner.
If your software supports non-integer scaling it can render things with that knowledge and give you crisp edges on the edge of text and UI elements.
Manjaro with recent KDE provides me what I call "a lot like Mac but way better" experience (surely, there are aspects in which Mac or any other system is better, I just don't know which particular).
And it has made a great replacement once Ubuntu lost its Unity (right at the moment it became polished enough).
The only disappointing part are the plasmoids - I could make a lot of use of some desktop widgets but it's pain to find useful plasmoids and make them work, making your own plasmoids seems complicated.
In fact I'd be comfortable with a generic terminal plasmoid (with a read-only mode option) and a generic browser (just display a specific URL, refresh periodically, basic HTML support is enough) plasmoid but it seems too much hassle to build them. I just wonder why these are not available OOTB.
More (and easy) hackability could also make KDE even cooler.
UPDATE (some more things I'd like to be fixed just came to my mind as I had a cup of tea):
KDE still has not reached the Unity level of the Mac-like global menu (D-BUS menu) support: some apps which worked with Unity global menu perfectly (and also work on Mac) still won't work with the global menu in KDE. I had to fall-back to the "Windows way" of having menus in every window to maintain uniform experience among different apps - too many apps left the global menu bar empty. This isn't a particularly serious problem though. Unity's facility of searching through menu items was also insanely cool and should be ported (as we have the D-BUS menu anyway).
I want to completely disable clipboard management so it wouldn't remember clipboard history (which is a security issue) and wouldn't clear the clipboard as soon as I close the window (extremely inconvenient - I often want to open a window just to copy something, close it and paste that somewhere else). But I could never find how.
I don't want tray messages to pop-up as soon as I start copying files. I'm not even sure I want them when the process finishes (perhaps there is a less annoying way to know it's done).
I'd like an option for Yakuake to actually replace Konsole so whenever I click "open terminal here" (preferably - in any app) it would open a new tab in Yakuake.
That's all the improvements to make KDE effectively perfect IMHO.
There is also already a web view plasmoids, but it is probably included in the plasma-addons package.
* https://github.com/Zren/plasma-hud for HUD
* https://github.com/Zren/material-decoration for LIM (Locally Integrated Menus in titlebars) though it'll have whatever issues the Global Menu panel widget has.
> I don't want tray messages to pop-up as soon as I start copying files. I'm not even sure I want them when the process finishes (perhaps there is a less annoying way to know it's done).
If you disable the progress animations + count badges in the taskbar I think it'll show it's own dedicated window like Windows.
> Yakuake to actually replace Konsole so whenever I click "open terminal here"
https://zren.github.io/kde/yakuake/#6-add-open-yakuake-here-...
If KDE5 is finally good, I'll give it a shot.
But Windows XP had way more polished look&feel (as did any other Windows version). KDE 3 looked ugly. KDE 4 looked OK but kind of wasteful in terms of screen area.
> KDE4 was unusably broken for years and years, it's basically why I stopped using a Linux desktop.
I just went to XFCE which has hardly changed at all since then. XFCE is always a perfect fallback DE for weird times. I also went XFCE (for about a year or 2 every time) when Unity was first introduced and when it got retired. I just disabled the standard XFCE panels and added a 3-rd party dock instead.
I had strong opinions about KDE 3 & 4, and have been using KDE 5 exclusively for over a year now. I love it and couldn't imagine going back to a different DE or operating system.
If you disable clipboard management on X11 then the clipboard goes away when the application does - that's how X11 works and the whole reason clipboard management exists.
If you don't want it to keep any history but the most recent item, then just disable that.
When I need something I will intentionally up[grade that program (for my IDE I keep old versions around to revert) and for my system I upgraded my video driver only when I had to, the rest is all LTS stiff.
Just making my a point that for some people the updates is no longer(or was never) an exiting thing and as long as your current machine just works there is no reason to break it.
Of course I know how to behave in that context, and I don't want to sound ungrateful since I get all of this quality software for free, but it somewhat saddens me that I still can't recommend these kinds of distros to my family.
