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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

#51

Post by bmn_ »

Nanzikambe wrote: post #34
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 is (or at least was) possible to opt-out, I'm using none of those with KDE 4.14.3-r1 That said the only reason I was able to accomplish this (and it was convoluted) is because Gentoo (Linux distro) allows me to customise & compile software with specific settings.

If I have to recompile to get properly coloured tray icons and a unified colour scheme (not split between applications and task bar), then the software is designed wrong.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#52

Post by bmn_ »

mwfunk wrote: post #23
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 must be awesome for the KDE developers to have such appreciative users with such constructive attitudes. It really makes you wonder why so many people who volunteer on open source projects get burned out on it after a while, or why so many mailing lists/forums/etc. for those projects have a unfortunate tendency to devolve into flamewars, bikeshedding, whining, and everyone crapping on everyone else for no particul…

I write software professionally and can't afford hobbyist conduct. I have all right to be pissed, era v4 ruined KDE's promise of full customisability. I assure you the KDE devs don't care what anyone says, they just do what they want, not what the users want.

Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker was ripping the devs a new one over that attitude not listening to users; apparently that went into one ear and out of the other.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#53

Post by donniezazen »

azinman2 wrote: post #27

Oi. I wish the nice designers of Silicon Valley could give some "pull requests" easily to the KDE team. The design is such a mix of things that don't go together -- some places of translucency, others don't, the pop ups are mostly flat yet the calculator has shadows, the search results and bookmarks have borders on every row yet the launch menu doesn't, the spacing between items in the left side of dolphin is off (to…

I am looking forward to your constructive criticism here [1]

[1] https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=285

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#55

Post by donniezazen »

freehunter wrote: post #29
ljoshua wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly related, but can someone clear up for me (a person who occasionally administers a headless Fedora box but doesn't venture into desktop Linux land) how different WMs and distros work when I want to install a particular piece of software? Does a desktop application have to be specifically written to run in KDE or Gnome or Unity? Or does it just look funny if I try to run a K* application in Gnome?

Generally the UI is written with one of the two big GUI toolkits: GTK (Gnome) or Qt (KDE). If you run Gnome, you get GTK and all the apps work without needing to download anything else, but if you have Gnome and want an app using the Qt framework, you'll need to download the Qt libraries, which can be substantial. Even after downloading the Qt libraries, though, the application might still look weird, since it's not…

> The state of WMs on Linux is really, really more complicated than it needs to be.

Choice is always going to be a prominent force in Linux. There will always be folks who are going to write new toolkits and apps and there they will find users who would want to promote it. That is just the nature of Open source.

That being said I think no one really likes to use GTK+ app if they are targeting multiple desktop environment and operating system. Ubuntu's Unity 8 and KDE both are using Qt and Qt is already available on all possible platforms including Android.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#56

Post by anonbanker »

azinman2 wrote: post #27

Oi. I wish the nice designers of Silicon Valley could give some "pull requests" easily to the KDE team. The design is such a mix of things that don't go together -- some places of translucency, others don't, the pop ups are mostly flat yet the calculator has shadows, the search results and bookmarks have borders on every row yet the launch menu doesn't, the spacing between items in the left side of dolphin is off (to…

man, it sounds like you're describing OS X Yosemite.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#57

Post by freehunter »

donniezazen wrote: post #55
freehunter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally the UI is written with one of the two big GUI toolkits: GTK (Gnome) or Qt (KDE). If you run Gnome, you get GTK and all the apps work without needing to download anything else, but if you have Gnome and want an app using the Qt framework, you'll need to download the Qt libraries, which can be substantial. Even after downloading the Qt libraries, though, the application might still look weird, since it's not…

> The state of WMs on Linux is really, really more complicated than it needs to be. Choice is always going to be a prominent force in Linux. There will always be folks who are going to write new toolkits and apps and there they will find users who would want to promote it. That is just the nature of Open source. That being said I think no one really likes to use GTK+ app if they are targeting multiple desktop environ…

I haven't done a whole lot of GUI development, but I briefly looked at Qt and it seemed like it cost a huge amount of money to use, so I wrote it off. Is that not the case?

