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KDE for Travelers

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165 pointsCOGlory35 comments

I am so grateful to KDE developers and developers who work on the whole ecosystem around it.

After years of using Gnome, I got fed up with problems at every upgrade, and switched to KDE Plasma. Suddenly everything just works as expected. Including fractional scaling, which still can be pain in the neck on Linux.

I recently donated to KDE and would encourage you to do the same [1]. I'll keep doing that occasionally.

[1] https://kde.org/community/donations/

True, Gnome is an exercises in lack of polish (or worse, quirky behaviour usually justified by some very weird way of thinking that doesn't match 99% of other people)

It's not that the Gnome team gets features wrong (every desktop software project does that) it's that they absolutely insist on dying on every single interface hill they find themselves on.

Hah, exactly that! You put it better than I could have had.

If you'll indulge me an anecdote, my first KDE experience was noticing the icons were too small, setting fractional scaling, and watching the entire desktop bug out requiring several restarts. I immediately switched to GNOME, noticed fractional scaling wasn't an option (by default), and just left the small icons alone - which I've now gotten used to.

I think that's a good allegory for the philosophy behind an opinionated desktop.

You need to use Wayland instead of X11 for fractional scaling. On Gnome, you need to enable it first.

You know, I was ready to disagree but then it dawned on me that i don't use any of the pack-in software that comes with gnome (the desktop). My workflow largely depends on other tools (which might use gnome libs truth be told), but i could probably change my session manager, desktop, window manager and the like with fewer papercuts than i think.

The promise of the linux desktop was already not delivered for a decade and then the mobile revolution happened and it set things back for a second decade.

But as the capabilities of software become ever more profound (see e.g AI tools) there will be a moment where the advantage of apps working with local personal data and the huge collection of open source tools will be dramatic.

At that moment the KDE community (and other FOSS communities) that toiled for decades will be vindicated in a massive way.

The way to accelerate that is to integrate local AI in common apps along with the imaginative use of open data from osm and wikipedia and native support for fediverse platforms.

For a long time foss computing was about emulating walled gardens. Its getting now to a phase where paths must split and human-centric computing comes of age.

I recently installed KDE and I'm surprised how good it is. It's miles ahead of both Windows and Gnome. I mean, it's crazy good.

Like the small things: when I plug my laptop into the docking, the various applications are moved to the correct external monitor. That never happens on Windows.

Tbh for me the monitor behaviour in KDE is great until it isn't. It works fine on my hardware at home but not on my Dell laptop and docking station at work. But I can live (and have lived) with it given the rest of KDE is as you say awesome.

Fighting the urge to debug, and failing, are they running the same software? I could see it being a hardware issue, but highly doubt it. For me it works flawlessly with an old T460 and its dock, but maybe the USB-C codepath is less robust, even today?

Yeah I suspect the USB-C docking station is the guilty party. Same software, Arch and KDE.

For what it's worth, I had a similar problem with a USB-C dock for my Framework in KDE. Check the Thunderbolt permissions under System Settings -> Hardware. I had to do a pairing dance to get it to work correctly.

Probably not really a kde issue. Dell docking stations don't use vanilla USB, they use display link which is a bit of a PITA.

From users point of view, from developer tooling experience, not really when compared to Visual Studio, .NET and C++ frameworks, even with the GUI civil war going at Redmond.

Although KParts and DCOP/D-Bus is certainly nicer than dealing with COM stuff.

Yes and I'd blame that on Qt more than anything else because they take C++ and bring it into their own magical world but it is very frail

Borland C++ interfaces for windows were better than anything else, MFC were a far 2nd place. .NET/C# made it useful again

OWL and VCL for the win!

Microsoft still doesn't have any tooling that comes close to C++ Builder. C++/CX was almost there, but then internal politics killed it.

I love KDE and am a daily and heavy user of Plasma, but the Itinerary app didn't work for me at all. I installed it from F-Droid and planned on adding a trip to a convention I am attending in August, but none of the steps of my trip worked. I tried adding the train trip, which wouldn't work because the search for the first station didn't return any results, and there was no button to add it anyway. I tried importing my ticket to the convention and the booking confirmation for the hotel, but both gave an unhelpful toast notification saying "Nothing was imported". If it can't support any of the steps of a trip, I don't feel like this is ready for production. Another (albeit minor) gripe was that you can't swipe from the left to open the left sidebar, forcing you to manually click the hamburger button in the top left of the screen, which is annoying when using a rather large phone.

I haven't hear of Itinerary before, and it seems to be a really swell app. Especially the Openstreetmap integration for showing indoor maps with platforms seems like a killer feature, and the KDE connect integration sounds very nice, too.

Regarding KDE connect, I can't recommend it enough - it seems like it makes it possible to have at least parts of the famed Apple ecosystem with FOSS (please correct me if I'm wrong, I only have a macbook for work and don't use any cross-device Apple functionality, I'm more or less guessing here).

I really appreciate this work. I realized how important it is the other day when I needed a text editor on my phone and realized how opaque the Play store is, it's hard to find an app you can trust not to hoover your data.

Either you give a closed source app access to your files, or it saves your notes to it's cloud. Even apps that are open source aren't transparent as they haven't necessarily uploaded the version in github. So it all falls apart and you're back to plain old trust so long as you use the app stores.

Workaround: revoke network permission from any local-first editor.

Have you tried F-Droid as a primary source for Android apps?

They include only open source apps, rebuild the app from sources themselves, list possible anti features in app description and does not allow apps with tracking in their catalogs.

I have much higher trust for anything I install from F-Droid in comparison to Play Store.

As for text editor I use Markor [1] and it is rather good.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.gsantner.markor/

KDE offers Android apps and they have their own FDroid repo.

https://cdn.kde.org/android/stable-releases/fdroid/repo/?fin...

This is very cool, particularly as it's a nice way of supporting pkpass files on Android.

However, I do wish it would also accept PDF files (planning a trip right now and many museums just give you a PDF), as well as that it had some level of in-app organization. I have a lot of items and it's just one live. I suspect I need to use the calendar function to do the latter.

They do.

Airlines don't always give pkpass. Just a PDF and itinerary just parses them correctly.

You can try your PDF and see if its already working or not.

If not then reach out to vkrause on KDE matrix, send him a copy of PDF and he will fix the code right away.

I've traveled a lot on airplanes and every often I get a new airline whose PDF isn't quite parsing properly. I send them a file and it gets fixed.

You can also do one thing, in order to test the app, if you have old PDF files, try to import them.

Props to the KDE Team for constantly redefining beauty and usability of Desktop Linux and beyond.

These plasma mobile apps were built with the Kirigami framework (https://develop.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/). I've been looking for a way to build an Android app with Common Lisp and this looks intriguing. Has anyone here looked into/tried it?

Also interested in general impressions of Kirigami, too.

Personally I love the usability of KDE, the speed (and information density) of the file browser, and love constantly discovering little "touches" of polish as I use it.

However, the thing that's killed it from being my primary DE is the inability to wake up from sleep on more than one occasion, resulting in me losing work. It's not happened to me on Gnome. (This is on Fedora Workstation on an AMD ThinkPad X13).

Cool that people build stuff, but I don't see anything that makes me want to switch away from TripIt (which is also free, useful, and has more than a decade's worth of my trips in it).

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