15 ms·

KDE Plasma 5.20

234 points by xyquadrat 6y ago

ognarb 6y ago
I was already running the beta and this version looks really solid.
neilsimp1 6y ago
People using KDE Plasma and not using some sort of rolling release distro are missing out, I think. 5.18 LTS was a very very solid release, but 5.19 and 5.20 have so much new that it's a bummer for people whose distros won't be seeing them any time soon.
- simion314 6y ago
  I am using some old LTS version and I am fine, I run Arch many years ago so I had my time of updating to latest and greatest but now I no longer need latest apps or libraries and only thinking that the next system update will bring me new bugs or changes I don't want to handle at this moment does not appeal to me anymore. When I need something I will intentionally up[grade that program (for my IDE I keep old versions around to revert) and for my system I upgraded my video driver only when I had to, the rest is all LTS stiff. Just making my a point that for some people the updates is no longer(or was never) an exiting thing and as long as your current machine just works there is no reason to break it.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  On the other hand, I'm running KDE Neon (the "stable" version, insofar as there is one) where everything is supposed to "just work" and even there I got a really dumb dependency error this morning[0] that lead to KWIN almost automatically uninstalling itself to "fix" the problem. This has happened a few times in the last months - including the desktop wanting to uninstall itself. Of course I know how to behave in that context, and I don't want to sound ungrateful since I get all of this quality software for free, but it somewhat saddens me that I still can't recommend these kinds of distros to my family. [0] https://imgur.com/a/9OeZsjW https://imgur.com/a/9OeZsjW
  - InfiniteRand 6y ago
    I really think Linux should make it harder somehow to uninstall critical parts of your operating system. I'm sure it might not be easy to work out a mechanism for this that would not add friction for those who need to swap out large components of their desktop experience, but I personally think this is one of those things that sometimes really scares people about Linux (along with rm -Rf /) Every couple years I find myself not paying enough attention to the apt update text and then I end up swearing off any interaction with Linux for months.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      Why would apt uninstall things automatically? I’ve never noticed pacman doing that but maybe I’m lucky
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        Sometimes a newer version of package A will declare that it conflicts with package B. Maybe package C depended on both before the conflict was added. Then the package manager might find that the only way to resolve all conflicts is to remove C, which then auto-removes everything C depended on. Maybe C happens to be the "kububtu-desktop" package.
        piedar 6y ago
        That seems like a poor design in apt. Does any other package manager allow such a thing? I know Arch's pacman has no autoremove - you have to gather a list of unneeded packages then remove them as a separate step. And Gentoo's emerge builds a dependency tree rooted in the @world package set, so if kde-plasma/plasma-meta is there it will never be removed by an automatic depclean.
      - e12e 6y ago
        apt does try to keep track of unneeded packages/dependencies though - and will suggest you remove them with apt autoremove. This should always be safe... Unless a package is missing dependency information (has a packaging bug).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AzzieElbab 6y ago
Always loved kde for ease of customization. Wish it had better support for auto tiling
- Shared404 6y ago
  You probably know this already, but you can use KDE with your choice of WM, allowing you to swap out kwin for i3/sway or whatever else floats your boat/gives you tiling. Edit: Spelling
  - d_tr 6y ago
    Only on X11 though, and you can only use X11 window managers.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      Ah, thanks for the correction. Do you happen to know if this is on KDE's roadmap for Wayland? Edit: A little bit of internet later, I found these: https://drewdevault.com/2018/04/28/KDE-Sprint-retrospective.html https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma#cite_note-1 It looks like it will probably be done at some point, and is definitely possible.
      - d_tr 6y ago
        Thanks, I actually had a vague memory of having read about this somewhere. Cool!
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    I tried that but ran into weird app behaviour and gave up at some point. Might give it another try at some point
    - Shared404 6y ago
      Some apps do behave badly with strictly tiling managers in my experience. Usually what I do is make one floating workspace and open them in there.
eznit 6y ago
I see they still don't have any graphic designer.
- bengale 6y ago
  Apart from the clock I think its not too bad.
  - eznit 6y ago
    This is awful: https://i.imgur.com/gTf25am.png https://i.imgur.com/gTf25am.png
    - eitland 6y ago
      Someone should dig out the relevant source code for you to fix it. I'm sure a good PR will be well received :-)
      - ognarb 6y ago
        The UI code for the system tray can be found here: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/tree/master/applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/tree/master... and the HiddenItemsView.qml is the part show on the screenshot. MR are always welcome.
        lallysingh 6y ago
        > cellWidth: hiddenTasks.width / hiddenTasks.columns > cellHeight: hiddenTasks.height / hiddenTasks.rows Looks like the window should default smaller to make the sizes reasonable, or whatever decides the columns/row counts needs some tweaking.
