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Progress on Plasma

ubuntustudio.org

41–50 of 138 posts

Re: Progress on Plasma

#41

I don't know where all of the love for KDE is coming from. It's got so many graphical and UI bugs even in comparison to XFCE that I can't use it as my daily driver.

Can you expand on what's not working for you? I use KDE via Kubuntu and have found it very stable. The only quirks are desktop environment things that I don't think XFCE even does OOTB, like sometimes it fails to auto-connect bluetooth speakers. The graphics stuff seems totally solid.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#42
post #3

Personally I consider the KDE the only DE that feels like it can compete with an OS like Windows or OSX. It's just a lot of small things that add up to make it feel cohesive. Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. A lot of people call that philosophy bloat. But honestly I've got a PC with 32 GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB. Like the Ubuntu Studio people have said 50MB m…

>> "Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in."

You can type cmd + enter in any Explorer address bar and Windows will start a command prompt in that folder. It's not the same, but at least simplifies things.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#43

I wish KDE had the same level of resources behind it as GNOME does. I keep occasionally trying new versions of GNOME but it feels like a DE optimized to look good in screenshots and always falls short when actually using it. KDE on the other hand looks relatively good and is infinitely more usable to me. It's got some rougher edges and a weaker application ecosystem but still comes out ahead for me. I also vastly pre…

I switched some years ago to KDE from Gnome. The only thing I wish I had from Gnome is the quality of text rendering.

Maybe it’s subjective, maybe it’s a measurable thing. I’ve not looked, but I feel KDEs text rendering is worse on my daily driver.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#44
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said, you got a PC with 32GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB.

Exactly - a desktop experience should track the current desktop hardware. If you have 512mb of ram and a pentium 4 then too bad. Let’s not hobble the future because of the past.

What about people who bought a low-to-mid range laptop last year? While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

Tracking "current" desktop hardware is a quick way to get yourself another vista.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#45
post #3

Personally I consider the KDE the only DE that feels like it can compete with an OS like Windows or OSX. It's just a lot of small things that add up to make it feel cohesive. Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. A lot of people call that philosophy bloat. But honestly I've got a PC with 32 GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB. Like the Ubuntu Studio people have said 50MB m…

> Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. That’s a nice feature. But it has little to do with Windows/OSX equivalence. It also highlights something I felt last time I tried KDE (admittedly a while ago). There were lots of nice UX innovations and polish. But they didn’t feel familiar to me (as a user of many desktop environments). This makes switching much less of an appea…

> But they didn’t feel familiar to me.

I'm shocked by this, especially when the alternative here is GNOME. You can put a lifelong windows user in front of a plasma machine and they will be able to figure it out easy. There is a start menu, a bottom taskbar, all the window buttons are where they belong, etc.

Contrast with gnome, where you can't get anything done unless you already know the magical keyboard shortcuts.

Plasma gets criticized often for having too many configuration options and too many features, which I think is just insane. It works perfectly well out of the box, but it allows you to tinker to your heart's content.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#47

I wish KDE had the same level of resources behind it as GNOME does. I keep occasionally trying new versions of GNOME but it feels like a DE optimized to look good in screenshots and always falls short when actually using it. KDE on the other hand looks relatively good and is infinitely more usable to me. It's got some rougher edges and a weaker application ecosystem but still comes out ahead for me. I also vastly pre…

Yeah but I hope it's not the same kind of resources - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HarfBuzz... Gnome developers have their head buried deep and firm in sands at this point.

Harfbuzz isn't a GNOME project. It's used by GNOME, KDE, Chromium, LibreOffice, and several other projects. The entire open source text rendering stack depends on it at this point.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#48
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. That’s a nice feature. But it has little to do with Windows/OSX equivalence. It also highlights something I felt last time I tried KDE (admittedly a while ago). There were lots of nice UX innovations and polish. But they didn’t feel familiar to me (as a user of many desktop environments). This makes switching much less of an appea…

> But they didn’t feel familiar to me. I'm shocked by this, especially when the alternative here is GNOME. You can put a lifelong windows user in front of a plasma machine and they will be able to figure it out easy. There is a start menu, a bottom taskbar, all the window buttons are where they belong, etc. Contrast with gnome, where you can't get anything done unless you already know the magical keyboard shortcuts.…

No disagreement here.

I don't use gnome desktops, for similar reasons (although I'm also not the target audience for adopters, as I currently use Linux as my primary desktop environment!)

I use cinnamon, as, for my personal preferences, it strikes the best balance between familiarity, 'prettiness' and functionality of the options I've tried.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#49
post #3

Personally I consider the KDE the only DE that feels like it can compete with an OS like Windows or OSX. It's just a lot of small things that add up to make it feel cohesive. Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. A lot of people call that philosophy bloat. But honestly I've got a PC with 32 GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB. Like the Ubuntu Studio people have said 50MB m…

> Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. That’s a nice feature. But it has little to do with Windows/OSX equivalence. It also highlights something I felt last time I tried KDE (admittedly a while ago). There were lots of nice UX innovations and polish. But they didn’t feel familiar to me (as a user of many desktop environments). This makes switching much less of an appea…

What?

You literally said you have only a limited amount of experience with KDE (from 'undefined' time ago), and yet you felt qualified to opine on its suitability for X... now?

What?

Re: Progress on Plasma

#50
post #3

Personally I consider the KDE the only DE that feels like it can compete with an OS like Windows or OSX. It's just a lot of small things that add up to make it feel cohesive. Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in. A lot of people call that philosophy bloat. But honestly I've got a PC with 32 GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB. Like the Ubuntu Studio people have said 50MB m…

As you said, you got a PC with 32GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB.

I'm still rocking a 7 year old Samsung Chronos with 8GB RAM and KDE5 flies.

There used to be a time when the real world footprint between KDE and XFCE was significant but that's not been the case in a long time.

These days the footprint of your average desktop chat client has dwarfed the difference in memory usage between most of the major desktop environments. So if you're looking for places to cut corners that would be the first place I'd suggest looking.

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