KDE Plasma 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#41

Post by rplnt » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 1:52 PM UTC

jkbyc wrote: post #26

rplnt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome doesn't let you switch easily (alt-tab is somewhat bad). Gnome doesn't let you see your apps well (huge waste of space for candy graphics). [and the list with Gnome goes on and on]; KDE doesn't let you launch them easily (yay for ignoring super-key). KDE is super unstable. I'm sure there are caveats with Unity as well. Simply, there is still reason to chose one or the other, these systems are not interchangeabl…

Alt-Tab works perfectly fine for me in Gnome Shell (I was initially annoyed by Alt+` to switch windows within a program group but now I find it useful). I find the app overview also clear and very usable. And it's nice that it's JavaScript-based so I can tweak some minor things easily (hot corner on external monitors). For Unity I'm probably simply not in the target group, I don't like it. I left KDE many years ago b…

> Alt-Tab works perfectly fine for me in Gnome Shell

That's what I was trying to say. I'm sure it works for many, but it doesn't work for everyone. That's why people still "care" (if selecting one or another is caring).

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#42

Post by xorcist » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #37

strykekyte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cleaner KDE4 is exactly what I was hoping for for a new update. I'm glad they stuck with what they did well and improved on this. I'm a VFX artist and I actually need the bells and whistles a good DE can offer, but I don't need one that acts like a tablet. In this day and age it seems we have 2 extremes for different uses of computers, but people in multimedia, vfx, 3D, ect... need something like KDE which offers a…

IMO there are roughly 3 kinds of computer users nowadays. Of course these are stereotypes, but I think the simplification helps explain what's been happening with DEs lately. A: Expert programmers who need nothing more than a browser, a text editor, and a bunch of terminals. They can do everything with the keyboard. They barely even touch the mouse unless it's absolutely necessary. They usually don't care what their…

If by B you mean A, then yes. You could suddenly not start an application by typing its name (which instead of executing what you wrote searched for it in active windows and gave focus to it), ctrl-tab for switching windows ceased to function (now it's only for applications) and multimonitor setups went severely broken.

There were workarounds for most of these of course, if you just took the time to read the manual, which they hadn't really written yet. All you had to do was to edit some xml by hand somewhere and/or run an undocumented command, instead of editing readable plaintext as before. But do you really want to take the time to learn how to do that just to get your xterms running again?

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#43

Post by Zardoz84 » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 2:39 PM UTC

avz wrote: post #28

agumonkey wrote: post #7

Am I the only one who lost interest in Desktop Environments ? I'm either satisfied with bare minimum (XFCE/ThunarFM...) or barest minimal (wmii/xmonad...). KDE5 is surely a great piece of tech but I fail to see what's new except for a cleaner KDE4 in terms of UX; these days I feel dom/javascript bear more innovation (maybe too much).

Shell and browser. That's all I need.

Yaquake and Rekonq/Chrome/Firefox

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#44

Post by peatmoss » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 3:00 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #37

strykekyte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cleaner KDE4 is exactly what I was hoping for for a new update. I'm glad they stuck with what they did well and improved on this. I'm a VFX artist and I actually need the bells and whistles a good DE can offer, but I don't need one that acts like a tablet. In this day and age it seems we have 2 extremes for different uses of computers, but people in multimedia, vfx, 3D, ect... need something like KDE which offers a…

IMO there are roughly 3 kinds of computer users nowadays. Of course these are stereotypes, but I think the simplification helps explain what's been happening with DEs lately. A: Expert programmers who need nothing more than a browser, a text editor, and a bunch of terminals. They can do everything with the keyboard. They barely even touch the mouse unless it's absolutely necessary. They usually don't care what their…

I've been saying this about OS X for a long time. Apple is more mainstream than it used to be, but earlier in OS X's life, I saw the A and C groups that you speak of. For a long while, OS X was a platform for grandmas and hackers.

I was an early PowerBook purchaser, because it immediately removed the need to dual boot for my job. I could run all my formerly NetBSD-hosted network sleuthing software and open the Word docs people sent (bonus: auto crossover Ethernet port meant never hunting for crossover cable).

By contrast, Windows had the power-user segment locked up. For a long while, it seemed that there were little utilities traded around forums to do all manner of things that I'd simply open a console to do on a *nix system. As a result, I always felt really unproficient on Windows systems, because I ended up trawling the webbernets for unfamiliar tools that had obnoxiously specific use cases.

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#45

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 3:08 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #37

strykekyte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cleaner KDE4 is exactly what I was hoping for for a new update. I'm glad they stuck with what they did well and improved on this. I'm a VFX artist and I actually need the bells and whistles a good DE can offer, but I don't need one that acts like a tablet. In this day and age it seems we have 2 extremes for different uses of computers, but people in multimedia, vfx, 3D, ect... need something like KDE which offers a…

IMO there are roughly 3 kinds of computer users nowadays. Of course these are stereotypes, but I think the simplification helps explain what's been happening with DEs lately. A: Expert programmers who need nothing more than a browser, a text editor, and a bunch of terminals. They can do everything with the keyboard. They barely even touch the mouse unless it's absolutely necessary. They usually don't care what their…

Expert programmer here that looks for the Xerox PARC developer experience, not the AT&T one.

