KDE Plasma 5
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
KDE5 is surely a great piece of tech but I fail to see what's new except for a cleaner KDE4 in terms of UX; these days I feel dom/javascript bear more innovation (maybe too much).
I think people still like DE because they try to make mouse UX fancy. If you're used to keyboards, dmenu is almost all you need. I'm sure even casual users or noobs would love it.
You're going to reply "but these things work outside DEs as well" - they do (though only to a degree), yes, but these systems were conceived and standardized in context of the desktop environment projects, and that's no accident. As communities they attract developers and spawn efforts to make things act in concert. And they continue to be the breeding ground for more goodness of that same nature.
So even if you're not fond of what you think of as DE UI, you have benefited from their development, and continue to benefit from them. The DE communities continue to shoulder this kind of work almost exclusively.
My point was that the DE development and user community has greatly enriched the ecosystem in general, and continues to do so. I'd like it if people who aren't fond of DE UIs (which, again, is fine by me) would acknowledge that more, instead of disparaging DEs as they often do. It shows a lack of understanding of how things work and flow in the greater community. The reality is that your experience outside the DEs would be far poorer today if the DEs didn't exist, because it's been and continues to be the DEs that drive many platform-y developments that enhance applications. Know whose work you rely on and what motivates them.
But of course, I can provide some concrete examples of shared global state popping up in my own workflows:
* The KDE platform has a framework to manage user search engines. You can manage them in System Settings, Plasma's control center application. Many KDE Applications will alow you to select text and hand it off to a search engine from the context menu (along with providing an entry point into the management UI, which can also run outside of System Settings; this takes care of making it work outside Plasma). The Plasma Desktop shell does the same, though, with its Run Command box, which is one keyboard shortcut away, also being aware of search engines and being able to start searches.
* The shell similary exposes things like favorite file system locations, which also pop up in file dialogs and file managers, in Run Command, the launcher, and other places.
* The KDE platform has the best support for international calender systems and calendering data like holiday information available in free software today, and the clock/calendar thingie you can stuff in a Plasma panel reflects those abilities, as do the applications built on the same platform.
And many other little examples broadly in the same vain. As you can see, the pattern is: The platform can do a lot, and there's some benefits to the shell being built on the same platform as the applications, at least for me. That doesn't need to be the same for you; you may interact with your computer in different patterns. You still get to enjoy the applications.
For Unity I'm probably simply not in the target group, I don't like it.
I left KDE many years ago because I found it buggy and bloated. Maybe it's time to give it a look but I'm happy with my Gnome Shell (in a very nearly out of the box configuration).
I was initially annoyed by Alt+` to switch windows within a program group but now I find it useful
Personally, I left Gnome because it felt unrefined and designed for a device other than a conventional laptop (i.e. one without a touch screen). I left KDE many years before then because I found the UI too busy, but they seem to have left that behind them so it might be time for me to take another look as well.
On the other hand, the persistent sessions/activities in KDE someone mentioned sound intriguing.
What did you switch to?
That's what I was trying to say. I'm sure it works for many, but it doesn't work for everyone. That's why people still "care" (if selecting one or another is caring).
For example with KDE activities you can save states of your desktop (which apps are open, their position on screen, their open tabs, files etc) and restore them whenever you want. So you have ready layouts for your usual tasks and you can start/stop or switch between them in seconds.
Another small example that exists since KDE 2 maybe: you get a clipboard with history. How one may live without it?
Also you get all the small perks like easily setting your keyboard layouts, shortcuts etc.
You get a very fast search utility. Navigating to a file through your file manager is so ineffective when you can type a few letters and find the exact file or folder you need. Searching through your email with gmail (or better) speed from your system tray without having to go to your browser is so useful.
There are a ton of small nice apps, like a ruler or a color selector or a screenshot utility. You may connect to a VPN with exactly two clicks or send your music from your speakers to your bluetooth headset.
Your music or video will autopause when your Android phone rings. You get notifications synchronization with your Android.
Your archive utility can preview any type of file even with color highlighting if it is code. Your apps can edit directly any file on remote file systems (even ftp or ssh).
There are so many things a well designed desktop environment can do for you.
