The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
lwn.net
lwn.net
I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
[1]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3871 [2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481985 [3]: https://invent.kde.org/vladz/switch-to-previous-desktop
I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo) button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than Gnome, of course.
Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per se.
[0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11 the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well. With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's, then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other combinations all fail in their own unique ways.
I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11 it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour. Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD ecosystem.
I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you on?
That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.
I have it and works fine on plasma6/wayland.
We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.
We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).
More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.
Performance work.
Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.
Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.
Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.
I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)
I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most distros just dump the basic default setup on users.
I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?
Try https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt as an alternative.
It feels native in Plasma/Breeze and is more traditional. I like it.
Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers) - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")
So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.
And "resolved" like [0] which is a 9 year old regression is marked "resolved upstream" becase KDE devs refuse to implement a workable solution FOR KDE like there used to be in 3.x and 4.x and instead require a perfect solution that will never happen as can be seen by the bug report's age. Not worth my time to report bugs if they will be treated like this.
People don't usually dig in the settings menu unless something is bothering them. If there are great opt-in features they're going to stay off.
We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed many defaults to values that reflect better what the users actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies, and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes in this regard.
And you're not wrong, it does help a lot.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
What is missing, compared to gimp?
I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense).
GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).
GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them.
And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita.
There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).
Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default:
https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht...
There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes.
It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
Oh well, back to GIMP.
On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second.
> the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system
Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms).
> spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops
The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.
But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf to do so.
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..
I say this as someone who has used the latest versions of KDE and Windows until around the release of Windows 11 (but I have seen that too).
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
Are they profitable these days?
That used to be their main problem, business wise. Always losing money, so making weird choices trying to stop that.
Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)
[1] https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-...
For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM.
Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important.
But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on.
Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.
This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open.
One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
Oh, did you mean the other kind of desktop cube...
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
The Gnome designers have apparently discovered that taskbars are attention vampires and a detriment to users.
This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars. GNOME is very usable, and if it's not, you don't know how to use a computer at all.
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
It is the easiest solution, requires no research or technical ability, and will not have any left over cruft from the hours of customizing.
The same goes for windows, I know people who reinstall every 6 months just to keep their system clean and working optimally.
> I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer.
I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms.
Maybe Fedora Silverblue is up your ally. All the apps, including the desktop environment are containers.
Or if you really want an actual hypervisor you could try Qubes, but that is not for the faint of heart.
You could even switch between them each time you log in, depending on your mood that day.
While its a joke, every joke contains some portion of a joke.
Regardless, not sure where you've gotten that impression of Linux. The only times I've reinstalled is when I've gotten a new laptop, and in those cases I just copy my home directory over to the new laptop and everything just works.
The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical; I don't think anyone even remotely knowledgeable would recommend a reinstall in that case. Just a trip to the package manager app and a restart.
I think there are quite a few reasons why the Linux desktop isn't more common, but "need to reinstall to fix issues" certainly isn't one of them.
I am forced to save things instead of all the times in the past that I have lost important data.
If my system blows up right now, I will be wiped clean with a fresh install in less than 15 minutes.
I don't really care what other people do with their computers. If someone doesn't want to use Plasma, they are the ones missing out.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around.
granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
It might satisfy hipster designers but not users.
Windows 8 and later were all designed by professional UI designers.
Also, every single company website or app that has absolutely atrocious UI was designed by a professional UI designer.
Users who prefer the old behavior can toggle it back on in the "Mouse Actions" settings under "Desktop Folder Settings", so it's not going away entirely.
It would be a good candidate for one of those first-use "did you know you can" type things.
hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives hobbyist something to experiment with.
I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-layer).
I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven by open source development)
This is great news.
The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11. I don't think this has been a problem lately. There is iirc an icon up top on gnome at least which I don't want in my video but I guess I'm not supposed to be recording my whole display?