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#46

Post by ryao » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 3:24 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #4

The kernel doesn't have much to do with the desktop environment running on top of it, what would the kernel's future have to do with KDE Plasma 5?

That was my first thought too. Aside from supporting certain possibly useful syscalls, the kernel has nothing to do with the desktop environment running on top of it in userland.

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#47

Post by quarterto » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 3:35 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #4

The kernel doesn't have much to do with the desktop environment running on top of it, what would the kernel's future have to do with KDE Plasma 5?

I think it's hypercorrection to avoid calling Linux an "operating system". Which it isn't.

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#48

Post by VLM » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

broodbucket wrote: post #40

VLM wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the eternal wheel of repetition in IT, we're nearing a complexity peak / inner product effect for D.E. that looks just like the peak I experienced of "doing everything in emacs" around 1990. Modern vim, and other editors, don't really look much like 1990s era emacs. People will make jokes in the future about current D.E being useful for everything except being a desktop environment, just like the well known jokes…

I use a DE for the same reason I use vi mode in emacs; I have the resources to do it, and there's a bunch of features that I'll probably only use a few times a year, but it's nice to have them there. I also switched from Arch to Ubuntu because I decided that the control I was losing was worth it to reduce the number of things I had to keep track of. The beauty of free software is that it's not like one paradigm is be…

"I have the resources to do it"

There is always a cognitive load and time cost to a feature. Even if you don't use it.

andmarios had a good point, innovation is defined as linking your phone to your desktop such that the audio out mixer volume crashes down when you get an incoming phone call on the cellphone. That's quite a cognitive load to learn about, set up, test, inevitably debug. If my wife's using my desktop and I get a call 100 feet away, what happens? She gets to debug why her phone doesn't connect to her account. It seems the "best" UI is just a physical volume control dial on a discrete amp connected to speakers, which is what I actually have. Its much more convenient than a software volume control.

Also most of the "features" tend toward lowest common denominator, not universal. So a super duper copy/paste system that works DE-wide works great with things you never cut and paste in, like perhaps the GUI FAX config screen. However it doesn't talk to emacs and vi where I actually do almost all my cut and paste (or does it connect... I'll be impressed if it does, I wonder how much work it is to set up and inevitably debug) In a similar way if I get a legacy voice phone call the DE might mute my music, but is it smart enough to do so for a google hangout video chat incoming, or a legacy skype, or a hangout on my tablet not my phone...

I would tend to agree, if they like it, good luck to them, although I'd never voluntarily use that kind of thing for productivity and style reasons. Just not conceptually appealing.

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#49

Post by zanny » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 3:46 PM UTC

lmedinas wrote: post #3

fafner wrote: post #2

I think KDE is doing the right steps with KDE5 technology-wise. But I'm still very confused by the way KDE split up the project and started to do separate releases. Now we have Plasma5 and I think there is a 5 version of the frameworks but not of KWin etc. I mean sure it will help them get the projects released and tested. But I'd love to hear a "KDE 5 released" announcement and install it. Instead of "One part of KD…

I guess one of the main ideas is to port to Qt5 and use the latest technologies.

Yea, the real benefit is a new crop of KDE applications or redesigns around QML. A long standing complaint with Qt has been the stiffness of the UI, which was due to its widgets heritage. Compare Plasma Media Center to Dragon Player and you can see the difference between the two technologies UX wise.

Re: KDE Plasma 5

#50

Post by VLM » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 4:02 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #37

strykekyte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cleaner KDE4 is exactly what I was hoping for for a new update. I'm glad they stuck with what they did well and improved on this. I'm a VFX artist and I actually need the bells and whistles a good DE can offer, but I don't need one that acts like a tablet. In this day and age it seems we have 2 extremes for different uses of computers, but people in multimedia, vfx, 3D, ect... need something like KDE which offers a…

IMO there are roughly 3 kinds of computer users nowadays. Of course these are stereotypes, but I think the simplification helps explain what's been happening with DEs lately. A: Expert programmers who need nothing more than a browser, a text editor, and a bunch of terminals. They can do everything with the keyboard. They barely even touch the mouse unless it's absolutely necessary. They usually don't care what their…

"fantasize about a "universal" DE that can scale seamlessly from 4" phone to 40" TV"

Its possible this is an inherently inappropriate goal.

So many non-computer things fail to scale over a mere 10:1 ratio of size that assuming a constant UI is probably inherently the wrong goal rather than the correct goal just as a default guess.

Some aspects are OK. The scribbled notes on the back of the ATM receipt in my wallet are made with the same character glyphs as I see on CAD blueprints. But the UI and technology are overall very different, because the size and job requirements are very different. Ramming one into the shell of another wouldn't be a win.

Look at the ergonomics, if nothing else. I recently have the technological capability to make a wheelbarrow the size of a garden trowel, and make a garden trowel the size of a wheelbarrow. That its recently become possible for me technologically, doesn't mean its good design or a great UI. It is in fact totally inappropriate and non-productive, although it would be an impressive hack. The analogy to the same UI on a phone and on a big screen TV is clear.

On topic of computer UI, something as simple as adding multiple screens / multiple machines on the same desk dramatically changed my workflow some decades ago.