It sounds like the setup you describe is only possible with a huge amount of configuration.
With enough configuration, Emacs could do all those things too.
The only one it doesn't do by default is the Android integration but you only need to install kde-connect and pair your phone. Kde-connect will probably be part of the default installation in the near future, so it will be out of the box too.
KDE always had such cool features. For example when audio CDs were still a thing, whenever you inserted an audio CD in your drive and open it in KDE's file manager it would show you folders with mp3 and flac versions of the songs. Once you tried to copy them, KDE would rip and encode them on the fly for you!
I think it probably confused a few people when it looked like their Red Book audio CD contained folders, one of which contained Ogg Vorbis files, ready tagged.
I had actually forgotten about this, thanks for the reminder!
There is a tool called glipper on the GNOME side that does this. I don't know how it fared in the GNOME 3 / Unity conversion though. I do remember that at one point it only needed a systray + GTK, but then they made it dependent on some GNOME stuff so I couldn't use it in a more stripped-down environment (e.g. xmonad + alternate systray).
KDE is blasting away any other "user interface shell".
If looks didnt matter, stop shaving and getting haircuts, and other pruning activities. KDE is best looking user interface which exists today. And it has just gotten better.
Looking at something like Windows 7 or 8, is vomit inducing.
I tried XMonad once but hit a snag (don't remember what it was) and went back to awesome. Some people have actually laughed at me when they've seen that I'm still using awesome.
A: Expert programmers who need nothing more than a browser, a text editor, and a bunch of terminals. They can do everything with the keyboard. They barely even touch the mouse unless it's absolutely necessary. They usually don't care what their DE is, as long as it stays out of their way. Judging from the reaction in this thread, a lot of HNers fall into this category.
B: Power users who spend a lot of time in WYSIWYG applications (graphics, video editing, Excel, etc.), multitask a lot, and make heavy use of the mouse. They know some keyboard shortcuts, but the nature of their work makes the mouse, not the keyboard, their primary method of interacting with the computer. Remember the gal/dude who did all the web design for your last project? Or the team who made that promotional video for you? They probably belong in this group.
C: Casual users who use nothing more than a browser and a music app. Maybe they also use a word processor from time to time, you know, to make garage sale flyers and birthday party invitations. Comic Sans is their best friend, Command Prompt is their worst enemy. They tend to use the mouse more than the keyboard, but both can be easily replaced with a touchscreen. You can usually catch them trying to buy computing devices in the local Wal-Mart.
What's interesting about the situation is that A and C share a lot of preferences despite being at opposite ends of the computer literacy scale. Both groups use only a few apps, so it doesn't really matter how those apps are launched. Both groups can live without a mouse for the most part. Neither group spends much time wandering through menus and settings, A because they don't need to, and C because they don't know how to. This leaves B in the awkward position of heavily depending on the traditional desktop metaphor (icons, menus, toolbars, and most of all, mice).
Unfortunately, A are the ones who make all the DEs, and since C are the largest group, they are the default target users of such DEs. It's easy to target both A and C. You just make a simple, touchscreen-friendly DE where all the advanced functions are hidden behind keyboard shortcuts and/or menually editable configuration files. But while the rest of us fantasize about a "universal" DE that can scale seamlessly from 4" phone to 40" TV, B are stuck in the middle, holding tight to their precious mice and 27" monitor, surrounded by DEs that are so utterly unoptimized for their hardware and daily work.
HUD? Seriously? You want me to take my hand off my lovely plastic rodent and type the name of the menu item that I want to use? Once you imagine yourself in B's shoes, all the backlash against Unity, GNOME 3, and Windows 8 makes perfect sense.
There were workarounds for most of these of course, if you just took the time to read the manual, which they hadn't really written yet. All you had to do was to edit some xml by hand somewhere and/or run an undocumented command, instead of editing readable plaintext as before. But do you really want to take the time to learn how to do that just to get your xterms running again?
I was an early PowerBook purchaser, because it immediately removed the need to dual boot for my job. I could run all my formerly NetBSD-hosted network sleuthing software and open the Word docs people sent (bonus: auto crossover Ethernet port meant never hunting for crossover cable).
