KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace
kde.org
kde.org
I have been using Kubuntu/KDE as my main workstation for last couple of months and I love depth of how much is possible with window environment. I think KDE works pretty well for powerusers as well as beginners and I am excited to see its new update!
Really excited to see this visual update.
Things are different, no need to order them, especially on one single axis.
I honestly think that almost all pointless flamewars in tech forums about the relative merits of various languages/operating systems/editors/desktop environments/whatever stem from confusion among the participants over whether personal preferences or objective qualities are being discussed. It doesn't help that for a lot of people in the larval hacker stage, there is no distinction between objective and subjective judgements- if they happen to prefer vi to emacs, they interpret that as meaning that vi is intrinsically better in some way, and isn't just a better fit for their particular workflow or whatever.
Personally I love KDE apps and I have been using i3 tiled WM.
Is this supposed to illustrate the "beta-ness" of the release? Because it's an atrocious UI. Two different-sized "wrench" icons next to each other? What are those checkboxes for? What does the little blue bar above the wireless symbol supposed to indicate? The blue lock is lost in the wireless icon in the network list (the eye is terrible at distinguishing blue shapes on a noisy background like that). It goes on and on...
Speaking as a past KDE user (and with zero experience of KDE in the past 7 years or more) I would say that each wrench is for a different purpose. Maybe one leads to Network Settings and the other lets you configure the widget. At least that's how using KDE used to feel back in the days.
Yes, such support is still there. In fact, it's even easier to get to than it was in KDE 3 (where you effectively had to be good at understanding how KDE converted URIs into kioslave requests).
I wonder why so many design-related critiques sound as if someone comitted a crime against humanity. C'est la vie, I suppose.
The comments here were even more virulent with the last beta. I didn't even bother to comment then, what can you say to people who expect multi-million dollar polished U/I out of a beta from one of the last large community-developed open source projects, as if KDE has some sort of hidden pool of paid artists and capital development programs?
Even Firefox on Linux still looks worse than KDE (IMHO) but people (even on HN) don't stop to base their opinion on Firefox based only on that.
As for me, I'm incredibly proud of those who develop the visual design for KDE, especially since they do so with no compensation. KDE has come a very long way since KDE 2 and 3 and that is almost entirely from true volunteer effort; while there is always room for improvement I think KDE looks good. Not even "good for what resources we have", but good per se, and if the screenshot of this beta is any indication KDE's Plasma 5 will look even better.
Compared to the alternatives, I think it qualified.
Yes it beta but if the screenshots immediately raises red flags to you chances are you are a mac us ser and should stay with mac for now.
(I have used mac for years and it annoys me to no end, mostly because it is so close to perfect but still broken to no end for many of my use cases. For me linux shortcuts, linux software, fullscreen working w/multi monitor, "correct" keyboard layout and keyboard shortcuts that makes sense to me is far more worth than visual polish. But then again I am weird, ain't I? ;-)
I don't think any of them are perfect, but Apple do a much better job with the cognitive aspects of computing than any open source efforts have been able to muster.
Is that the trend for the next iteration of KDE ? (I like it)
Although in my opinion their work hasn't exactly been a huge improvement so far. It's just a flatter coat of paint with the same issues that already plague KDE: inconsistent padding and spacing, terrible organization (think system settings) and so on.
The redesign is not in this beta and, depending how long it takes, maybe won't make it into the first final release either. Partially it's even by design. It's not intended that Plasma 5 diverges too much from the current release to ease the transition.
That said, at the top level the breadcrumbs on the left aren't needed.
I did a lot of Linux desktop stuff 10 years ago. Now I feel most of the action takes place inside the browser. KDE's biggest contribution to computing will always be KHTML.
Edit: To add a bit more to the conversation, does the change from Canonical to Blue Systems[2] changed much to the development of Kubuntu/KDE?
[1] https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-asFPvnoidnw/U4cXbGCcv2I/AAAAAAAAM...
Blue Systems OTOH is a big KDE contributor. Things like KDE Search improved a lot thanks to Blue's involvement. As for Kubuntu: It appears to me that mostly the same people are involved with it. The only KDE thing mostly specific to Kubuntu is Muon (and that's being ported to Debian as we speak). Everything else by Blue Systems is AFAIK cross-distro.
The Kubuntu guys already announced that Canonical's own display server Mir is not an option. Therefore it remains to be seen how feasible Kubuntu remains with Canonical pushing a Wayland competitor.
KUbuntu = Worst KDE integration and the cause for why so many people have a negative view of KDE!
OpenSUSE = Best KDE integration
Take `zypper se -s`, for example - or if you prefer the long form, `zypper search --detailed`. How do you get that information from any of the apt tools, or even aptitude?
And then there's the openSUSE build system.
But I digress. I will attempt to replace my openSUSE installation with NixOS and if I miss my automatic KF5 builds, I'll try to create Nix packages for them.
Zypper is by far my favorite package manager and find apt-get and company a PAIN. apt-cache search foo UGH!