I currently don't use my fedora machine much (just ssh into it when I need to) and wsl2 is good enough.
Historically, what you had was single click to select, then something else (usually the Enter key or similar) to open the selected item; this is consistent with for instance drop-down lists (where Enter activates the default button of the dialog box containing the drop-down). Double-click was just a shortcut to "select and then do the default action".
A sibling comment compared to smartphones, which use long-press to select; in my experience, both double-click and long-press can be hard for some people (for instance, I've seen people release the long-press a millisecond too early, causing it to do the single-press action instead of the long-click action).
We invested a lot of effort in Plasma6 to make screen recording on Wayland as smooth as possible. With OBS (and our native screenshot/recording tool Spectacle) it just "works".
We also developed a mechanism to make screen recording/sharing work for old XWayland clients (to have things like screen sharing work from i.e. the Electron Discord app)
So what is it KDE? Do you care about RSI or not? I'm no longer a young person anymore, and appreciate any features to prevent RSI. I think its silly to relent on the single click due to "new user pressure".
At least there is still an option for it, I suppose.
The combined overview (four-finger swipe up) is one of the main things I felt was missing from Gnome and macOS and is really nice! I wish it was a three-finger swipe, but it's KDE, so you know there's probably an option somewhere.
I'm also excited about being able to consume HDR content on my workstation where I have a much nicer monitor, so will have to report back on that.
I really dislike the new default lock screen wallpaper. Not entirely sure why.
Plasma 6 fixes the panel configuration mess, which was pretty buggy. It works flawlessly now while being more intuitive.
The new Breeze theme fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies that irked me here and there. It looks much better now.
Fingerprint unlock had some weird bugs as well, which all seem to be ironed out. Very clean and consistent now.
Even the new default sound theme is _super_ nice. I'm a huge fan of the new sound effects across the desktop environment. Seriously, they're so good.
New screen recording stuff just works (Super+R) and the PipeWire setup plays perfectly with OBS. Can record individual windows and it all seems to work as expected.
Still not entirely sure this will replace Sway for the serious workstation multitasking sessions and the advantages that a tiling window manager brings, but it's really a joy on my laptop.
I know a lot of people (rightfully) have their gripes with Wayland, but this feels pretty feature complete to me. The last missing piece I'm personally feeling is remote desktop access, but I admittedly have not done anything there yet. Since screen capture is working perfectly and KDE Connect to control machines remotely from my phone works, I'm guessing the pipes are all in place and I simply need to set things up.
If you're feeling curious, give it a shot! I think it's a fantastic starting point.
Last time I tried it a few months ago, albeit with plasma5, it kind of worked, but I had to do many tweaks in my configuration and couldn't figure out settings for coherent scaling for hidpi.
The issue with making it 3-finger is that 3-finger swipes are reserved for desktop switching, and desktops can be arranged in a 2D grid
I do wish it was configurable in the settings and that any combination of 3 or 4-finger swipes could be bound to anything
I didn't read far enough, don't mind me.
It's not configurable yet in 6.0, but we do plan to add configurability for touchpad gestures
MacOS has a fixed hardware target obviously, Microsoft has all the hardware manufactures testing their drivers. The Linux ecosystem simply can't provide the same level of quality. I'm still waiting for hibernate to work on my laptop (using Fedora so I'm getting new kernel versions).
Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements. This makes the UI so much harder to parse. This trend where everything is flat and visually indistinguishable except for inperceptible differences in shade of grey can't go away soon enough. It's ruined a decade of user interfaces already. Yeah they look pretty, but they're awful to use.
Did you actually look at the screenshots? KDE did not remove separation between elements. However it is now achieved by drawing a single line between two elements, instead of framing every single thing which is extremely ugly.
I also find Kate '6' to be much more pleasant to use, because this separator is still clear enough, but actually uses marginally fewer pixels which is nice on my low-resolution laptop.
And there is also some before and after comparison on the announcement https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/
I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit and extra scrolling.