By contrast, Windows had the power-user segment locked up. For a long while, it seemed that there were little utilities traded around forums to do all manner of things that I'd simply open a console to do on a *nix system. As a result, I always felt really unproficient on Windows systems, because I ended up trawling the webbernets for unfamiliar tools that had obnoxiously specific use cases.
Even now, I think Windows 7 had the most power user-friendly DE ever to grace the Earth, and I look forward to KDE 5 since it looks like it might be a worthy replacement.
Its possible this is an inherently inappropriate goal.
So many non-computer things fail to scale over a mere 10:1 ratio of size that assuming a constant UI is probably inherently the wrong goal rather than the correct goal just as a default guess.
Some aspects are OK. The scribbled notes on the back of the ATM receipt in my wallet are made with the same character glyphs as I see on CAD blueprints. But the UI and technology are overall very different, because the size and job requirements are very different. Ramming one into the shell of another wouldn't be a win.
Look at the ergonomics, if nothing else. I recently have the technological capability to make a wheelbarrow the size of a garden trowel, and make a garden trowel the size of a wheelbarrow. That its recently become possible for me technologically, doesn't mean its good design or a great UI. It is in fact totally inappropriate and non-productive, although it would be an impressive hack. The analogy to the same UI on a phone and on a big screen TV is clear.
On topic of computer UI, something as simple as adding multiple screens / multiple machines on the same desk dramatically changed my workflow some decades ago.
The others all seem to insist I have one taskbar or even a dock for all 3 screens which is just not how I've worked all the way back to Gnome 2.
People will make jokes in the future about current D.E being useful for everything except being a desktop environment, just like the well known jokes about emacs being a great OS, but only so so text editor.
The next rotation of the same wheel will probably be "doing everything in web browser"
currently I mostly use the "vim" of desktops rather than an "emacs" of desktops, I switched from awesome to xmonad a year or two ago, don't remember why.
I have some mythtv front ends that use ratpoison as a WM because at least in the olden days mythtv wouldn't run even in fullscreen unless it was on top of something providing window management, weirdly enough.
I also switched from Arch to Ubuntu because I decided that the control I was losing was worth it to reduce the number of things I had to keep track of.
The beauty of free software is that it's not like one paradigm is being forced down our throats, we can pick and choose. I hope KDE does well for the same reason I hope icewm does well, because more users of free software is a good thing.
There is always a cognitive load and time cost to a feature. Even if you don't use it.
andmarios had a good point, innovation is defined as linking your phone to your desktop such that the audio out mixer volume crashes down when you get an incoming phone call on the cellphone. That's quite a cognitive load to learn about, set up, test, inevitably debug. If my wife's using my desktop and I get a call 100 feet away, what happens? She gets to debug why her phone doesn't connect to her account. It seems the "best" UI is just a physical volume control dial on a discrete amp connected to speakers, which is what I actually have. Its much more convenient than a software volume control.
Also most of the "features" tend toward lowest common denominator, not universal. So a super duper copy/paste system that works DE-wide works great with things you never cut and paste in, like perhaps the GUI FAX config screen. However it doesn't talk to emacs and vi where I actually do almost all my cut and paste (or does it connect... I'll be impressed if it does, I wonder how much work it is to set up and inevitably debug) In a similar way if I get a legacy voice phone call the DE might mute my music, but is it smart enough to do so for a google hangout video chat incoming, or a legacy skype, or a hangout on my tablet not my phone...
I would tend to agree, if they like it, good luck to them, although I'd never voluntarily use that kind of thing for productivity and style reasons. Just not conceptually appealing.
One of the things I like about Unity on the desktop is how keyboard-oriented it is. Features like the Dash and the HUD are specifically aimed at exposing functionality without requiring you to take your hands off the keyboard in order to push a mouse around. Which is appealing, at least to me. But whatever it is, it definitely is not tablet-oriented.
It's true that Canonical's vision for Unity is that it will eventually scale up and down beyond desktop/laptop displays, but they have absolutely not taken the Windows 8 approach of starting with a touch UI and then jamming it onto machines where it doesn't fit. Instead they've come up with a core set of metaphors (the Dash, scopes, etc.) and then looked for ways to present them appropriately on different platforms, which seems much more sensible.