Finding settings: Press Super-and-Space type 'set...'
Gnome 3.x, just about any version, e.g. RHEL7 RC
Finding settings: Press Super, type 'set...'
Windows 8
Press Windows key, type 'control'
Windows 7
Press Windows key and letter R and type 'control'
Seriously, each of us uses what we find best and produces work. Settings tend to be easy to find these days
My understanding of Gnome desktop is that customisation is being offloaded to third party extensions. I admit rapid changes in API for extensions means breakage at present, but I'm hoping for asymptotic stability as the interface matures. When that happens it will be like visual emacs one hopes... hack on your GUI for the things you need.
And at that, you can pick your own icon themes anyway. There are Hycons, Numix, Faenza, etc. I do agree defaults matter and the Oxygen icon set is gaudy, but it shouldn't stop an HN user from trying it since you can change them.
Also, the inconsistencies are mostly due to app developers themselves. The difference between plasma and the software compilation can exemplify that - you use two entirely different application stacks if you are developing for one or the other (qt widgets enhanced by kdelibs vs qml enhanced by plasma). And then there are multiple ways to actually develop the app interfaces - you can use anchor based widgets, ui files, or raw custom positioning which I find in reviewing a lot of codebases a bit too common for my liking.
When I have the time I try to fix it, though. The problem right now is that while the Qt world's future is QML based, the KDE applications and libraries were developed for over a decade around widgets. So when I develop something new I'm using QML and it can scale, animate, and orient really well for arbitrary window sizes and devices, but some widgets applications just anchor a toolbar to 50px indents and then it looks like puke on high DPI.
I mean you can still do that in QML, but the anchors and layouts are so easy to use it seems insane to do so.
LXDE/Lubuntu is probably closer to that "16%." I can get <200M initial RAM usage pretty easily with LXDE. XFCE is really not that lightweight. They are both pretty lacking compared to current versions of GNOME/KDE.
And remember you can change the icon theme. Numix, Faenza, and Hycons are all popular alternatives available already. Though I'm still using the Oxygen icons on kde4 because all those themes are missing swathes of icons...
BTW I'm using KDevelop to edit PHP. It's come a long way since its introduction, and is now almost on par (feature-wise) with Netbeans, which makes it the second best free PHP IDE for Linux!
Does the next generation workspace just change the UI/UX or optimize stuff too? The post doesn't talk much about that.
Would KDE actually require so much for all the features it gives or can that actually come down?
It might not be that big of a problem this time around, when(ever) we move from v4 to v5, because hardware isn't evolving as fast as it used to. But KDE will remain a behemoth.
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-low-fat-settings
Basically, it turns off composting and file tagging services. It reduced the memory requirements and the CPU % dropped to something close to GNOME 2.x or XFCE.
How much RAM is utilized depends on the components you loaded. "Convenience distros" tend to start more services by default. The KDE Workspace is very modular. You can disable/remove many things, esp. if you compile yourself. That said, it's not a workspace primarily for low-end computers. If it requires more RAM than your PC has, maybe look at LXQt.
Example task:
1) inspect running konsole task to find exposed interfaces
2) find one related to background colour
3) script up "change background colour to red in current konsole" command
Last time I looked at the KDE+dbus situation (early KDE4) it seemed this was really hard.
Even if we forget Gnome's track record for infrastructure, it was notoriously command-line-hostile.
So I guess DCOP is bye bye and dbus is no good.
Looks like a bunch of konsole stuff never got implemented as dbus interfaces in KDE4. This specific use case seems to be covered by the konsoleprofile command (I wonder why the devs chose that route instead of exposing a dbus interface).
Anyway, I don't use KDE but I think it does a lot of good things and I wish them luck. Using XFCE right now and couldn't be happier.
Also: they could take a very clean approach, like really minimal design and leverage their customization options (that they are famous for) to a few themes and let the community do the rest. Like "sane defaults" that don't scare newbies. I know it's not easy.
For my part - ever since switching to i3, I can't really see myself using any other WM. Once I got used to not touching the mouse, I lost all desire to use a traditional mouse centric GUI.
IIRC, the only real tinkering I did was to re-jig the navigation shortcuts to resemble VIM bindings. From a user's perspective i3 is comparable to xmonad, but configuration wise it's an order of magnitude simpler.
i3 does, however, come at a price. Not being inside a fully functional DE means a lot of normally trivial tasks require active thought and engagement, at least at first, since they will have to either be handled via the command line or by seeking out the correct application (e.g. managing wi-fi connections, handling dual-monitors & monitor rotation, etc.)
It needs a lot of tinkering once Wayland is the accepted standard.
Neither do I. I love the fact that, after years of wasting pixels on 3D effects and shadows, we're moving beyond that. This release of KDE seems to be a step in that direction.
The one piece of software from the KDE distro that I really love is Konsole.
And Konsole is pretty good, but doesn't handle resizing well in XMonad, so it's urxvt for me.
I used to see it everywhere that linux was being used, 50/50 or so with other desktops, I don't even remember the last time I saw someone use it.