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KDE Plasma 5.20

kde.org

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Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#161

Post by jpetso »

Zhyl wrote: post #55

Would someone from the KDE team be able to give an update on the Valve funding for KDE? [0] I remember being quite happy when I heard this, as it might be paving the way for a renewed SteamOS initiative, or another Linux offensive, but I don't follow KDE closely and I haven't heard anything since around the time of this article. Any indication of what was achieved and what has happened since would be interesting to m…

I haven't checked whether Roman Gilg is still working for Valve, but he ended up forking KWin into KWinFT (plus supporting libs) with a heavy Wayland focus. He got frustrated by upstream KDE not merging his extensive refactorings on a timeline that worked for to him and is now trying to out-compete the original. Roman Gilg's blog is a good read on that matter.

Both parties seem very reasonable to me. So far, the jury is still out on where things will end up - KWinFT has some good momentum and ideas, while upstream KWin with David Edmundson and other steady contributors are also continuing to fix lots of Wayland issues with every release. Either way it looks like we'll be in a good spot soon.

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#162

Post by lupinglade »

ognarb wrote: post #45
eitland wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That always comes up and I and many other KDE aren't bothered at all by it. That said, I guess Open Source as a whole could always need more talented artists as long as they don't try to insert themselves as arbiters of anything UX related, for example demanding to remove every configuration option or make everything work like in Mac/iOS. Edit, also: I guess they have multiple graphic designers/artists and if it was…

Yes we have many skilled designers and we are planning a big update of the default theme for Plasma 5.21 and a part of it is already in the master branch. Unfortunately it is often more complex to implement the mock-ups and we always need more manpower. See the mockups https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891

That mockup still looks bad! It may be moving in the right direction, but it's not the destination we need. Spacing is inadequate in many places, such as left padding on the window title, left padding on the sidebar text (this should line up with the title text btw), the window chrome colours are too pale, the font is too small, the view change icons are confusing, what is all that empty space in the path bar?... sigh the second screenshot link is even worse.

Don't take this the wrong way, I appreciate the work the KDE team is putting into this, but the UI just make me cringe when I try to use it. I have used all versions of KDE and IMO KDE 1 and 2 had the most consistent UIs. I think you guys should really focus a release on just the UI, rework it entirely to give it a polished, unique feel that can really push the experience forward. Something more like BeOS maybe? That had a nice polished, clean UI. All this transparency/blurring by the way, is unnecessary, the next UI should not be full of it.

Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.

Just my two cents.

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#163

Post by jpetso »

teekert wrote: post #83
brylie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently decided to give stock Ubuntu with Gnome a try, coming from KDE. After about two weeks of missing some of the simple pleasures of KDE, like being able to right-click in the file browser to create a new file or resizing windows to the left/right side of the window with Meta-left/right (which is somehow buggy in Gnome), I landed back in KDE-land with Neon. I briefly toyed with the idea of Manjaro, but am not…

Usually small things get to me like, Kmail won't keep my emails de-collapsed, or Kwin puts a border around Firefox so my tabs are not at the top and I have to aim (true for Gnome also btw), same goes for VScode. Or I want to use git over sshfs but KDE uses kioslaves and not gvfs so it's not a normal FS if you mount ssh in dolphin. Stuff like that. Gnome usually make me miss some configuration options or they remove t…

For the record, I prefer SSH-via-kioslave over SSH-via-fuse. On my previous work Macbook, I'd bind it as "normal filesystem" and that worked great until I suspended my laptop or disconnected the VPN, at which point filesystem semantics are a giant drag on the experience. If implemented as badly as on macOS, it makes your file dialog and command line access hang.

At least kioslaves handle disconnects gracefully and are right back in service whenever your network is, without having to remount anything.

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#164

Post by otterlicious »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #20

KDE 5 Plasma is amazing. Subjectively, I feel the following about it: after over 2 decades of being extremely buggy and extremely ugly, KDE has became a culmination of desktop PC GUI design, the best I've experienced so far (tiling WMs can be better in certain tasks and settings but not universally). Manjaro with recent KDE provides me what I call "a lot like Mac but way better" experience (surely, there are aspects…

I want to completely disable clipboard management so it wouldn't remember clipboard history (which is a security issue) and wouldn't clear the clipboard as soon as I close the window (extremely inconvenient - I often want to open a window just to copy something, close it and paste that somewhere else). But I could never find how.

If you disable clipboard management on X11 then the clipboard goes away when the application does - that's how X11 works and the whole reason clipboard management exists.

If you don't want it to keep any history but the most recent item, then just disable that.