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#58

Post by anonbanker »

ljoshua wrote: post #26
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?

Slightly related, but can someone clear up for me (a person who occasionally administers a headless Fedora box but doesn't venture into desktop Linux land) how different WMs and distros work when I want to install a particular piece of software? Does a desktop application have to be specifically written to run in KDE or Gnome or Unity? Or does it just look funny if I try to run a K* application in Gnome?

Usually, if you have all the appropriate packages installed, running a GTK+ app in KDE/LXQt, or a Qt app in GNOME/XFCE/Cinnamon will look normal. The widgets/theme will not normally look identical to the WM's theme and widgets (Unless you're using a cross-widget theme such as Oxygen-gtk+), but you won't be seeing any real issues or loss of functionality.

Should an application (let's say, Amarok) require chunks of KDE to install on your nice GNOME desktop, your package manager will install those required packages along with the application, so that when it starts up, there are no missing libraries or errors. And those libraries will be loaded (in the case of Qt4, 50MB of libs) into memory for as long as the application is running.

Now, should you be running a headless install without all the appropriate lipstick packages already installed (some of us like running X apps over SSH sessions), you may see some really ugly naked widgets. Qt and GTK+ without any theming engine installed will not win any beauty pagents, but you'll be able to use the application, even without icons. And, should you wish to place some lipstick back on that pig, you just need to install a package or two to pretty everything back up.

TL;DR - Stuff should work fine between DE's, if it doesn't, then your distro is broken or frankenstein'd.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#59

Post by jensreuterberg »

bmn_ wrote: post #52
mwfunk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be awesome for the KDE developers to have such appreciative users with such constructive attitudes. It really makes you wonder why so many people who volunteer on open source projects get burned out on it after a while, or why so many mailing lists/forums/etc. for those projects have a unfortunate tendency to devolve into flamewars, bikeshedding, whining, and everyone crapping on everyone else for no particul…

I write software professionally and can't afford hobbyist conduct. I have all right to be pissed, era v4 ruined KDE's promise of full customisability. I assure you the KDE devs don't care what anyone says, they just do what they want, not what the users want. Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker…

Yeah as someone who works with the KDE and Plasma Devs - I can tell you that you're wrong...

but [prediction of the future coming]: you won't care anyway. Which is ok, dear bmn_1! You get to be ... I guess "upset" about something that happened 6 years ago! You get to post about how horrible it is that no one listens to you (you, a professional programmer and all!)! It's fine, it really is.

You know what I can't afford? This shit. Now I don't mind (really you're SO right there its really into one ear and out the other) because I'm a big boy and been doing this for years and years. I don't know about the programmers but for designers and especially designers in open source and ESPECIALLY-especially young designers testing the waters in open source, honing their skills and learning how to work in a team - my advice will always be "Do the opposite of what that guy wants".

You're probably a lovely person. I bet you nurture little animals back to health and is a ton of fun socially going out for pints - in another world we could have been friends. But here - in this setting - with all your wounded pride leaking out of every sentence and word, with your "I big professional! You listen!" chest thumping and your make-belief truth you spun out of overhearing a keynote... you're one of the many things wrong with open source today.

Re: KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

#60

Post by [deleted] »

bmn_ wrote: post #52
mwfunk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be awesome for the KDE developers to have such appreciative users with such constructive attitudes. It really makes you wonder why so many people who volunteer on open source projects get burned out on it after a while, or why so many mailing lists/forums/etc. for those projects have a unfortunate tendency to devolve into flamewars, bikeshedding, whining, and everyone crapping on everyone else for no particul…

I write software professionally and can't afford hobbyist conduct. I have all right to be pissed, era v4 ruined KDE's promise of full customisability. I assure you the KDE devs don't care what anyone says, they just do what they want, not what the users want. Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker…

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