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KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

kde.org

71–80 of 120 posts

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#71
post #55

I think what strikes me about DE upgrades like this is that they don't appear to add anything fundamentally new or promise to provide me with a meaningfully improved or more efficient experience. 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.

I use KDE at work and rarely touch the mouse to switch between windows. I have two monitors, and a couple of keyboard shortcuts, but power-usage comes with a price. I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too.

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#72
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read it and I know the settings are being redesigned. The system settings is just one example and perhaps the most egregious. It's also the one that is still a constant annoyance after years of using KDE when trying to find something.

It is? My girlfriend uses KDE, and I never found difficult to find stuff using the integrated search. On the other hand, if they would recreate print settings, I wouldn't have to explain that typing http://localhost:631/ in a browser is the most intuitive way of managing printers.

Sorry - What's the point you're making about your girlfriend?

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#73

This screenshot: http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/plasma50b2-netw... 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 terribl…

He, I would like to say it is the price for living with kde. I find it is generally worth it and suggest other people try it if they don't like their current setup and have some time to spare. I changed to ubuntu fo a few years while they used gnome 2 but now I am back on kde for my workstation and have been for a couple of years. (Distroshopping coming up later this month when the various lts-buntus and derivatives…

On a regular day I use Mac OS X (mainly a browser, and iTerm and Emacs in full-screen), Fedora with Gnome, iOS, and Android.

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.

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#74
post #25

About 4 years ago, I switched from KDE/Kubuntu to OSX. Not because I hated KDE, but because my job needed OSX. It takes divvy, sizeup, apptivate, bartenderapp to do, what I was able to do with KDE out of box. The dual monitor support in OSX is still not in par with KDE. 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 th…

and yet every OSX diehard will think you're on crack and KDE is inferior.

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#75
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually more optimization is taking place than visual refreshes. Porting the stuff to Qt5 (esp. QtQuick2) should speed everything up on non-ancient PCs. Visual refreshes are just easier to explain. ;-)

Its not speed I'm bothered about. KDE is more or less very smooth at that. Its the resources it takes! The CPU is always nearly being utilized on a small-medium scale, and nearly 700mb is taken away at boot-time and gathers upto 2gb upon usage. That's too high, at least I think so. Would KDE actually require so much for all the features it gives or can that actually come down?

Well, on kubuntu you can install kubuntu-low-fat-settings (not sure if they still offer this):

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.

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#76
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not speed I'm bothered about. KDE is more or less very smooth at that. Its the resources it takes! The CPU is always nearly being utilized on a small-medium scale, and nearly 700mb is taken away at boot-time and gathers upto 2gb upon usage. That's too high, at least I think so. Would KDE actually require so much for all the features it gives or can that actually come down?

Why would it matter if a piece of software uses CPU and RAM if it doesn't negatively affect the performance of the system?

It may not impact the performance, but it certainly does the battery life and fan noise in a laptop.

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#79
post #25

About 4 years ago, I switched from KDE/Kubuntu to OSX. Not because I hated KDE, but because my job needed OSX. It takes divvy, sizeup, apptivate, bartenderapp to do, what I was able to do with KDE out of box. The dual monitor support in OSX is still not in par with KDE. 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 th…

Same, without Moom transition to Mac was unbearable for me.

Re: KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

#80
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this trend continues. Mainstream desktop environments sort of lost their roots. I never wanted widgets, I just need to organize my windows!

Is Xfce mainstream yet? It's pretty popular for a non-default desktop - I can't find the cite, but I have a vague memory of something like 16% of Ubuntu being Xubuntu.

No, XFCE development is very slow. Last I checked, I think they still working on GTK 3 support.

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.

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