> Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5.2 form a fairly lean pair compared to historic KDE releases; This is mostly anecdotal and other factors are in play, but no matter how you slice it Plasma 5 uses less RAM, somewhere between 20-40% less RAM is consumed on a freshly booted machine, exactly how much mileage you’ll get out of it will widely vary depending on your system, configuration, and distribution.
(on p3; is there a pages=all type URL hack for wordpress?)
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 (too close), the icons are seemingly all over the place (the life preserver is more photo realistic while the hard drive is more cartoony), etc.
I know there are mailing lists and whatnot for this but if the process of helping was easier for normal (and good) designers to help out a little I think we all would benefit. Or at least if you're going to copy Apple pay attention to their ratios.
It's actually very easy to contribute to the design process. Especially for this entire redesign. It was announced right from the start on the website / blog, the mentioned Visual Design Group website was put up, they created a subforum for design discussion and input (very active and so easy that even I, a non-designer, was able to participate), and they regularly posted detailed updates on the design process asking for feedback (sometimes in the form of polls). So I'm not quite sure how much easier you are expecting the process to be.
>> "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"
Is this maybe due to the nature of open source? If you look at the big design teams in SV they are typically run by a dictator (e.g. Jony Ive or Duartes at Google). Maybe for good design that's necessary or you end up with a large mix of conflicting ideas.
> Third party high-DPI support for applications like Steam and Firefox will be much more mixed
Dude, Steam is still sucky on OSX/Retina, almost three years from release; and Firefox took its sweet time to get there as well (and it's still not perfect). It's not KDE's fault.
OA is using fairly capable hardware, so, out of curiosity, I installed the Kubuntu 15.04 alpha2 iso on my test laptop which is a 7 year old Thinkpad x61s dual core with 2.5Gb ram.
The result works responsively, with reasonably smooth graphical effects including the 'white out' and transparency effects mentioned in the OA.
Baloo search: baloosearch <word> works from command line and from the application launcher. Finds both file names and words within files (.pdf,text). Dolphin does not return results. Fresh install gives 'invalid protocol' error within Dolphin. Installing baloo-utils gets rid of that error but still no results. There are older bug reports about this stuff.
Are you sure about that? I would think the exact opposite, that there are more good QT/KDElibs programs then GTK ones. And more recently more and more apps switch to QT (like wireshark for example).
And I heard somewhere that Gnome is very popular in the US, but everywhere else KDE is slightly more favored (apart from all the small DEs and WMs).
Other distributions favored Gnome, like Fedora and RedHat, which has been dominating the enterprise. And maybe I'm wrong, but compared to other distros, Kubuntu was always in good shape. Back in the day when Canonical was distributing CDs, I got one as well with Kubuntu on it, so it was officially supported.
For me I used to prefer Gnome because of the apps I was using. OpenOffice or Firefox seemed to be out of place in KDE. Plus I preferred a simpler environment, of course nowadays they've gone overboard.
I'd say more of the best apps are written for Qt. Certainly the only high-profile case I know of an app switching from one to the other was Rosegarden, which switched to Qt and found it to be a much better toolkit.
Part of the reason is history (if we're talking about 15 years ago then Qt had a more restrictive license - and, sad to say, the gnome website still spreads FUD about this, or did the last time I looked). But mostly I think it's that big distros have Gnome as the default - probably because it's easier to support since it's much less configurable than KDE.
(And I don't think it's a clear case of one being "more mainstream"; rather, my impression is that Americans tend to use Gnome/GTK and Europeans tend to use KDE/Qt)
> Plasma 5.2 and Frameworks 5 Applications have transitioned to a flatter style, and it’s safe to say Breeze veers towards a more Apple-esque school of design over Google or Microsoft takes on flatness.
That's the main thing I don't like about it. Also I don't get the depressive trend of washing out colors and turning the style into monochrome. What's wrong with colored icons?
I hope there will be a way to chose other styles and KDE will maintain the reputation of being very UI configurable.
If you don't like the icon theme you can search "icon" in the system settings and it gives you a page to either change from preinstalled themes or go to the kde-look repository of user themes to pick from.
So no, customization never went away. Breeze is just replacing Oxygen, but the ability to change it doesn't go away.
The downside however can be with GTK applications (for me it's primarily Firefox). Official themes like Oxygen got gtk{2,3}-engines-oxygen support to unify look and feel. With new official theme being Breeze the focus will probably shift on the later. So GTK applications will look ugly if you won't use the official theme.
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 a native GTK UI.
The state of WMs on Linux is really, really more complicated than it needs to be.
> 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.
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?
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.
They work fine. There's even some effort to make apps use similar looking themes and icons when running in a different desktop; certainly things like tray integration work pretty consistently. It's not perfect - they might look a bit funny - but apps from the "other side" stick out less than e.g. java apps always do.
They look a bit funny and take a bit longer to start up. If you are on a Gnome desktop then the GTK libs will be already loaded when you try to open Gedit but its gonna need to load all the Qt libs into memory if you want to open KolourPaint.
IMO, its more of an inconvenience than a big deal breaker.