I'm sure it might not be easy to work out a mechanism for this that would not add friction for those who need to swap out large components of their desktop experience, but I personally think this is one of those things that sometimes really scares people about Linux (along with rm -Rf /)
Every couple years I find myself not paying enough attention to the apt update text and then I end up swearing off any interaction with Linux for months.
Yes. This was one of the things we had to polish way back in the first Linux boom when I was working at Lindows. We got a report from QA that "when I uninstall this random thing called dpkg I can no longer use the app store". After the lead dev managed to collect himself from off the hallway floor (the only literal ROFL I have ever seen), everyone realized that yes, you should be prevented from uninstalling the core software.
This is exactly the opposite of what I want. Why don't the designers of 21st-century desktop environments understand that my 3 PDF files have nothing to do with one another? The same goes for my terminals, my text buffers, my web pages....
Why group things that are involved in unrelated tasks?
Configure for my own use, and rant about the predominance of an inferior way of thinking.
And, with less-configurable DEs, ranting (or being silently tolerant) is the only option.
Haven't used this version though, so what do I know.
Edit: It says about two lines down that it's configurable.
You may be looking for activities (they are useful to group related tasks together).
Well maybe it's what everyone else wants. Either way it's just the default they're changing, one good thing about grouping in Plasma is it lets you exclude certain applications so you can exclude your PDF viewer. Alot of other environments give an all or nothing approach.
Could you give an argument for why someone would want it?
I absolutely hate it that the default for Gnome is to group all windows of the same application together under the same icon. When I have multiple terminals open, then they are in no way related. I want a specific one. Like writing code in an editor and a terminal for running the application or compiling, and then another one for some shell access.
That means you need to wait for each application to add support for it whereas here it is the window manager.
What you want it seems is to group the windows by workflow. You can do what. Use a different desktop per workflow. I have 1 main 2 reference 3 utilities Then set your task bar to only show windows from the current desktop.
https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kde-workspace/plasma-desktop/...
(unless, of course, you are aseigo in disguise)
It's not what I want either, and it's not what most other Linux users I know want either.
It's copying the behavior of MacOS, plain and simple, and I disagree with them doing that. I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.
Same here, but grouping applications when the taskbar is full isn't too unreasonable, is it? It is not even necessarily copied from Mac, it might have been Windows who introduced or at least made it mainstream I think (It wouldn't surprise me at all if it existed on some Linux Desktop environment as an option before that.)
And of Windows 7-8-10 (and of Unity). And the opposite is just copying the behavior of Windows 95-2000 (XP would already group taskbar buttons by default although it still couldn't "pin" them and required separate launcher buttons).
And, by the way, MacOS doesn't group all the windows by default, some get a separate icon when launched (at least they did some years ago, I don't know about the recent versions).
> I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.
Fortunately, there are many different WMs/DEs on Linux and you don't have to use KDE (or its default set-up) either. You can either tweak it, or choose a different WM/DE or write your own (I would totally do so if I had more spare time).
I hated the fact that it displays a huge speaker icon in the middle of the screen whenever adjusting volume, I know I adjust volume, I don't need to see it in the middle of the screen every time, this is a productivity computer, not a television.
The only way I found to disable that behavior was to change some javascript code somewhere within KDE. But everytime I update archlinux, it was restored and I had to apply my change again!
There's no normal setting or config file to turn it off...
I'm using Cinnamon now though, that one is much better at just being exactly how it should be (= KDE 3.5-ish) and not changing in annoying ways all the time. Or running undesired, not easy to disable, CPU hogging "nepomuk" and other oddly named things in the background. Or being too integrated with other software like PIM stuff, while all I want is a good window manager.
Release linked here reworked on screen notifications. So that sound problem may be fixed. Otherwise you can change association for volume keys and use your own command.
You can uninstall nepomuk etc..
There is now (and the default is a smaller popup as well).
KDE is all about giving lots of options to users, but at the same time they aren't afraid to experiment and change its defaults to try to appeal to first-time users. In this case, window groups is a nice default that avoids scrolling or too-small buttons.
It makes switching between different documents (with the mouse) too much hassle: click/hover on the button, wait for the documents list to pop up, click the one you want - that's too much.
Single-click can actually be handier in many cases.
But I still want the same button to launch and to represent a running app.
And an extra button to be added right after the main one when a second window of the same app gets opened.
