KDE Plasma Is Not a Desktop Environment | Hacker News Reader

KDE Plasma Is Not a Desktop Environment

blog.nicco.love

53 pointsjandeboevrie60 comments

The branding got confused down the road. It was simply KDE for over a decade (maybe two? I don't remember the timing precisely). Then suddenly, a rebrand, KDE is the community of developers and users and Plasma was the desktop environment. Which just about everyone continues to call it KDE.

KDE is a better understood brand than Plasma. It might always be so.

As someone who learned about the desktop only after it was already called Plasma I don't think it is that confusing at all. Maybe it is about what one is used to?

When someone says they use "KDE" as their Desktop, I still understand what they mean. After all the KDE family of applications in it's totality also represents some sort of ecosystem that one may use.

> After all the KDE family of applications in it's totality also represents some sort of ecosystem that one may use.

Sorry I gotta ruin your day but KDE applications means something else entirely in the KDE branding parlance: https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/ . It's a bunch of apps except Plasma and a few applications that are actually developed as part of plasma, like System Settings, Discover and a few others.

See why everyone hates this :-D ?

The KDE-is-now-the-community rebranding is definitely corporate PR tier cringe. Was sad to see an open source project emulate that bs.

Don’t agree. The vast amount of KDE related projects meant that the name described so much more than just a desktop environment.

As an outsider (haven't used KDE in 15 years) I perceived "Plasma" as just a fancy "very major" version number. The usual post-semver insecurity: "if every change has to be a major increment if it can't be guaranteed to be an unfailing drop-in replacement in every corner case scenario, how do I express a larger change?" Not nice, but far from cringe. But I certainly won't rule or that this is just me enjoying the blessings of ignorance :)

I find it more concerning how the author celebrates all those hypothetical device classes, instead of focusing on being good at one thing (desktops). Feels a bit like being stuck in time loop where Windows 8 is still the hottest new thing (it never was, got ridiculed from the start). But again, I might be wrong, if there are non-desktop use cases that are not only live in production but also major contributors (perhaps something like large TV brands building on/building Plasma for their UI?), then they have made all the right calls.

off topic: feels a bit weird to read through that very talkative YouTube monologue style, that's probably contributing a lot to my perception. But, wow, so much better to have a transcript than the video itself!

They should've renamed the organisation instead of reassign meaning. K Desktop Environment is still seared in my mind.

It would be simpler to have KDE under whatever name instead of renaming KDE to Plasma + Friends.

> because you do use KDE Plasma, right? right?

I do (via Kubuntu), but sometimes I wish I wouldn't - it has lots of annoying bugs that only appear once in a while (not often enough to invest the time to try to fix them, but often enough to be annoying). The most annoying being that ksmserver-logout-greeter sometimes crashes when trying to shut down. And when I want to shut down my PC, it's usually because I want to do something different right now, so having to spend more time getting my PC to shut down correctly (because otherwise, who knows what might happen) is really annoying. That's why overly enthusiastic phrases like this one about how great KDE is kind of rub me the wrong way...

this usually happens when you install a new nvidia driver as it replaces the opengl libraries and for some reason the logout/shutdown and lock screen can't deal with it.

The thing is that it only happens sporadically, and locking works just fine (I do that routinely whenever I go away from my desk, even at home, and there was never any issue), just shutdown doesn't...

"The most annoying being that ksmserver-logout-greeter sometimes crashes when trying to shut down."

That's quite an esoteric issue that I have never seen on a lot of disparate hardware, all with KDE, since early v2. I'd log an issue, you never know it might get fixed and you can get on with life.

That may be true, but the only thing I know is that I'm having it :) What I didn't mention is that it's an LTS version of Kubuntu, so logging an issue would probably just lead to the question "does it still happen with the current version?", and I'm not motivated enough to invest the effort into finding that out right now, so I guess I'll just have to live with it until I upgrade my installation...

Fair enough.

However you might like to note the time it happens next and then on your next reboot take a quick look in your journal and perhaps point something like lnav at /var/log and see if anything jumps out.

  journalctl --since "2023-04-13 09:00:00" --until "2023-04-13 09:05:00"
  https://docs.lnav.org/en/v0.11.1/usage.html#time

EDIT: formatting

This is a good example of why you should design software to be as robust as possible up front. E.g. using statically typed languages, not using shell scripts, using typestate patterns, bundling dependencies, etc.

A lot of Linux software isn't very intrinsically robust and the result is lots of janky stuff that isn't caught by tests, and only affects a small number of people in difficult to reproduce ways.