I used SuSE Linux with KDE 2 and KDE 3 more than 10 years ago. It was a good Win95 style shell with many customization options back then. Later I switched to Gnome 2 because of the KDE 4.0 fiasco and no one forked off KDE 3. Thankfully Ubuntu decided to change the shell, as Gnome 3 was another fiasco. Nowadays I just connect from a Mac, Windows, Android or iOS shell to Linux servers. It seems both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 (5?) lost their UX-design goal - that's why Linux Mint MGSE emerged, and Ubuntu created their own shell. It seems that HTML based shells like ChromeOS/ChromiumOS, WebOS and FirefoxOS are the future.
For the end user it is more or less cosmetic change. But for developers the change is huge and very important. KDE didn't plan to radically change design with 5.x.
Maybe it's a well-researched article, but am I the only one that bothers the structure of the website?
I am not able to read it. The text is just in the middle, really big white space left and right. Than there is this big wallpaper on every page. By the way, why so many pages?
The the column width is just about ideal at approximately 77 characters per line.It could be slightly wider without detracting from the readability, but not all that much. [1][2]
The negative space left and right is to ensure an optimal column width. If there is nothing important to place to the sides, anything added there would serve only to distract from the flow of article content. That is to say, filling space for no reason is unreasonable.
Pagination is its own thing, and I won't comment one way or another on that.
I usually like reading articles with this width, but there's usually a different color background to differentiate the article from the page so there's not this huge white-space void.
Other than that I thought the article easy to read.
I think the article is actually quite readable. However, the fact that javascript is required to render any text does irk me a little. Edit: I may have jumped the gun: the site now seems to be loading fine without js.
Ahh, okay, it seems to be fixed now. There was a fullscreen image on top of every site (you could not even see the headline!). The width looks good now, maybe it way just my high resolution monitor (UHD)?
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, but these v4.x era additions annoy me to no end. v5 does nothing to improve this.
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 particular reason. Hooray for human nature, huh?
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.
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.
Though, the desktop search incarnations were a hype topic back in the early KDE 4 era and strigi, nepomuk and its later re-implementations and the related services like dbus were sadly sub-par/sluggish compared to Windows search and Mac Spotlight. The biggest let down was the rewrite of KDE 4 itself. KDE 3 had so many features that were never re-implemented in KDE 4.x. I had the impression that the developers lost touch with the user base back then.
In the days before Novell bought SuSE KDE 2 and 3 were very popular.
I agree with your sentiment, although I disagree with the way you said it. On the actual issues raised, most of them can indeed be turned off or at the very least mitigated some how.
Akonadi is indeed a resource hog and useless (a dozen processes and 100+MB memory usage). If you don't use any KDE PIM application (Kmail, Korganizer) or any calendar event integration they don't appear. Nepomuk is no more, replaced by baloo, which is actually pretty fast and light on resource usage, so I keep it running. But it can be easily turned off in the system settings under the desktop search item. I don't use activities, the only trace of it is a kactivitymangered process running, if it bothers you that much you can set up a startup script to kill it.
The tray icons and cashew you may have a point. Although I like monochrome status icons but the cashew is an eyesore, so I drag it underneath the panel and it stays out of the way.
The article says "it drives tweakers nuts because it’s the one unchanging thing on the desktop. There have been heavy debates on how to hide it, but for the interim it’s here to stay." Really? You get the same thing by right-clicking (or long press on a touchscreen, I imagine) on the desktop. Having an omnipresent widget is redundant and annoys people who don't need it.
Except many inexperienced users (and some experienced yet lazy users who never take the time to learn their computer, I've noticed) don't know or often forget about right-clicking. So when you throw a bunch of random people who have never seen KDE before and test their proficiency with the desktop, of course they're going to overlook right-click menu and whine about needing a special widget for customization. But that's how UI design is these days: conceding to the lowest common denominator. Designers are striving for a utopian interface that can be used without any training or adjustment period. Yet it's a myth. It's impossible to make a computer that can be used without instruction. Maybe if half as much time was spent writing documentation as is spent twiddling with icon colors users would have a resource where they could learn how to use KDE. Then you could build a desktop that doesn't feel like it's in novice mode all the time.
Except documentation isn't as sexy as screenshots and Google-ripoff icons.
Addendum: "Authors note: My testing machine had an issue with activities, so I was unable to fully test activities: this section may have minor inaccuracies."
How much better off would KDE be if they just stopped foolishly hanging on to the idea of Activities? No one uses it. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Also, I told my non-techie brother that the three-line menu was called a "hamburger". He looked at me like I had a carrot growing out of my nose. Please someone come up with a better name for that thing.
> The article says "it drives tweakers nuts because it’s the one unchanging thing on the desktop. There have been heavy debates on how to hide it, but for the interim it’s here to stay." Really? You get the same thing by right-clicking (or long press on a touchscreen, I imagine) on the desktop. Having an omnipresent widget is redundant and annoys people who don't need it.
I usually use right click, but you know that you can customize your mouse actions on the desktops and set right click to other stuff, like showing a running applications menu ?
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.