This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a trackpad or a mouse.
No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall, including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger (esp taller) than it is on my machine.
Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I use keyboard shortcuts for.
I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it. The only real problem is that the window should probably be larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like you can freely resize it.
Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
Managed to get back to X11, for some reason the logoff button does not work anymore but at least my monitoring scripts do.
[1] https://github.com/Kalmat/PyWinCtl/blob/master/README.md#lin...
The only distro shipping it right now seems to be KDE neon, whose entire premise is shipping KDE stuff as soon as possible...
DuckDucking it, I couldn't find a solution, but I hope someone can tell me there is.
Outside of things like this (and finding the right screen recording program) I didn't really notice a difference.
Step 1: Right click an open Picture-in-Picture window. In the context menu, select "More Actions" -> "Configure Special Window Settings...". This will populate most of the window settings for you.
Step 2: Click "Add Property..." and select "Window title". The newly added row's text field should read "Picture-in-Picture". Change the dropdown option from "Unimportant" to "Exact Match". (All PiP windows in Firefox use this title and by making it Exact Match the rule shouldn't affect any other Firefox windows.)
Step 3: Click "Add Property..." again and this time select "Keep above other windows". The dropdown in the newly added row should be set to "Apply Initially". Select the "Yes" radio button if it isn't already. (As a note, I think that didn't work for me as I have it set to "Force" rather than "Apply Initially")
Step 4: Click "OK". That's it. No more manually setting Keep Above every time you open a PiP.
Since doing the above it's just worked without issue, though it was annoying that it was broken in the first place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/osjt3p/firefox_wayland...
KWin does as well (workspace.activeWindow, workspace.windowList).
It's not well documented, but you can do this to get a list of your windows: `wlrctl toplevel list`
And this to get the currently focussed window(s): `wlrctl toplevel list state:focused`
No thank you.
My current Linux installation on desktop is from 2016 and everything was configured years ago. Recently I had to install Linux in Virtualbox and decided to go with KDE. I was overwhelmed with settings not in a good way. Maybe when I was younger I was more enthusiastic and liked it, but now I want reasonable defaults and consistent UI/UX experience.
I'm kidding (and kinda not), it's a valid complaint.
Everybody who remembers the KDE 3->4 transition will probably violently disagree with that. Hopefully that was an educational moment for the dev team and they've actually internalised that lesson.
edit: just realised that 3->4 transition was more than 15 years ago, which makes me feel very old...
For me one of the biggest accomplishments of our community is that people really do stick around. It's very multi-generational. Therefore the memory is there and the lessons do get learned.
That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
I still have nightmares about that. I ended up moving to i3 as a result of that transition and never looked back, although KDE is my "backup desktop".
I every now and then use KDE and it keeps looking less and less as a "desktop environment for developers" (read: ugly), and more like a desktop environment that everybody loves. These latest screenshots look fantastic.
KDE can look amazing with a custom theme, why don't they just pick one and make it official?
Mine is here which is still quite WIP https://carlschwan.eu/2023/12/19/announcing-brise-theme/
And there is another one for icons https://anditosan.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/breeze-icons-upda...
I quite like the GTK toolkit but I'll never be able to tolerate the default Dark colorscheme. If we're strictly talking about colors, I find Breeze to be more pleasing in Light and Dark mode.
My issue with Breeze aren't the default colors, but rather the theme itself
Sure, there were ups and downs (KDE4?) but it's not easy to keep this upward trajectory and kept improving things in a OSS project.
Nowadays KDE is definitely my favourite desktop experience, including Windows and macOS (which I feel are getting worse and worse every year).
> Qt has switched to CMake, away from the qmake build system
Found some more information:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-cmake-the-past-the-present-and... (2021)
With that negativity aside, I use i3 nowadays but KDE is still always my other desktop. I've been using it since the KDE1 days and have always strongly preferred it over gnome :) Even in i3, Konsole is my console of choice.
