KDE KTrip – helps you navigate in public transport | Hacker News Reader

KDE KTrip – helps you navigate in public transport

apps.kde.org

64 pointspabs339 comments

Tried the Android version here in the Netherlands where there's an extensive open API for public transport (https://www.openov.nl/, providing live delays and schedule shifts for almost any stop out there).

It suggested such wonderful trips like "just run the entire way at about 72 km/h", "take the bus to Germany, wait for twelve hours, then go back by bus and walk the rest of the way there", and "take the train in the right direction, then switch to the hour long bus ride that leaves at the same time as the train ride but takes three times as long".

I appreciate the attempt here, but there seems to he a big focus on German public transit so I probably wouldn't use it outside Germany. Hopefully there are some public transit fans out there that wouldn't mind giving my local regional routes a bit of a polish one day, because the suggestions it gives me right now are just plain comical.

I used to use the Transportr app (from f-droid) here in the netherlands for a while, but it used the 9292 and NS apis directly, which broke about a year ago and haven't been fixed since. I wonder if implementing openov in this app instead would be a better idea than trying to figure out the new 9292 api.

The problem with using this data is that the data itself is quite raw. You'll have to calculate the routes, potentially merge bus stations/train stations/etc. together for a clean experience and take certain details into account (when you can and can't use international trains for national travels without getting a special ticket, for example: you can often take the ICE to Germany without weird reservations, but don't even try that with the Thalys!).

I'm sure someone knowledgeable in this area will be able to figure that stuff out, but I've been happily using the NS API for my silly side projects because it just kind of works.

The 9292 API was never open as far as I know, though there are several reverse engineered API libraries available for it on Github.

Transportr has excellent 9292 integration.

Do you know what routing provider(s) were in use, out of interest?

It looks like the app builds upon[1] the kpublictransport library, which should offer a few options[2]. I'm not sure how the selection of those is surfaced in the app though, not having used it myself.

[1] - https://invent.kde.org/utilities/ktrip/-/blob/1bd4e070143eb0...

[2] - https://github.com/KDE/kpublictransport#backends

Has anyone tried this and can compare it to Öffi? It's one of the best Android apps I use: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.schildbach.oeffi/

Just tried Ktrip but it only let's me navigate between train stations in my country (NL). Transportr (also on Fdroid) I use normally, where you can actually see the data sources api's it uses, and it has one for the other public transport too.

Big Öffi fan here. When I switched to a dumb phone as a daily driver and a Pine Phone for fun, I was very pleased to discover KTrip. The mobile version works well with the three (German) transport districts I use as well as Deutsche Bahn. Included OSM links for every station. You cannot search for connections based on arrival time, though. GUI wise, I miss Öffi's time line view for connections, and the weird analogue clock input for departure time is a pain.

The Android app [1] was last updated 2 years ago. I'm not sure it's useful to list the link on the website alongside the Linux release from a month ago...

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.kde.ktrip/

What is the rationale behind having apps built on/with technologies like KDE, Gnome etc. prefix their names with K or G etc? Why KTrip instead of Trip? Is it just a historical artifact of development, or is there another reason?

I like it, especially when it's incorporated rather than just prefixed (eg. ark, kalzium, kamera, konsole, yakuake) for a couple of reasons.

First it gives a unique name that you can search the web for. Looking for a solution involving an application called 'trip'? Well good luck with that.

Second it provides some brand grouping. I haven't ever piped apt-cache search through a grep for 'k', but the name can give me a quick hint if it's a KDE-native application.

Third, it's a combination of lazy and rude to call your app a common Word, especially when someone in one of your Teams at the Office is trying to Access the web to find information about it. Some companies are especially awful about squatting on these common words -- everyone else then has to qualify their terms forever. Of course it's intentional hijacking of the vernacular, which makes it more annoying.

Google did this for a while with G before just using the full company name as a prefix.