    - vvillena 6y ago
      I've just upgraded to 5.20 and the icons are slightly bigger than in the image. It doesn't look as harmonious as the Windows 10 sidebar, but the slight size increase makes a difference. All in all, it's an improvement over the previous list-style panel, because the information is easier to read.
mac01021 6y ago
>when you open several windows with the same application (like when you open several LibreOffice documents), the Task Manager will group them together. This is exactly the opposite of what I want. Why don't the designers of 21st-century desktop environments understand that my 3 PDF files have nothing to do with one another? The same goes for my terminals, my text buffers, my web pages.... Why group things that are involved in unrelated tasks?
- seego 6y ago
  Why configure it when it denies an opportunity to rant?
  - mac01021 6y ago
    Well, I can do both.... :) Configure for my own use, and rant about the predominance of an inferior way of thinking. And, with less-configurable DEs, ranting (or being silently tolerant) is the only option.
- Shared404 6y ago
  It's KDE, so I would guess that it's fairly simple to configure to not do that. Haven't used this version though, so what do I know. Edit: It says about two lines down that it's configurable.
- cies 6y ago
  Since it's KDE you can switch this feature off :) You may be looking for activities (they are useful to group related tasks together).
- thomond 6y ago
  > This is exactly the opposite of what I want. Well maybe it's what everyone else wants. Either way it's just the default they're changing, one good thing about grouping in Plasma is it lets you exclude certain applications so you can exclude your PDF viewer. Alot of other environments give an all or nothing approach.
  - 6y ago
andmarios 6y ago
In time for its 24th birthday which is tomorrow!
Derbasti 6y ago
Does it now support using two monitors with different scaling factors? With display calibration? This is what is holding me back at the moment: heterogenous scaling is only available in wayland, but color calibration (colord-kde) only works in X11. I think I'll give Gnome another try this time around.
- ognarb 6y ago
  Sadly color calibration is not yet available in KWin-wayland. I saw a MR around but it didn't got merged yet. It will probably come in Plasma 5.21.
- ZetaH 6y ago
  I had the same issue with my 14,0" WQHD (2560x1440) laptop screen and my external monitor. I wanted to scale up only the laptop's screen so that I can read the text on it, but then my external monitor got scaled too large. After using it for months like that I solved this by simply setting the resolution on the laptop to 1920x1080, and scaling to 1. I felt really stupid after that I did not do this sooner.
  - seabrookmx 6y ago
    That's not an optimal solution though, because you're relying on your screen to do non-integer scaling and you'll have blurrier fonts etc. as a result. If your software supports non-integer scaling it can render things with that knowledge and give you crisp edges on the edge of text and UI elements.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 6y ago
KDE 5 Plasma is amazing. Subjectively, I feel the following about it: after over 2 decades of being extremely buggy and extremely ugly, KDE has became a culmination of desktop PC GUI design, the best I've experienced so far (tiling WMs can be better in certain tasks and settings but not universally). Manjaro with recent KDE provides me what I call "a lot like Mac but way better" experience (surely, there are aspects in which Mac or any other system is better, I just don't know which particular). And it has made a great replacement once Ubuntu lost its Unity (right at the moment it became polished enough). The only disappointing part are the plasmoids - I could make a lot of use of some desktop widgets but it's pain to find useful plasmoids and make them work, making your own plasmoids seems complicated. In fact I'd be comfortable with a generic terminal plasmoid (with a read-only mode option) and a generic browser (just display a specific URL, refresh periodically, basic HTML support is enough) plasmoid but it seems too much hassle to build them. I just wonder why these are not available OOTB. More (and easy) hackability could also make KDE even cooler. UPDATE (some more things I'd like to be fixed just came to my mind as I had a cup of tea): KDE still has not reached the Unity level of the Mac-like global menu (D-BUS menu) support: some apps which worked with Unity global menu perfectly (and also work on Mac) still won't work with the global menu in KDE. I had to fall-back to the "Windows way" of having menus in every window to maintain uniform experience among different apps - too many apps left the global menu bar empty. This isn't a particularly serious problem though. Unity's facility of searching through menu items was also insanely cool and should be ported (as we have the D-BUS menu anyway). I want to completely disable clipboard management so it wouldn't remember clipboard history (which is a security issue) and wouldn't clear the clipboard as soon as I close the window (extremely inconvenient - I often want to open a window just to copy something, close it and paste that somewhere else). But I could never find how. I don't want tray messages to pop-up as soon as I start copying files. I'm not even sure I want them when the process finishes (perhaps there is a less annoying way to know it's done). I'd like an option for Yakuake to actually replace Konsole so whenever I click "open terminal here" (preferably - in any app) it would open a new tab in Yakuake. That's all the improvements to make KDE effectively perfect IMHO.