"A lot of Linux software isn't very intrinsically robust"

Yet you will almost certainly have something Linux running in your home somewhere. Obviously, I am making quite an assumption here with regards what OSs run in your home, but Linux powers way more stuff than any other OS on the planet by a massive margin.

Your casual dismissal of Linux misses several points. Linux is just a kernel - 'tis what boots and stuff. Statically typed bollockary doesn't even feature at this level, yet we have some wondrous stuff on display. We get eBPF to play with for fiddling quite unceremoniously with network packets and much, much, more. We have way more file systems than you can count ... OK put your socks back on. We have multiple schedulers and way more firewalling systems than is reasonable. nft looks like it might be quite useful. It's the fourth one I've dealt with (ipfw, ipchains, iptables) so it should work out.

That's the kernel alone - 1000s of devs working on it - way more than any other OS kernel.

There are multiple stable WMs, GUIs and whatever. I've stuck with KDE since a shaky self compile of 2.0 a fair few years ago.

Linux runs quite a bit of your life somewhere even if it's only your telly.

I used Kubuntu for a very long time, KDE Plasma has a lot of really neat things in it and I have no issue with recommending it to many people. But eventually I end up gravitation back towards Cinnamon and Mate based Desktops because of the simplicity they provide. Not so ambitious but execute what they do well.

Cinnamon is great! My goto forever has been Xfce because I like the simplicity, but after my last bout of DE window shopping I tried Cinnamon and really liked it. It feels like a similar vibe to Xfce (unbloated), but it's not quite as spartan.

That's a Kbuntu problem. Isn't it abandoned for the most part? Tried mint, was better, but not good enough.

I left it for the same reason. Moved to Manjaro KDE and... Way, way better.

I have the same issue with the logout-greeter crashing and stopping me shutting down or suspending. I often have to resort to "sudo shutdown now".

Fun fact: KDE was originally an acronym for "K Desktop Environment", so now it seems the official term is "K Desktop Environment Plasma Desktop". I envision when VR is announced and they rewrite this in Rust it will be called "K Desktop Environment Plasma Desktop 2.0 for Virtual Reality Headsets, Written in Rust" or KDEPD2VRHWR for short.

are they allowed to claim it is written in Rust without violating the new T&C?

What? I'm confuesed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35526453

Tempest in a teapot. Standard trademark stuff really.

Being standard does not mean it cannot be criticized.

It can be, but there's no need for paranoia. It's weird really. Trademarks are IMO about the least objectionable kind of IP. They're there to serve normal people, and are simple enough to work around if needed with no loss in functionality. Very much unlike patents or copyright.

The criticisms don’t seem valid, though. Projects have to function within the law, and pretty much any popular project has to address these legal issues. Here’s the Linux page about its trademark, for example: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark

> The Linux Foundation protects the public and Linux users from unauthorized and confusing uses of the trademark and authorizes proper uses of the mark through an accessible sublicensing program.

"in Rust", "for Rust", "with Rust" are fine. "KDE Rust" would not be.

> KDE was originally an acronym for "K Desktop Environment"

Before that, it was Kool Desktop Environment.

Some German FOSS developer somewhere thought "Kool" was cooler than "Cool", which tells you how cool KDE and its design are. (Hint: they aren't.)

They dropped that very early on for just KDE.

I personally don't like it when commercial companies try to tell me what I may or may not call their products, but when a bunch of volunteers continually get all arsey about their name and bleat and moan about "calling it the right name" when I remember the real name better than they do themselves, frankly, it puts me off using the entire software suite.

I would guess others feel similarly.

If the KDE volunteers want people to adopt and use and favour KDE, then IMHO they should try a new tactic:

Stop whining about what people call it.

Well you aren't kewl at all!

:-D

Guilty as charged. It's a fair cop, but society's to blame.

See related post by Nate Graham around Plasma as a product https://pointieststick.com/2023/04/12/plasma-products/

> The wallpaper - which is modular, there are various wallpaper services you can switch between. Different shells can handle wallpapers in a different way, with different defaults; as an example, a Plasma shell meant for e-ink devices (which, by the way, is in my to-do-before-mid-july-list) probably wants to have an always-white wallpaper, which is provided by the “org.kde.color” plugin.

And before this abstraction that 0.1% of people need we could have different wallpapers for different desktops. Now we can't.

That you need a plugin to show a solid color is simply absurd.

About the plugin part - to be fair, and as far as I know, it is not a "plugin" in the same way of, say, Gnome extensions - I guess OP meant more than it is a module. It actually comes by default in every Plasma install.