Well, if you're a user of said desktop environment, it's a useful signal that the program will at least attempt to fit in with the look and feel, may possibly integrate better, and can be expected to use less RAM because it uses components you've already loaded.

KDE's app names have historically been difficult to relate. Their file manager is called "Dolphin", PDF viewer "Okular" and the app store "Discover".

I am slowly coming to terms with Dolphin, some decades on -- took me a long time to move past Konqueror (also not very intuitive in terms of name->functionality I guess).

I'd suggest that the disconnect between name and function might not be a KDE peculiarity, given the GNOME equivalents of those two applications are / were Nautilus & Evince.

OTOH I don't think discoverability for products in GNU/Linux distros commonly comes down to trying to intuit semantics of the product's name.

> Nautilus & Evince

The difference is the UI usually names these appropriately in GNOME. You won't really read the brand Nautilus in the UI anywhere - it'll be called "Files", which makes much more sense to the reader.

> OTOH I don't think discoverability for products in GNU/Linux distros commonly comes down to trying to intuit semantics of the product's name.

I recall watching a video from Linus Tech Tips where he tries switching to Linux for the first time [0]. A big point in the video is that he tried KDE and had big problems figuring which apps to use because they're not named intuitively.

If tech people are getting tripped up over these names, I can't imagine an average user trying out KDE.

[0] https://openforeveryone.net/articles/kde-fixing-every-ltt-co...

The nipple's intuitive, everything subsequent is learned.

KDE has (or at least had, I can't find the setting now) the option to toggle between showing menu items by function/description (eg 'file manager') or name (eg 'dolphin'). I set it to the latter years ago, but the default was the former.

KDE (contemporary) from the Launcher (start menu) you can start typing in 'file' and it'll bring 'Dolphin' to the top with the description 'file manager'.

Obviously Alt-F1 or clicking on the K button bottom left in a default setup isn't genetically intuitive, but I'd suggest that it's as close as we can get in 2022.

Anyway, this isn't really the point, I suspect.

On the other hand, I can't imagine an average user finding anything useful in Google after searching for "linux files crashed". And then when communicating with fellow humans:

- Files has a nice UI

- Huh?

Or worse: "Web is ugly".

Your local bakery probably also doesn't call itself just "bakery".

And you (figuratively) use Java and C#, not "Oracle Programming Language" and "Microsoft Programming Language".

Yes. You name things so you can communicate ideas about them.

The flip side of this is that it's very annoying to not know the executable names on GNOME, because the UI doesn't train you. What if I want to launch one from the command line? What if I want to force kill something? Or, heaven forbid, search on Google for help? It's all very well creating a fairy land where nobody needs to know the real names of things, but sooner or later the veil must be pierced.

Looking at the screenshot, I wonder where the asymmetry stems from. The word "Details" is not centered in the window. The spacing between the forward/backward buttons and the hamburger menu is different than the spacing from those buttons to the word "Connections". That's why I often find UI elements of KDE so cluttered even since KDE 2.

"Details" is not intended to be centered -- it's left-aligned inside the right pane. You can faintly see the pane dividing line to the left of it. I haven't tried the app but I'm guessing that divider is resizable.

You are right, it's a heading of a pane.

What's a good live distro for a well-integrated KDE experience? I haven't used it for years but want to see how it is these days. I used to love the way the core-ish apps seemed to work together in concert.

I recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed since it's a sane and tested rolling release without the blood, so you get the latest KDE updates with the latest kernel and packages.

I wouldn't recommend Kubuntu or KDE Neon, as the latest KDE releases are developed on the latest kernel, so, using it on Ubuntu based distros with old kernel and old packages might not be the best experience for the latest KDE releases or even cause issues.

Anecdotally, KDE also runs better on Tumbleweed than on Fedora for me.

