KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown
kver.wordpress.com
kver.wordpress.com
> Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5.2 form a fairly lean pair compared to historic KDE releases; This is mostly anecdotal and other factors are in play, but no matter how you slice it Plasma 5 uses less RAM, somewhere between 20-40% less RAM is consumed on a freshly booted machine, exactly how much mileage you’ll get out of it will widely vary depending on your system, configuration, and distribution.
(on p3; is there a pages=all type URL hack for wordpress?)
If you have Safari its Reader View works. Unfortunately none of the “readability”-type bookmarklets I know of work in this case.
I know there are mailing lists and whatnot for this but if the process of helping was easier for normal (and good) designers to help out a little I think we all would benefit. Or at least if you're going to copy Apple pay attention to their ratios.
Is this maybe due to the nature of open source? If you look at the big design teams in SV they are typically run by a dictator (e.g. Jony Ive or Duartes at Google). Maybe for good design that's necessary or you end up with a large mix of conflicting ideas.
Dude, Steam is still sucky on OSX/Retina, almost three years from release; and Firefox took its sweet time to get there as well (and it's still not perfect). It's not KDE's fault.
The result works responsively, with reasonably smooth graphical effects including the 'white out' and transparency effects mentioned in the OA.
Baloo search: baloosearch <word> works from command line and from the application launcher. Finds both file names and words within files (.pdf,text). Dolphin does not return results. Fresh install gives 'invalid protocol' error within Dolphin. Installing baloo-utils gets rid of that error but still no results. There are older bug reports about this stuff.
And I heard somewhere that Gnome is very popular in the US, but everywhere else KDE is slightly more favored (apart from all the small DEs and WMs).
Also, KDE (until very recently) wasn't helped by it's unusually hideous default theme and icon set.
For me I used to prefer Gnome because of the apps I was using. OpenOffice or Firefox seemed to be out of place in KDE. Plus I preferred a simpler environment, of course nowadays they've gone overboard.
That's the main thing I don't like about it. Also I don't get the depressive trend of washing out colors and turning the style into monochrome. What's wrong with colored icons?
I hope there will be a way to chose other styles and KDE will maintain the reputation of being very UI configurable.
So no, customization never went away. Breeze is just replacing Oxygen, but the ability to change it doesn't go away.
The state of WMs on Linux is really, really more complicated than it needs to be.
Choice is always going to be a prominent force in Linux. There will always be folks who are going to write new toolkits and apps and there they will find users who would want to promote it. That is just the nature of Open source.
That being said I think no one really likes to use GTK+ app if they are targeting multiple desktop environment and operating system. Ubuntu's Unity 8 and KDE both are using Qt and Qt is already available on all possible platforms including Android.
IMO, its more of an inconvenience than a big deal breaker.
Should an application (let's say, Amarok) require chunks of KDE to install on your nice GNOME desktop, your package manager will install those required packages along with the application, so that when it starts up, there are no missing libraries or errors. And those libraries will be loaded (in the case of Qt4, 50MB of libs) into memory for as long as the application is running.
Now, should you be running a headless install without all the appropriate lipstick packages already installed (some of us like running X apps over SSH sessions), you may see some really ugly naked widgets. Qt and GTK+ without any theming engine installed will not win any beauty pagents, but you'll be able to use the application, even without icons. And, should you wish to place some lipstick back on that pig, you just need to install a package or two to pretty everything back up.
TL;DR - Stuff should work fine between DE's, if it doesn't, then your distro is broken or frankenstein'd.
Part of the reason is history (if we're talking about 15 years ago then Qt had a more restrictive license - and, sad to say, the gnome website still spreads FUD about this, or did the last time I looked). But mostly I think it's that big distros have Gnome as the default - probably because it's easier to support since it's much less configurable than KDE.
(And I don't think it's a clear case of one being "more mainstream"; rather, my impression is that Americans tend to use Gnome/GTK and Europeans tend to use KDE/Qt)
I can understand why you wouldn't like initial versions of KDE 4 , but since 4.4 has become one of the best desktops that anyone could use.
Sorry for off-topic.
http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
I usually like reading articles with this width, but there's usually a different color background to differentiate the article from the page so there's not this huge white-space void.
Other than that I thought the article easy to read.