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#165

Post by ryan-allen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #153

Windows 10 look and feel for your Linux desktop. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but reminds me once again of how little respect developers have for spending resources like GPUs and instruction cycles for "bling" essentially. I am always saddened a bit (as you can probably tell) that my desktop machine is easily 1000x more capable in terms of compute and rendering than my desktop in 1995 and yet is no more respons…

> Windows 10 look and feel for your Linux desktop.

That's exactly what I wanted! I've been using Manjaro KDE for a couple of months now exclusively.

I am extremely happy, it's very convenient developing on Linux directly!

It's much snappier than Windows 10 on the same hardware, and you can turn lots of the bling off to get better performance.

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#166

Post by eitland »

laszlokorte wrote: post #155
eitland wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments. You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-) I used Mac for three years. In my opin…

You are right that all desktop environments have their issues and sure open source gives you more freedom. But: 1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app 2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place 3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I…

> 1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app

I'm fully aware, it is just so utterly inefficient for my workflows and my head.

With alt-tab it is back-to-the-last-thing I worked on, I don't even think. On Mac it is: was-the-last-thing-I-worked-on-another-app-or-another-document-it-was-another-etc

This can happen hundreds of times in a day, costs up to a few seconds at a time and more importantly it is insanely annoying when you know how snooth it can be.

And to rub it in: Gnome 3 has something similar to Mac but you can disable it if you are a keyboard person like me.

KDE is like Windows but can be configured however you like it.

> 2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place

Good thing they fixed that since 2012.

> 3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined.

From my perspective: if a file chooser can block all other windows and I know people keep talking about the separation between apps and windows on that particular OS I conclude that they messed up that particular one.

When I see rendering glitches on an open source project (I rarely see them, but thats maybe just me) I conclude that they haven't had time to fix it yet and probably the graphics drivers they have to build on aren't as polished as those on other OSes.

But back to my conclusion: I'm happy all OSes and DEs exist. Some people honestly prefer every one of them for different reasons.

I'm just so tired of people pretending KDE is kind of subpar because it doesn't excel in all areas at once.

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#167

Post by eitland »

lupinglade wrote: post #162
ognarb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we have many skilled designers and we are planning a big update of the default theme for Plasma 5.21 and a part of it is already in the master branch. Unfortunately it is often more complex to implement the mock-ups and we always need more manpower. See the mockups https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891

That mockup still looks bad! It may be moving in the right direction, but it's not the destination we need. Spacing is inadequate in many places, such as left padding on the window title, left padding on the sidebar text (this should line up with the title text btw), the window chrome colours are too pale, the font is too small, the view change icons are confusing, what is all that empty space in the path bar?... sig…

> Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.

Basically you are saying you want KDE to be something it isn't.

You don't need to use widgets if you don't want to, why do you want to remove them from everyone else?

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#168

Post by konart »

eitland wrote: post #126
konart wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I agree with you, that's nothing a custom theme / engine can't fix. For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time). Even now you have to compile and install a custom theming engine[1] in KDE to apple decent themes [1] https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum/tree/master/Kvantum

> For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time). I don't follow: you point out an issue with KDE styling before saying you use MacOS that is even harder to style?

No, my point is that you don't really have to style macOS. (at least for me and many other people it's nearly perfect)

While with KDE the first thing you want to do is to apple different style and then you learn you have to compile different styling engine to do so.

Obviously macOS is not the system you'd want to use if you can't stand its UI

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#169

Post by Zhyl »

jpetso wrote: post #161
Zhyl wrote: post #55

Would someone from the KDE team be able to give an update on the Valve funding for KDE? [0] I remember being quite happy when I heard this, as it might be paving the way for a renewed SteamOS initiative, or another Linux offensive, but I don't follow KDE closely and I haven't heard anything since around the time of this article. Any indication of what was achieved and what has happened since would be interesting to m…

I haven't checked whether Roman Gilg is still working for Valve, but he ended up forking KWin into KWinFT (plus supporting libs) with a heavy Wayland focus. He got frustrated by upstream KDE not merging his extensive refactorings on a timeline that worked for to him and is now trying to out-compete the original. Roman Gilg's blog is a good read on that matter. Both parties seem very reasonable to me. So far, the jury…

Thank you, I will give his blog a read!

Re: KDE Plasma 5.20

#170

Post by bmn__ »

ashton314 wrote: post #88

Ugh! KDE is so pretty and so configurable except in the one way that I really need: I need an easy way to set Emacs-style keystrokes globally. Do this and I’m sold forever. (That aside, very exciting update!) Is there anything like Karabiner or AutoHotKey for KDE that lets you download predefined keyboard shortcuts?

• Run `systemsettings5 kcm_keys` and configure or edit `~/.config/kdeglobals`, section `[Shortcuts]`.

• https://github.com/autokey/autokey

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