(Then logout and choose jwm when typing password)
I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be useful would be for accessibility.
>Wayland as default
I have plasma installed here and one weird thing I noticed is that if I use the wayland version sometimes text isn't rendered on windows or entire panels flash black rectangles, while if I use the X11 version my mouse speed becomes slower. I wonder if the update addresses these issues. Anyway after trying out several DEs I ended up using Xfce because my mouse feels faster in it.
For me personally, it lets me think of desktops in terms of what is left or right of them, rather than what actual number it is, i.e my Steam desktop is to the right of my browser desktop and to the left of my remote session. If I need to go to the email desktop from where I'm at, it's two scrolls away. I usually leave a little bit of the desktop visible on each virtual desktop to facilitate this.
So, not an accessibility thing for me but an actual preference. People are different. I know, it shocked me too.
> Users who are comfortable with Plasma 5 are unlikely to feel discomfited with Plasma 6
I say yeah !
Both KDE and GNOME are accelerating at a fantastic pace, but 1 of these projects are prioritizing the less visible (and hugely important) stuff. That is GNOME. I apologize for capitalizing Gnome, but that's what's comfortable.
Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing". As VR-enabled desktop environments become a thing, we need to view DEs like physics/sandbox simulators. A lot of the design specs that Apple puts out essentially mirror what you would expect in an environment with actual physics interactions. How light bounces between layered interface components. It's going to be hugely resource-intensive but someday we'll look back on 2D GUIs and DEs like something that pales in comparison to the amazing interfaces of a 3D environment where we can attach virtual surfaces to walls and ceilings and have them follow after us as we move around the office/house with our headsets.
(Someday: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/174)
PS: I'm loving how both KDE and GNOME are pushing a lot of DE behaviors into JS extensions. On a separate front, everything we interact with is like this close to being entirely within a web browser.
Nobody likes what I've said, but I'm prophesying now: DEs will need to go "spatial", and all of /this/ will be in a web browser by 2027.
KDE seems to have this working pretty well, whereas Gnome does not and it isn't clear when they will get there.
There is absolutely nothing to love about that utter atrocity
Wait... all of this is a lot to take in. HDR progress has gone great on Red Hat's side, but KDE has been working on it just as long (with arguably further progress). VRR has existed on KDE for a while as "Adaptive Sync" and the work that goes into updating GNOME extensions exists mostly because the GNOME developers refuse to make a stable API for it.
GNOME and Red Hat obviously do great work for the community, but these seem like weird examples. To the contrary, with GNOME's fractured extensibility and now-missing system tray, a lot of Windows and MacOS users will probably feel confused booting up GNOME 40. I say all this from a GNOME system myself =P
> Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing"
Holy whiplash, Batman! I disagree so hard my head is spinning.
For one, "the curve" of Spatial Computing is so-far relegated to cheap Android SDKs and $3,500 iPad-killers. Nobody is shipping Johnny-Mnemonic style hardware today, and probably won't be for another decade. Focusing on developing that technology is not only a waste of time, but entirely tangential to the work that goes into making the modern desktop usable. GNOME and KDE's efforts shouldn't be dedicated to a hypothetical userbase that might never exist.
...and on the flip side, a lot of work has gone into "spatializing" Open Source software. OpenXR is the de-facto standard for VR experiences, and is well-supported on Linux clients. With Wayland, the desktop's rendering model is now finally up to a position where someone could feasibly write a foveated window renderer. There are people doing it right now, despite the lack of demand: https://simulavr.com/
What?? Plasma/KWin 5.27 already had support for VRR. On Gnome/Mutter, it's still in a merge request (or maybe it's finally been merged recently? not sure but it's definitely not in any released version to my knowledge).
Not sure about partial scanout, but Plasma 6 also enables basic HDR support (although it doesn't seem to work well on my Nvidia machine, SDR-on-HDR looks very washed out).