The negative space left and right is to ensure an optimal column width. If there is nothing important to place to the sides, anything added there would serve only to distract from the flow of article content. That is to say, filling space for no reason is unreasonable.
Pagination is its own thing, and I won't comment one way or another on that.
[1] http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/recom...
[2] http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-widt...
Still using KDE, because it's the least bad desktop environment, but these v4.x era additions annoy me to no end. v5 does nothing to improve this.
Though, the desktop search incarnations were a hype topic back in the early KDE 4 era and strigi, nepomuk and its later re-implementations and the related services like dbus were sadly sub-par/sluggish compared to Windows search and Mac Spotlight. The biggest let down was the rewrite of KDE 4 itself. KDE 3 had so many features that were never re-implemented in KDE 4.x. I had the impression that the developers lost touch with the user base back then.
In the days before Novell bought SuSE KDE 2 and 3 were very popular.
Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker was ripping the devs a new one over that attitude not listening to users; apparently that went into one ear and out of the other.
but [prediction of the future coming]: you won't care anyway. Which is ok, dear bmn_1! You get to be ... I guess "upset" about something that happened 6 years ago! You get to post about how horrible it is that no one listens to you (you, a professional programmer and all!)! It's fine, it really is.
You know what I can't afford? This shit. Now I don't mind (really you're SO right there its really into one ear and out the other) because I'm a big boy and been doing this for years and years. I don't know about the programmers but for designers and especially designers in open source and ESPECIALLY-especially young designers testing the waters in open source, honing their skills and learning how to work in a team - my advice will always be "Do the opposite of what that guy wants".
You're probably a lovely person. I bet you nurture little animals back to health and is a ton of fun socially going out for pints - in another world we could have been friends. But here - in this setting - with all your wounded pride leaking out of every sentence and word, with your "I big professional! You listen!" chest thumping and your make-belief truth you spun out of overhearing a keynote... you're one of the many things wrong with open source today.
That said the only reason I was able to accomplish this (and it was convoluted) is because Gentoo (Linux distro) allows me to customise & compile software with specific settings.
Akonadi is indeed a resource hog and useless (a dozen processes and 100+MB memory usage). If you don't use any KDE PIM application (Kmail, Korganizer) or any calendar event integration they don't appear. Nepomuk is no more, replaced by baloo, which is actually pretty fast and light on resource usage, so I keep it running. But it can be easily turned off in the system settings under the desktop search item. I don't use activities, the only trace of it is a kactivitymangered process running, if it bothers you that much you can set up a startup script to kill it.
The tray icons and cashew you may have a point. Although I like monochrome status icons but the cashew is an eyesore, so I drag it underneath the panel and it stays out of the way.
The article says "it drives tweakers nuts because it’s the one unchanging thing on the desktop. There have been heavy debates on how to hide it, but for the interim it’s here to stay." Really? You get the same thing by right-clicking (or long press on a touchscreen, I imagine) on the desktop. Having an omnipresent widget is redundant and annoys people who don't need it.
Except many inexperienced users (and some experienced yet lazy users who never take the time to learn their computer, I've noticed) don't know or often forget about right-clicking. So when you throw a bunch of random people who have never seen KDE before and test their proficiency with the desktop, of course they're going to overlook right-click menu and whine about needing a special widget for customization. But that's how UI design is these days: conceding to the lowest common denominator. Designers are striving for a utopian interface that can be used without any training or adjustment period. Yet it's a myth. It's impossible to make a computer that can be used without instruction. Maybe if half as much time was spent writing documentation as is spent twiddling with icon colors users would have a resource where they could learn how to use KDE. Then you could build a desktop that doesn't feel like it's in novice mode all the time.
Except documentation isn't as sexy as screenshots and Google-ripoff icons.
Addendum: "Authors note: My testing machine had an issue with activities, so I was unable to fully test activities: this section may have minor inaccuracies."
How much better off would KDE be if they just stopped foolishly hanging on to the idea of Activities? No one uses it. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Also, I told my non-techie brother that the three-line menu was called a "hamburger". He looked at me like I had a carrot growing out of my nose. Please someone come up with a better name for that thing.
I usually use right click, but you know that you can customize your mouse actions on the desktops and set right click to other stuff, like showing a running applications menu ?