And though am pretty sure you made that 0.1 statistic out of thin air, also can bet if the 'one wallpaper per virtal desktop' part were working, a bigger percentage of people would be using a solid background color. Maybe even more than the people who would be using one wallpaper per virtual desktop.

I can have different wallpapers for different activities. Why can't KDE have different wallpapers for different desktops? Is this just a missing feature? Perhaps it can be re-enabled by a Plasma Applet?

When you need to have different options showing complex things as a wallpaper, it's best to factor them out as plugins, or at least separate implementations of some interface in their own files. When that happens, why not also use that interface for the basic functionality, ensuring a common code path? You don't want "enum WallpaperStyle { Image, Color, Plugin }" when you can have just "WallpaperPlugin".

Sounds like an abstraction not far enough: if you want that single-color optimization, make it an image format that only allows 1x1. It would work whereever a reader for that image format exist, but code that's eager to take performance shortcuts would be free to add a little optimization. Same for the configuration UI, an "image or color picker" would be fully transparent to image picker only.

Bonus points if the specification of that image format allows itself the impertinence of annexing the file name: "if the file name starts with a hash sign and is followed by three or six hex digits, the color of the pixel is that color, contents of the file are considered a comment"

I have been using KDE Neon for many years on different machines, laptops mostly.

About twice a year I try some distribution (usually Fedora) with Gnome, and each time I return to Neon.

Gnome is relatively speaking "prettier" as a window manager. But that's where it all ends.

Because KDE as a project provides everyday applications for which there are no replacements of same quality - Okular, Dolphin, KDE Connect, etc.

I have no complaints about Neon's reliability.

I just want to say thank you to the KDE community for a great system.

And yes, KDE as an ecosystem has long been much larger than a desktop environment.

I agree, GNOME is prettier, and also, functionally poorer. KDE is uglier but works better.

But for me, KDE is not very functional and is missing a lot of core features and functions that I want.

MATE is slightly better, and Xfce is better still.

You’re implying that xfce has more “core features and functions” than KDE? I thought it was intentionally minimal.

No, I am not implying that, and I think that the concept of "minimal" is widely misinterpreted.

What I am saying is that Xfce contains and implements all of the functionality that I want in a desktop, in some areas more of it than KDE does... and it does it in a smaller, simpler, cleaner collection of software, which does it in less space using less memory.

So, while KDE includes a lot of large complicated components, I don't want many of them. I prefer standalone best-of-breed tools than ones that are closely integrated. I don't like KMail, or the chat tool, or the contacts manager, or the networking and VPN client, or the file manager, or the browsers (plural), etc.

I want a vertical taskbar. KDE does this poorly, it requires more work to configure it and it doesn't handle it well.

Xfce does it well, and it has valuable functions for this role built in, such as making it simple to configure the size and layout of the start menu button. I can constrain it to one text line, or a one-line icon plus a one-line label.

KDE, despite having approxiumately 1000 configuration options, doesn't include options to control the size or shape or layout of the start button.

So, while KDE has a lot of irrelevant stuff that is therefore bloat and cruft to me, it lacks important core functionality that I want.

This is the harsh side of the Pareto Principle. One man's core function is another man's needless bloat.

For me, and IMHO, KDE is mostly bloat and misses out on important stuff.

E.g. up to KDE 4 it at least let me set the panel to span 2 monitors. That was removed in KDE 5. An important function was lost.

I do not want desktop widgets. I do not want 3 or 4 or 12 ways to display desktop icons. I do not want file manager content rendered via HTML. I do not want a desktop with an integrated email client, choice of web browsers, chat program, complete office suite, etc. I do not want my file manager to be able to connect to FTP or POP3 or anything other than showing me the files on mounted drives.

I don't want my file manager to talk to network protocols at all. That is not its job. If it is to show the content of network drives, it should tell the underlying OS to mount those drives. I don't want it to duplicate OS functionality.

But there is a lot of stuff I might like. I liked BeOS. Window title bars were only long enough to contain their title and the control buttons. That was space-efficient. I also liked `wm2`. Title bars on the side of windows was also space-efficient on widescreens, and in 2023 all screens are widescreens.

I don't want textures or bitmaps or themes or anything, but I want more control over size and position and placement of title bars than KDE offers me. Yet Xfce, despite being "minimal", can do this.

People misunderstand what "minimal" means. It doesn't mean "does not implement core functionality." It means "is as small as necessary to implement core functionality and yet is able to encompass extensions to be as customisable as the user wants".