This is can be achieve on Windows using an easy hack[1], despite there seemingly is no "official" way.
https://www.sevenforums.com/customization/22606-make-taskbar...
I hope this is going to be added to KDE as well.
1 - quick browsing
2 - development (editor and browser)
3...7 - if "development" accumulates too many windows (uncomfortable) and I don't want to close them yet, subset I work with pushed to next number (or subset I want to investigate later)
8 - audio
9 - servers
It exits, it is not mainstream.
You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-)
I used Mac for three years. In my opinion it had some extremely weird behavior by default (CMD-tab couldn't switch between instances and to make matters worse there is no configuration option or tool you can use to get sane behaviour.) And bugs:
- opening a dialog in one browser window would lock all windows from that browser. Good luck looking up the documentation for where the files you are supposed to upload are without either closing the upload dialog or opening a different browser.
- keyboard shortcuts vary wildly between apps: In one app CMD - Shift - leftarrow selects tobthe start of the line. In Safari however it meant go back. Guess how I still know after 8 years. Yes, filling out forms and losing everything because I wanted to select a lkne of text.
Windows also often used to drive me mad. It is better now but the performance tax when compiling is still 30%! And even their own dotnet applications use 3 seconds to start on their OS vs 127 ms or something in a virtual Linux machine on top if that Windows box.
Crazy bad performance and latency issues and insane keyboard shortcuts are UX problems just as well as flickering and reflowing.
KDE isn't worse. Just different. For some of us it has already been the least annoying option for years already.
1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app
2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place
3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined. Visual states like this [1] should not appear. If they are inside a promotional video I assume that some people have seen it happening and either did not care or it is very hard to fix because the issue is rooted deeply in the system. Maybe I overreact but I stumble across glitches like this all the time I try to use linux on the desktop.
I'm fully aware, it is just so utterly inefficient for my workflows and my head.
With alt-tab it is back-to-the-last-thing I worked on, I don't even think. On Mac it is: was-the-last-thing-I-worked-on-another-app-or-another-document-it-was-another-etc
This can happen hundreds of times in a day, costs up to a few seconds at a time and more importantly it is insanely annoying when you know how snooth it can be.
And to rub it in: Gnome 3 has something similar to Mac but you can disable it if you are a keyboard person like me.
KDE is like Windows but can be configured however you like it.
> 2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place
Good thing they fixed that since 2012.
> 3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined.
From my perspective: if a file chooser can block all other windows and I know people keep talking about the separation between apps and windows on that particular OS I conclude that they messed up that particular one.
When I see rendering glitches on an open source project (I rarely see them, but thats maybe just me) I conclude that they haven't had time to fix it yet and probably the graphics drivers they have to build on aren't as polished as those on other OSes.
But back to my conclusion: I'm happy all OSes and DEs exist. Some people honestly prefer every one of them for different reasons.
I'm just so tired of people pretending KDE is kind of subpar because it doesn't excel in all areas at once.
But here's the thing, many defaults are just choices made by some dev, designer.
In KDE many options have nothing to do with the MacOS or Gnome defaults, even more, the defaults have been choosed specifically to avoid a known behavior or default in MacOS or Gnome
Luckily for everyone, KDE has so many customization options that you can make it work like almost any GUI you know, the popular one is of course MacOS aesthetics, but some guys like to configure it to behave just like Windows 10.
You could also create your own kind of GUI, nothing like any other GUI available.
The lesson is, in KDE most defaults can be changed, and that's mostly why it still exists as a software project probably.
I understand it might not be a priority of the project but it leaves me with the feeling of something left unfinished and makes KDE completely unusable for me.
Edit: I feel like I need to edit my post because I am unnecessarily negative. Fixing the visual might actually be a huge task and I think KDE is getting better every release. A huge thank you to the team for the effort they pour into developing free software.
KDE is quite a useful Desktop Environment packed with functionality; I miss KDE a lot when using Mac OS X or Windows.
For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time).
Even now you have to compile and install a custom theming engine[1] in KDE to apple decent themes
I don't follow: you point out an issue with KDE styling before saying you use MacOS that is even harder to style?
