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Plasma 5.18

kde.org

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Re: Plasma 5.18

#21

Post by opencl »

rjzzleep wrote: post #3

Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article. My first impression is that it looks good. Lots of useful features. But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again. Tha…

The only out of the box tiling feature I'm aware of is the Windows-like hotkeys (meta+arrows) for snapping windows to half or a quarter of the screen.

There are kwin extensions for more extensive tiling support such as: https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling

Re: Plasma 5.18

#22

Post by diffeomorphism »

skriticos2 wrote: post #20

I just recently switched to kubuntu (KDE) back from fedora (Gnome 3). On one hand I do like that the desktop does not try to re-define basic muscle memory things, like changing the shortcut if you try to switch between two windows of the same application. (Seriously Gnome, WTF?). On the other hand it crashed left and right after install (less so now that it settled down a bit) and there are a million QA type problems…

Kubuntu has a bad reputation for a reason.

The fractional scaling could use some work, agreed. The foundations seem rock solid, but work on new stuff (e.g. wayland, fractional scaling) could be quicker.

Re: Plasma 5.18

#23

Post by skriticos2 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #22
skriticos2 wrote: post #20

I just recently switched to kubuntu (KDE) back from fedora (Gnome 3). On one hand I do like that the desktop does not try to re-define basic muscle memory things, like changing the shortcut if you try to switch between two windows of the same application. (Seriously Gnome, WTF?). On the other hand it crashed left and right after install (less so now that it settled down a bit) and there are a million QA type problems…

Kubuntu has a bad reputation for a reason. The fractional scaling could use some work, agreed. The foundations seem rock solid, but work on new stuff (e.g. wayland, fractional scaling) could be quicker.

Kubuntu at least boots. I was trying neon first, which refused to do so on my laptop.

Re: Plasma 5.18

#24

Post by opencl »

jonny383 wrote: post #11
haspok wrote: post #7

How about proper multi-display support (including mixing HiDPI and low-res displays)? Every time I connect my FHD laptop to my UHD monitor the windows on the desktop move around completely randomly. It is better than before, because they used to move outside the visible area, they fixed at least that. But hey, at least there is an Emoji Selector now (???).

Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). KDE honestly seems the best for this, although on the latest version of GNOME has fractional scaling available behind a flag (although also buggy and very slow).

System76 added a 'HiDPI daemon' for handling mixed-DPI multimonitor setups in GNOME to their PopOS distro, in my experience it works less badly than the alternatives.

https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-release...

Re: Plasma 5.18

#25

Post by vanderZwan »

rjzzleep wrote: post #3

Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article. My first impression is that it looks good. Lots of useful features. But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again. Tha…

> But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again.

The OMGUbuntu site did a decent write-up:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/kde-plasma-5-18-lts-feat...

Anyway, updating KDE Neon as I'm typing this. Looking forward to new bits of polish :)

Re: Plasma 5.18

#26

Post by slightwinder »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #13

Every time there is a new KDE announcement/release I give it another try. I don't like it. I miss the KDE 3.5 days. The DE seemed more cohesive then and worked very well. Ever since they went down the plasma route it looks like they focused on making it look pretty. The whitepapers and announcements made it sound like there was hefty backend improvements but each update was buggy for me. I still use KDE apps, I find…

Yeah, mee too. With KDE 3.x there where many people which were eager in improving abilities and workflows of KDE. With KDE this somehow changed, the focus switched to other things, many people seems to have left and today there seems to be a different spirit remaining in the project. Even today, a decade later I don't get the impression that KDE ever moved beyond what it once was and promised. Kind of a shame as there are still many people doing good work there.

Re: Plasma 5.18

#27

Post by shrikant »

jonny383 wrote: post #11
haspok wrote: post #7

How about proper multi-display support (including mixing HiDPI and low-res displays)? Every time I connect my FHD laptop to my UHD monitor the windows on the desktop move around completely randomly. It is better than before, because they used to move outside the visible area, they fixed at least that. But hey, at least there is an Emoji Selector now (???).

Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). KDE honestly seems the best for this, although on the latest version of GNOME has fractional scaling available behind a flag (although also buggy and very slow).

> [...] multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary).

Testify :(

I'm still struggling to get my (IMHO, extremely vanilla) setup working (Ubuntu on Thinkpad T430 + 2 external QHD monitors), and I'd appreciate any pointers to any resources that can help me resolve this.

Re: Plasma 5.18

#28

Post by alxlaz »

rjzzleep wrote: post #3

Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article. My first impression is that it looks good. Lots of useful features. But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again. Tha…

I'm not a big fan of "large" DEs, but I take KDE for a spin every other release or so.

The tiling features are all scripts now, they're not part of the base Kwin code anymore. They work pretty well in my experience. (That being said, if you haven't used Kwin in a while, it's worth noting that it also lost window tabbing along the way, so tiling is far less useful than it could be).

In terms of resource use, Plasma 5 is a lot more lightweight and snappier than we've come to expect from KDE in the post-4.0 era :). You can tell it's QML all the way down because the latency is nowhere near as good as in the 3.x days, but it's not too bad, and in terms of resource consumption (RAM, CPU, whatever), it's better than it's ever been in the last 10 years. And it's very good overall.

In terms of power consumption, I can't say I've noticed a difference between KDE and the more lightweight setup that I use. I haven't ran numbers though -- so all I can say is that, if there's a difference, it's small enough that I haven't noticed it. Probably because the biggest power drains account for so much of the power drain that KDE & friends don't account for much anymore :)

Re: Plasma 5.18

#30

Post by DCKing »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #13

Every time there is a new KDE announcement/release I give it another try. I don't like it. I miss the KDE 3.5 days. The DE seemed more cohesive then and worked very well. Ever since they went down the plasma route it looks like they focused on making it look pretty. The whitepapers and announcements made it sound like there was hefty backend improvements but each update was buggy for me. I still use KDE apps, I find…

> Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help, you are making it worse.

They're sure as hell not making it worse for regular people that manage software using graphical interfaces. The world doesn't revolve around power users.

Even then - I consider myself a power user, and I enjoy using Gnome's equivalent from time to time. I might be a power user, but I like pictures and discoverability. This might be a shock to some, I'm sorry.

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