Xfce does all I want in a desktop and more besides, and it does it in a small efficient package.

KDE does a tonne of stuff I don't want but it does not do stuff I need, like graceful elegant handling of vertical taskbars. Therefore all the other functions, like 2 or 3 menu entries for "Help | About" and yet none of them tell me the current KDE version are just bloat to me.

Some apps have a version number. Some have a date. The idea of a desktop is consistency. This is inconsistent and highly annoying. FIX IT!

Some apps have menu bars. Some have hamburger menus. Some combine menu bar with title bar similarly to GNOME's CSD.

I hate CSD. I detest hamburger menus. This is meant to be a configurable desktop. What kind of menu I get is not globally configurable. FIX IT. This is bad and it is annoying to see and even more annoying to use.

The idea of a big configurable customisable desktop is meant to be consistency and harmony and a single system-wide look and feel. KDE fails to offer this and is getting worse as time goes by. That is a failure and it's why I don't use KDE.

I love KDE apps as well - especially KDE Connect[1]. Before I had problems with it lagging, but it works great now. I use it daily to control my media center which also runs KDE Plasma.

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

To me KDE Connect performed with full of bugs, to the extent that I just rage quit it.

Warpinator from Linux Mint team is a lot better for simple file sharing.

https://github.com/linuxmint/warpinator

I'm using primarily the "remote" aspects of it, so not surprised to hear that.

If all you want is "send and receive files across a local network" then I can recommend Magic Wormhole and Magic Wormhole William (depending on which app store you use; e.g. Google Play Store, F-Droid, Homebrew, Debian/Ubuntu APT repos, etc). It will attempt to use LAN if it can and uses PAKE for auth.

All this and yet I cant turn off every single animation/effect/fade in under a minute in one menu and not losing mind over doing it while searching the web for 4th day just to find out its not doable at all. Pls. This is nuts.

I love KDE Plasma, the desktop edition, and also many of the apps that KDE creates. There is simply no better desktop in existance today even when looking at closed/proprietary alternatives. And I sure hope I could some day use Plasma mobile edition on a full proper GNU/Linux powered smartphone. Great work KDE developers and a big huge thank you for all you offer us.

Is there a way to move Plasma windows around with the keyboard?

I would love to be able to move the current window around with - say - ctrl+meta+uparrow or something.

I dabbled with KWin scripts and successfully got one working which centers the current window:

https://github.com/no-gravity/kwin-move-window-to-center

Now I couldn't live without this script anymore!

But somehow I was never able to reproduce it for a second script. Everytime I try to make a copy of this one, modify it and add a shortcut - it does not work.

Maybe there is a much easier solution, just using desktop agnostic linux commands?

Definitely. You can set tiling shortcuts in system settings. Personally, I use my numpad so that e.g. meta + num7 tiles to the top-left. You can also move windows from monitor to monitor that way.

Yes, I already use shortcuts to tile windows and move them between desktops.

But this is about a different task: I want to move the current window 10px up when I press ctrl+meta+uparrow.

If you're on X11, you should be able to use xdotool, which doesn't depend on KDE doing anything in particular. No idea what the equivalent is if you're on Wayland.

xdotool can move a window?

Yes! See the windowmove command!

You can do Alt+F3 ↓ ↓ ↓ → enter and then move the window using cursors keys (and hit enter to apply the window position)

You can also assign a shortcut to get to this point (in Shortcuts -> Global Shortcuts -> System Settings -> Move Window).

I don't think you can get what you're asking for without writing a tiny script and setting it to be invoked with your keyboard shortcut.

While it works, the problem with "Alt+F3 ↓ ↓ ↓ →" is that when I move the window afterwards, the cursor keys get passed through to the window. So when I do that on Firefox, the website scrolls up and down. When I do it on a terminal, it invokes my bash history.

Try the arrow key(s) (after selecting resize in window menu) while pressing down Super key.

Which one is the "Super Key"? If it is the window key - that one in combination with the arrows is already mapped to tiling functions. Window+UP makes the current window take half of the screen on the upper side.

Oh sorry, use shift key + arrow keys. Not the super key.

It’s incredibly difficult to change established brands. Especially for open source projects which do not have large marketing budjets.

KDE was foolish to try, and the best they can do is just accept that KDE is a deptop envirenment.

The same point could be made about GNOME. "GNOME is not a desktop, it's also a [community](https://www.gnome.org/about-us/) focused on lots of open-source principles etc."

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