While with KDE the first thing you want to do is to apple different style and then you learn you have to compile different styling engine to do so.
Obviously macOS is not the system you'd want to use if you can't stand its UI
That isn't necessarily a bad thing but reminds me once again of how little respect developers have for spending resources like GPUs and instruction cycles for "bling" essentially.
I am always saddened a bit (as you can probably tell) that my desktop machine is easily 1000x more capable in terms of compute and rendering than my desktop in 1995 and yet is no more responsive, no quicker, no less of a burden on the underlying machine.
I find LXDE as a DE fairly lightweight and not too troublesome. The Qt version had some issues with my older X server (Qt for some software defined radio apps that use Qt rather than Gtk or other toolkits).
That's exactly what I wanted! I've been using Manjaro KDE for a couple of months now exclusively.
I am extremely happy, it's very convenient developing on Linux directly!
It's much snappier than Windows 10 on the same hardware, and you can turn lots of the bling off to get better performance.
I switched from KDE 3.5 / 4.0 to Unity and later Gnome around the time KDE 4 was first released (apparently 2008), for the same reason as you. But last year I switched back to KDE Plasma because Gnome felt unstable and slightly glitchy, and KDE is much smoother now.
What types of things make a big difference for you?
When I sit at my computer, it's to do something in an application. The desktop environment doesn't do much for me once I've launched the program that I'm actually there to use, does it? I'm generally pretty happy in Ubuntu or Windows or macOS or iPadOS.
A very happy user of KDE. Other DEs on Linux and other OSes seem so limiting compared to KDE.
Good job, fellas.
In general I'm very happy with Plasma but it does expose UI options that can really harm the experience.
Appearance (tab) -- and deselect 'Highlight Windows when hovering over tasks'.
(That aside, very exciting update!)
Is there anything like Karabiner or AutoHotKey for KDE that lets you download predefined keyboard shortcuts?
I've been trying to simulate the use of i3wm inside KDE for a while now, most of the online tutorials end up failing as some floating toolbar from KDE ends up grabbing focus and breaks the i3wm workflow. If anyone has gotten this to work with the latest builds, I'd be happy to try out their configs.
I've also tried out the alternatives of krohnkite (hi esjeon!) but what really breaks KDE is that you can't assign a workspace to each monitor. I have 3 monitors and I can independently assign each workspace to each monitor in i3wm and you can switch between them really easily. Its a massive productivity boost which keeps me sticking to i3wm even though KDE is more fully featured (blue-tooth, OSD etc...)
Edit: Spelling
Edit: A little bit of internet later, I found these:
https://drewdevault.com/2018/04/28/KDE-Sprint-retrospective.html
https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma#cite_note-1
Guess I'm installing KDE Neon tonight...
Edit, I have to say that for the kids I'll stay on Gnome, it's very recognizable for them when compared to the iPads they use at school, much more so than KDE (and Win10 for that matter).
I briefly toyed with the idea of Manjaro, but am not sure I'll be able to install some software that is readily available as .deb.
I have been using KDE as my daily driver for both work and personal computing for five years now.
Gnome usually make me miss some configuration options or they remove them. But as I grow older I get better at accepting defaults and I think Gnome will capture me once and for all soon. I do like how Ubuntu looks ootb (I only set dark theme, autohide the panel and keep 4 virtual desktop at all times (normally they are removed when empty)).
Sometimes I choose Mate (similar to XFCE I guess). I like it a lot but it just doesn't look that good (ark-darker makes it better).
I do like change every now and then.
At least kioslaves handle disconnects gracefully and are right back in service whenever your network is, without having to remount anything.
It's been possible to create files in the file browser (in Nautilus/Gnome) for as long as I can remember – you just have to have "templates" for the files you want to create in your Templates directory (e.g. "C file.c", "Text file.txt"). That being said, unfortunately this is one of those things where Ubuntu and Gnome are objectively worse than they were ten years ago – due to the changes related to renaming files in Nautilus, you can no longer give your new files a proper name as you create them, but have to manually rename them afterwards. Compared to all the clicks that takes (with typing in between), it's faster and more convenient to just click "Open Terminal here" and create any files you need with touch.
I don't know of any problems with Super-left/right, though.