Gnome is indeed massively ahead in terms of extensions, but I don't know how much of that is due to capabilities vs. market share. See for example Karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel.
From my perspective KDE is much farther ahead in pushing Wayland features. Apart from them currently shipping VRR and HDR, there is also for example long-standing support for XWayland-native scaling that Gnome is just now starting to consider. Or how about implementing server side decoration instead of forcing applications to use something like libdecor?
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...
This one caught my eye:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480122
SUMMARY
If the screen is turn off and then the pc goes to sleep (only possible if the lid is closed because trying to use a shortcut to sleep cause pc screen to turn on), on lid open the screen is black and the pc is unusable (require a reboot).And speaking of kinks, I'm disappointed in the number of posters on Mastodon who are angrily claiming that they will never use KDE again because of issues they run into on the first day of a major release. What did they expect?
And I will repeat: Many thanks to the devs, testers, documenters and all others who make this happen. Well done!
- If my monitor dims due to inactivity then I start using my computer again, the monitor stays dim and does not come back up to the brightness I had it unless I turn off my monitor and turn it back on. I resolved this by just turning off dimming.
- If KDE goes to lockscreen due to inactivity but I start interacting with my computer during the transition, my monitor just stays black and doesn't return to desktop or go to lockscreen.
- My bluetooth headphones disconnect whenever KDE goes to lockscreen.
-I use multiple languages and sometimes my languages will switch randomly despite not hitting the language hotkey and often I will mash my language hotkey and the language still won't change.
Those are just what I remember off the top of my head but I'm maintaining a list somewhere in a notebook.
Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE games or educational applications.
You can join the New Contributors char room on Matrix to get help with starting out https://matrix.to/#/#new-contributors:kde.org
Wow, a 5-year-old laptop. Things were so primitive in 2018. Here in my the mighty year of 2024, my computer has....... 16 GB of RAM.
I like the overall experience of gnome. The apps feel nice, the DE feels snappy etc. But the tiling features of KDE make me curious. I like sway, but I recently completely messed up my configuration and it’s a an absolute pain to get back working even halfway decent, so I may as well give a integrated DE a try
Admittedly, this may very well be due to the fact that I didn't quite have the time to configure it to match my tiling WM mappings i've been used to at this point
You can get the gist of it from this Super User discussion: https://superuser.com/questions/1141631/make-windows-10-file...
Judging by the screenshots, the UI remains a mess though. It's really surprising how people can be selectively blind about these things.
Ok...
> Another change to scrolling behavior in this release is that clicking on a scrollbar moves the window to the location clicked, rather than one "page" at a time. ... in order to be a better option for users with RSIs.
This is already done with the middle mouse button. Will people please stop fucking with scroll bars?
Ironic that one paragraph extols the virtues of forty year-old defaults, then the next recommends breaking something that already works.
though why isn't two buttons enough, one for page nav, another for move to point, wonder whether this is configurable globally in KDE
The problem imo is that Wayland is too hard to write your own WM for. People wrote X11 WMs in weekends when they got fed up with the status quo. How many do the same for Wayland?
> How many do the same for Wayland?
A lot, because wlroots provides a decent base to handle all the things you don't want to be handling manually. The ecosystem of simple tiling WMs made with wlroots is quite vibrant.
At first, I was going to point out that wlroots itself says it abstracts the job of a compositor: 'about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway.' [0] Would seem to prove the point that too many LOC are needed just to get something running. But really wlroots is from the same group that maintains Wayland [1], so maybe it's like a low-level/high-level access duality common in other software projects.
In my circle of Linux users, a lot of the people that choose KDE do so because they don’t find the desktop layer interesting to hack on, and just want a tool for interacting with Linux.
i'm currently on pop!_os waiting for their new desktop :)
KDE: let's make our panel floating by default to distinguish ourselves visually from Windows! later Microsoft rumored to introduce floating panel in Windows 12.