Also, maybe give Gecko Linux a try, it's a sane, noob friendly, batteries included version of Tumbleweed, with Nvidia drivers and proprietary codecs out of the box, along with a default to X11 because the author doesn't consider Wayland ready for prime time. Just make sure to do a sudo zypper dup after installation to update the OS and packages since the packages on the ISOs are out of date as the ISOs are updated about twice a year, which is not ideal for a rolling distro but to be fair, the whole Gecko "operation" is run for free by one guy so this is understandable.

Probably KDE Neon [1]: this is Ubuntu with updated KDE maintained by the KDE Team.

I use openSUSE Tumbleweed where KDE is up to date and well integrated (I really recommend Tumbleweed for a good KDE experience), I see that they have a live image they call JeOS ("We also have JeOS, Live images. Check out Alternative Downloads!") [2], I haven't tried the live image but it's probably very good.

[1] https://neon.kde.org/

[2] https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/#download

I've got two issues with NEON:

1. It's Ubuntu based, so comes with snap. Not a fan. 2. It's LTS based, and tends to update not on schedule but with about a half year delay. That means packages get old... 3. (I lied!) It's both bad and good: updates are, even on the user branch, too damn frequent :)

I do agree about the Ubuntu part. For the updates, if the intent is just to test KDE in a live environment, this part should be up to date and frequent updates should not be an issue.

I would recommend against using KDE Neon daily though. Or Ubuntu by the way. It used to be a really good distro, but it's not so much today I think.

Frankly, any? I used KDE Neon, Fedora, Opensuse and now Debian. They all give you access to the KDE apps suite. I don't know what you mean with integration really, it's a matter of using their apps (or not, I still use Firefox for example).

I used Manjaro KDE for years and always felt like it is perfect.

Really? Just in the past year or two I had more than one occasion when an upgrade of the same mostly vanilla system broke the graphical environment completely and I had to manually edit/delete some files to get it back.

(That was separate from the other couple of times when some python packages required manual intervention to not yield a broken upgrade but that may have been related to AUR. Not a biggie for me but probably caused frustration for many users)

Never happened to me. I mostly used it on very old hardware Core 2 Duo with on-board Intel graphics though. Everything seems great on a modern AMD laptop as well but I run XFCE (for sake of using the Chicago95 theme) rather than KDE on it and it's been just about a year.

Perhaps one of reasons why it worked this reliably for me is I turnt composition off (there is a handy hotkey for that in KDE) but it worked nice with it enabled as well. I only switched it off because I never managed to invent a reason for it to be enabled.

Integrated, as in the package updater UI works together with the OS. Or there are no services that conflict with those running under KDE.

Fedora's not been great, upgrades always bring some kind of changes. In 35, I ended up with broken system monitoring applets. Still better than in 34, where, in addition to broken monitoring, Plasma needed to be restarted 3 times before panel drawers unbroke.

Never managed to get night mode not get immediately overridden by some other part of the OS.

All distros that I've used provided UI for package updates.

Rolling releases hugging upstream very closely may have breakage, but that isn't KDE specific. It is the reason I went back to Debian stable, because it is indeed stable. The breakage I had with Opensuse and Fedora was Wayland related as far as I could establish.

Well, after upgrading to Fedora 35, my UI no longer works :) No, it's not KDE-specific. The failure of integration is distribution-specific.

I can't run recent Fedora KDE either, due to them mainlining Wayland prematurely. Perhaps you have the same?

I'm on Debian now, which ships an older KDE, but, everything works, which is a first.

I had KDE running on Wayland mostly OK, but some glitches caused me to switch the session back to X (in exchange for other glitches I already know how to deal with). I never asked to switch, it happened when upgrading to 35. It also means I don't know how to install the X session.

I'm using Mageia with great success. KDE, frequent security and package updates, big repository, non-Ubuntu. Former Mandriva and Mandrake for those who remember Linux in the early 2000s.

I installed Kubuntu 20.04 on my workstation almost 2 years ago, and it has been working out well since. It really does feel well integrated.

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