Reminds me of another thing I love about Dolphin: hit f4 and a terminal pops up at the bottom of the window. That feature is addictive and I had withdrawal symptoms when I switched to Gnome (again) :)
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-year-of-dissatisfa...
The latest time was just last month, and the _stock_ panel widgets kept crashing, forgetting their preferences, and so on. The desktop environment itself occasionally crashed-to-login.
Well, back to Gnome2! (MATE).
What's bugging me though is that subsurfaces clipping bug in Wayland session. Kmail is still broken in 5.19.x.
I was using KDE on an RPi4 and Pinebook Pro. For basically all the computing that I do these machines are more than powerful enough; but apparently not for KDE (or Gnome3!)
The heat as long as it's dissipated out of the case to keep the system cool doesn't bother me.
Builds never slow down my desktop experience.
I don't think you're gaining a lot, using such low end hardware.
There's no way I can afford a T480.
FOSS developers really should be using minspec machines to test.
That said, I'm sure there are many modern laptops for a fraction of the price of a T480 which will do the job just as well, and a lot better than a Pi4. What is "minspec" anyway? You have to draw a line somewhere. Should I expect to run a modern DE on my smartphone from 2011? How about my desktop from 2005?
That said, by the spec sheet, those machines should be easily capable of running Plasma. If you're having problems, perhaps it's not Plasma's fault, but something to do with the blobby GPU driver stack?
No. That's a phone.
> How about my desktop from 2005?
Why not? That's approximately within the ability scope of the Pi4 and Pinebook Pro that I have.
DEs haven't really improved so significantly since then that they should need that much more power.
Their need for more computing ability has more to do with shoddier development practices than it does features.
The problems with KDE that I noted were mostly crashes and general broken behaviour; performance is more a Gnome3 problem, it only recently was capable of running on a Pi.
For completeness's sake I will just note that DEs are vastly different from 2005, notably in using GPU compositing; this is nicer in many ways and more power efficient, but stresses the driver stack a lot more. The crashing issues you mention are not common, so I would try running it on some different machines before blaming the instability on Plasma.
Interestingly, 2011 smartphones and 2005 desktops have broadly similar specs.
I had compiz back in the day; compositing isn't new. It's also not all that important; I'm basically using the same bones of the Windows 95 DE, 25 years later. Except Win95 was fast, lean, and incredibly unstable. ;)
I try KDE every year or so, and _always_ abandon it due to instability. I've filed tickets in the past but KDE developers, and to be fair Gnome devs too, seem to have your attitude: old and slow devices aren't worth their time, despite the large install base worldwide.
Hell, they're not much slower than Chromebooks or the previously popular Netbooks.
KDE team could have put focus and resources on core desktop environment.
It had many problems, but still they keep diversifying further.
I really like KDE, it's been my goto desktop from nearly 4 years.
Ed: not quite yet, October 22nd, apparently : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
And 20.10 will "only" come with plasma 5.19 - so it's ppa/bacports or 21.04 alpha for 5.20 looks like:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GroovyGorilla/Beta/Kubuntu
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/kde-plasma-5-20-release-...
I'm sure a good PR will be well received :-)
Looks like the window should default smaller to make the sizes reasonable, or whatever decides the columns/row counts needs some tweaking.
That said, I guess Open Source as a whole could always need more talented artists as long as they don't try to insert themselves as arbiters of anything UX related, for example demanding to remove every configuration option or make everything work like in Mac/iOS.
Edit, also: I guess they have multiple graphic designers/artists and if it was possible to measure I'd bet $20 that they are more skilled than the majority of people complaining :-)
Don't take this the wrong way, I appreciate the work the KDE team is putting into this, but the UI just make me cringe when I try to use it. I have used all versions of KDE and IMO KDE 1 and 2 had the most consistent UIs. I think you guys should really focus a release on just the UI, rework it entirely to give it a polished, unique feel that can really push the experience forward. Something more like BeOS maybe? That had a nice polished, clean UI. All this transparency/blurring by the way, is unnecessary, the next UI should not be full of it.
Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.
Just my two cents.
Basically you are saying you want KDE to be something it isn't.
You don't need to use widgets if you don't want to, why do you want to remove them from everyone else?