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Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

plasma-bigscreen.org

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Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#231

Post by Pxtl »

array_key_first wrote: post #203
Pxtl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly this is the only complaint I agree with. KDE plasma desktop and its configurability looks and feels great... but all their in house actual windowed applications like Konsole and Kate are mediocre at best. All that duplicated effort seems wasteful.

It's honestly just Konsole. Kate is very good, you can legitimately use it as a vscode replacement if you want. Dolphin is also the best file manager and it's not even close. And then kmail... kmail is bad.

I don't want Kate to be vscode, I want it to be notepad.exe. I want it to open a document instantly and let me edit and save and close with no distractions or delays.

I have vscode for vscode.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#232

Post by ryukoposting »

AnonHP wrote: post #62
olivierestsage wrote: post #7

Big things from KDE lately. If you haven't tried it since the pre-Plasma days, I really recommend giving it a go. Fabulous as a general DE.

How is it on older or budget hardware though? It’s been a long time since I tried KDE, and in between even worked with Xfce because Gnome was a bit more resource intensive. Is it still the case that in terms of hardware specs and demand of the hardware, KDE needs/uses more than Gnome? I guess Xfce will be in a different league capability wise and resource requirement wise.

How old and what budget? I spent a good chunk of the late 2010s rocking Plasma 5 on a machine with a first-gen i5. It 8 GB of RAM and an SSD, which probably helped, but it ran great!

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#233

Post by arendtio »

akshatjiwan wrote: post #83

KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick. Not that any other desktop environments are particularly ugly but KDE can compete with the best commercially developed desktops. For a moment though I thought that this story was about the launch of a new plasma TV 'big screen' and it got me really excited.

> KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick.

That is clearly an understatement. For me, it is the best desktop environment out there.

I don't want to say that it is perfect (there have been many versions over the years which clearly were not (e.g. KDE 4.0)), but none of the other desktop environments (including Windows and MacOS) have a similar feature set:

- mainstream UX principles like Windows - beautiful as MacOS - customizable and extendable like no other

I have to work with MacOS every day, and it is just painful to see how much better KDE is when it is not available...

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#235

Post by array_key_first »

Pxtl wrote: post #231
array_key_first wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly just Konsole. Kate is very good, you can legitimately use it as a vscode replacement if you want. Dolphin is also the best file manager and it's not even close. And then kmail... kmail is bad.

I don't want Kate to be vscode, I want it to be notepad.exe. I want it to open a document instantly and let me edit and save and close with no distractions or delays. I have vscode for vscode.

I think Kate does that, it just also has a bunch of other functionality.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#236

Post by 71bw »

hedora wrote: post #77
AnonHP wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it on older or budget hardware though? It’s been a long time since I tried KDE, and in between even worked with Xfce because Gnome was a bit more resource intensive. Is it still the case that in terms of hardware specs and demand of the hardware, KDE needs/uses more than Gnome? I guess Xfce will be in a different league capability wise and resource requirement wise.

I use LXDE on my new boxes, but on a 15 year old machine I wasn't sure what the Linux distro had defaulted to. I was surprised to see it was KDE. That machine takes 30 sec to decrypt the disk encryption key (stupid proof of work functions!), but the desktop environment is as snappy as LXDE on high-end 2026 machines. I haven't compared those two with XFCE recently, but they all seem fine these days.

> That machine takes 30 sec to decrypt the disk encryption key (stupid proof of work functions!),

I think my Ryzen 7500F takes a similar amount of time and it is, by no means, old nor underpowered.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#237

Post by 71bw »

tapoxi wrote: post #54
cromka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, but I don't share the sentiment. Moved this year from macOS and KDE is over-engineered with little thought put into the UX. For example, try to take a screenshot. I was quite literally shaking my head for good couple minutes looking at this abomination. It's so extremely confusing, all over the place, bogged down with tons of switches, modes, it's like you need to spend 30 minutes to understand how this thing…

I just hit printscreen and save, I think you may be confusing your familiarity with a system with user friendliness. For comparison, MacOS doesn't have a printscreen key, it's command-shift-3 or command-shift-4. Much more confusing to newcomers in my experience.

It's a bit slow for me, in my experience. Sometimes doesn't want to copy the image to the clipboard. Saving is also wonky. Really wish I just had sharex on Linux

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#238

Post by 71bw »

einr wrote: post #220
atoav wrote: post #136

If you have regular KDE I urge you to just shake your mouse vigorously for ca. a minute. The cursor has this mouse finding feature where the mouse cursor gets bigger if you shake it. It can get comically big, like fill the whole screen big. One of the best features I have ever seen.

This feature is borrowed from macOS, but on macOS it doesn't grow indefinitely.

...and yet overall its done better than on Mac, because in full-screen apps or 3D games it doesn't start covering your view:-)

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#239

Post by lrschaeffer »

ryukoposting wrote: post #113
Oanid wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to disagree with you on that one. I recently migrated to Fedora from Windows 11, which gave me the chance to try Plasma, GNOME, and a couple other desktops. Plasma is exactly what I don't want in a DE. It’s extremely configurable, but also overwhelming, and I don’t think that’s something the average user would feel comfortable navigating. I ended up choosing GNOME. It feels visually cohesive, and the design…

I don't see how Plasma is any easier or harder to navigate than Windows. If you find the customizations overwhelming, then just... don't. It's fine in its stock form. I turn off the top-left corner thing and leave everything else alone.

Same. Although finding the setting for the top-left corner is annoying, it gets easier every time.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#240

Post by GreenWatermelon »

Pxtl wrote: post #231
array_key_first wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly just Konsole. Kate is very good, you can legitimately use it as a vscode replacement if you want. Dolphin is also the best file manager and it's not even close. And then kmail... kmail is bad.

I don't want Kate to be vscode, I want it to be notepad.exe. I want it to open a document instantly and let me edit and save and close with no distractions or delays. I have vscode for vscode.

For just notepad you have kwrite.
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