If only there was a decent launcher on Linux, I could definitely put OSX behind me.
I like synapse, it's very fast and simple.
What reason except to save real estate could there be? Who does not want to be able to see which windows he has currently open?
In my experience a dock is preferable when you have a small number of windows open for each application and a taskbar is preferable with a larger number. Perhaps tabbed applications have made this switch possible.
And yeah Breeze looks awesome. Can't wait to use it.
* KDE Frameworks 5, which is a modularized, tiered set of libraries and runtime components that complement Qt with functionality useful to building apps and shells.
* KDE Plasma 5, a set of shells implemented using Frameworks 5. Plasma Desktop is the most prominent of those. KWin is part of Plasma, FWIW, so sure, it's at 5 now.
* KDE Applications. Not yet at 5, but will increasingly ship ports of individual applications to KF5 over the next releases.
Contrast this with KDE 4 development. KDE 4.0 (which contained all of these things in one) came years after the last major release of KDE 3, thus stopping the world cold for its entire development cycle, and e.g. preventing apps from doing feature releases. Separating these things and releasing them independently means that Plasma continued to make 4.x releases during ramp-up of Frameworks 5 development, KDE Applications kept doing feature releases while Plasma 5 is materializing, and so on. It's just a lesson learned from the last round. It's certainly more complex from a "SKU" perspective, but the net effect on users is not leaving them stranded for years. The effect on developers has actually been increased productivity: Plasma 5 development happening against already somewhat-stable Frameworks 5 instead of starting out at the same time, for example.
A fair question :). Let me summarize:
* KDE Frameworks 5 made its first stable release on July 7th, 2014. That's since been followed by Frameworks 5.1 one month later. It's monthly releases from here on out. This is production-ready code.
* KDE Plasma 5 made its first stable release on July 15th, 2015. This was followed by Plasma 5.0.1 one month later. Plasma 5 does monthly maintenance releases, while feature releases are on a three-month interval, i.e. Plasma 5.1 will be released in October. 5.0 is considered a stable release, but it's a dot-oh with some rough edges (nothing comparable to 4.0 at release, though), and the distros are also still doing their integration work right now. The release notes and an errata list provide some guidance there. Most distros will replace Plasma 4 as default with 5.1 or 5.2 later this year, when everything will have settled nicely.
* KDE Applications is doing a 4.14 feature release this month. This will be the last one built entirely on the KDE 4 libraries. Future KDE Applications releases will start shipping ports of apps to Frameworks 5, at the discretion of their individual maintainers/dev teams (some have had porting branches for a good while).
> Will Kubuntu ship Plasma5/KF5 next release (14.10) even if the applications are not yet ready?
I'm not 100% on top of the plans of the Kubuntu community, but I believe 14.10 is still going to use Plasma 4 by default - you might want to look into that more closely though, I'm not certain. I'm sure they'll offer Plasma 5 for interested users in some form as well though. They probably do already. KDE 4 apps still run in Plasma 5, of course, so that's no limitation (and KF5 apps also run in Plasma 4, for that matter).
Yes, on the promo front this does mean we don't get to do a big "BANG! It's KDE 5!" moment, but it also has some advantages for promo - e.g. driving home that KF5 isn't useful just for making apps that run in Plasma, and by implication that KDE Applications aren't useful just in Plasma.
1: Of course, part of the fun of running FVWM is seeing screenshots of other people's FVWM setups or features of other window managers, and then finding someone who's done the same in FVWM and porting their configs or implementing it yourself, usually within a few hours at most. It's hard to explain to non-FVWM users just how versatile it is.
Also market segmentation. Lets talk Vietnam. You reach the drooling masses with a graphical action movie like "Platoon". You reach the intellectuals with a book like "Fire in the Lake". There is no universal human "right" or "wrong" just different tools.
Given the above paragraph it is highly likely that noobs / non technical people will stick with touch and GUI and productive tech people will stick with somewhat more elaborate CLIs.
But yeah, it's vague and using one corner too much. Linux Desktops would have been the better term.
That is why in GUI oriented OS like Amiga, BeOS, Windows, Mac OS X, among others, the UI stack interacts a lot with the kernel.