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KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

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Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#11

Post by shmerl »

Scarbutt wrote: post #3

It is because that the "best" apps for Linux distros are written with GTK the reason for KDE being much less mainstream than Gnome?

> Plasma 5.2 and Frameworks 5 Applications have transitioned to a flatter style, and it’s safe to say Breeze veers towards a more Apple-esque school of design over Google or Microsoft takes on flatness.

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.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#12

Post by frik »

I used SuSE Linux with KDE 2 and KDE 3 more than 10 years ago. It was a good Win95 style shell with many customization options back then. Later I switched to Gnome 2 because of the KDE 4.0 fiasco and no one forked off KDE 3. Thankfully Ubuntu decided to change the shell, as Gnome 3 was another fiasco. Nowadays I just connect from a Mac, Windows, Android or iOS shell to Linux servers. It seems both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 (5?) lost their UX-design goal - that's why Linux Mint MGSE emerged, and Ubuntu created their own shell. It seems that HTML based shells like ChromeOS/ChromiumOS, WebOS and FirefoxOS are the future.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#13

Post by zanny »

shmerl wrote: post #11
Scarbutt wrote: post #3

It is because that the "best" apps for Linux distros are written with GTK the reason for KDE being much less mainstream than Gnome?

> Plasma 5.2 and Frameworks 5 Applications have transitioned to a flatter style, and it’s safe to say Breeze veers towards a more Apple-esque school of design over Google or Microsoft takes on flatness. 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 othe…

If you don't like the icon theme you can search "icon" in the system settings and it gives you a page to either change from preinstalled themes or go to the kde-look repository of user themes to pick from.

So no, customization never went away. Breeze is just replacing Oxygen, but the ability to change it doesn't go away.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#14

Post by 16bytes »

jfreax wrote: post #2

Maybe it's a well-researched article, but am I the only one that bothers the structure of the website? I am not able to read it. The text is just in the middle, really big white space left and right. Than there is this big wallpaper on every page. By the way, why so many pages? Sorry for off-topic.

Looks to be an attempt at setting a readable line-length.

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.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#16

Post by shmerl »

zanny wrote: post #13
shmerl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plasma 5.2 and Frameworks 5 Applications have transitioned to a flatter style, and it’s safe to say Breeze veers towards a more Apple-esque school of design over Google or Microsoft takes on flatness. 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 othe…

If you don't like the icon theme you can search "icon" in the system settings and it gives you a page to either change from preinstalled themes or go to the kde-look repository of user themes to pick from. So no, customization never went away. Breeze is just replacing Oxygen, but the ability to change it doesn't go away.

The downside however can be with GTK applications (for me it's primarily Firefox). Official themes like Oxygen got gtk{2,3}-engines-oxygen support to unify look and feel. With new official theme being Breeze the focus will probably shift on the later. So GTK applications will look ugly if you won't use the official theme.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#17

Post by nerdo »

frik wrote: post #12

I used SuSE Linux with KDE 2 and KDE 3 more than 10 years ago. It was a good Win95 style shell with many customization options back then. Later I switched to Gnome 2 because of the KDE 4.0 fiasco and no one forked off KDE 3. Thankfully Ubuntu decided to change the shell, as Gnome 3 was another fiasco. Nowadays I just connect from a Mac, Windows, Android or iOS shell to Linux servers. It seems both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 (…

KDE 3 was forked: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#18

Post by from_elsewhere »

jfreax wrote: post #2

Maybe it's a well-researched article, but am I the only one that bothers the structure of the website? I am not able to read it. The text is just in the middle, really big white space left and right. Than there is this big wallpaper on every page. By the way, why so many pages? Sorry for off-topic.

The the column width is just about ideal at approximately 77 characters per line.It could be slightly wider without detracting from the readability, but not all that much. [1][2]

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...

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#20

Post by frik »

bmn_ wrote: post #8

A big raised middle finger goes to the developers who thought it was a good idea to make it impossible to opt out of akonadi, nepomuk, baloo, activities, monochrome tray icons, that fucking cashew icon and having an additional separate colour scheme just for the task bar. All of KDE is configurable and can be switched off, except these "innovations". Still using KDE, because it's the least bad desktop environment, bu…

It's a bit harsh.

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.

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