- adambyrtek 6y ago
  Agreed, and you can easily add proper tiling support with the Krohnkite extension, which makes anybody coming from a DWM-inspired tiling WM like Xmonad feel instantly at home.
swebs 6y ago
So how do I install it on Ubuntu?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vvillena 6y ago
  KDE is probably too much of a core package to install, unless you are doing for the fun of it. The best way would be to wait until Ubuntu ships it in its next release.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Or reinstall KDE Neon which is Ubuntu base with KDE on top. That's what I've been running as my main desktop at home for 5 years or so and at work on and off for 5 years.
  - brnt 6y ago
    KDE Neon is what youre looking for.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  sudo apt install kde-full
  - e12e 6y ago
    Presumably that would get you the previous release, if running Ubuntu 20.04? You'd either need a custom ppa, build it yourself, or run the early version of 20.10 (oth look at the date, I guess 20.10 is out? So maybe wait for 21.04?). Ed: not quite yet, October 22nd, apparently : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases And 20.10 will "only" come with plasma 5.19 - so it's ppa/bacports or 21.04 alpha for 5.20 looks like: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GroovyGorilla/Beta/Kubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GroovyGorilla/Beta/Kubuntu https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/kde-plasma-5-20-release-features https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/kde-plasma-5-20-release-...
neves 6y ago
I has been a decade since I used KDE. It was eating too much memory of slow computer. I always missed a desktop environment for power users, instead of one aiming for the average user. Kde always the best one with this objective
- xbar 6y ago
  This is how I feel. But it's been more like 2 decades since I used KDE. Time to come back to it.
- JW_00000 6y ago
  Memory usage has greatly improved in my experience compared to a decade ago. (At least, in comparison to the available RAM.) Actually I felt that nowadays Gnome Shell with some extensions is more resource hungry. I switched from KDE 3.5 / 4.0 to Unity and later Gnome around the time KDE 4 was first released (apparently 2008), for the same reason as you. But last year I switched back to KDE Plasma because Gnome felt unstable and slightly glitchy, and KDE is much smoother now.
- criddell 6y ago
  > I always missed a desktop environment for power users, instead of one aiming for the average user. What types of things make a big difference for you? When I sit at my computer, it's to do something in an application. The desktop environment doesn't do much for me once I've launched the program that I'm actually there to use, does it? I'm generally pretty happy in Ubuntu or Windows or macOS or iPadOS.
  - vvillena 6y ago
    You're lucky to have a workflow that depends in just one application and one window, then.
    - criddell 6y ago
      Multiple windows isn't a power user feature and it isn't a differentiator for KDE.
inoffensivename 6y ago
I've been using KDE for nearly 20 years and it just keeps getting better. Good stuff!
kuschku 6y ago
I’ve been using Plasma for years, but after this release talking so much about the wayland improvements, the actual result is more than disappointing. First, to explain my setup: I've got a Dell UP2718Q in landscape, 3840x2160, 10-bit in DCI-P3 colorspace at 1.5x scale at 60Hz, side-by-side with a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 in portrait, 1024x1280, 8-bit in sRGB colorspace at 1x scale at 75Hz 10-bit support isn’t there yet, color calibration support isn’t there yet either, but that’s something where I’ll just have to wait for the future. Discover currently fails to install due to mismatched dependencies, but this is also something the future will solve. So far: KScreen still refuses to save changed settings, so on every boot I have to manually set my Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 to Portrait at 75Hz again. The scaling somewhat works, but not properly, especially GTK applications are upscaled rather than downscaled. (See Firefox in the screenshot linked below) The plasma panels overlap about half a virtual pixel at 1x, or 1 pixel at 1.5x, so the panel on the right monitor opens the dashboard on the left one, and the panel on the left monitor sometimes doesn’t even open a panel at all. Screenshot: https://i.k8r.eu/sEDfiQ.png https://i.k8r.eu/sEDfiQ.png Overall it’s a good start, but still not quite there yet.
- JW_00000 6y ago
  Can I ask how you managed to set a different scale factor for each screen? In the system settings I can only find a global scale factor... Or is this only supported using Wayland?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Yes, it is only supported in Wayland because X is limited to one global scaling factor.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      I don't think X is so limited. You can use the xrandr tool to set pretty much arbitrary positioning and scaling for each screen, at least with the proprietary NVidia drivers. But that is GPU scaling, not framework scaling.
  - 6y ago
Zhyl 6y ago
Would someone from the KDE team be able to give an update on the Valve funding for KDE? [0] I remember being quite happy when I heard this, as it might be paving the way for a renewed SteamOS initiative, or another Linux offensive, but I don't follow KDE closely and I haven't heard anything since around the time of this article. Any indication of what was achieved and what has happened since would be interesting to me! [0] - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Funding-KWin-Work https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Fu...
- jpetso 6y ago
  I haven't checked whether Roman Gilg is still working for Valve, but he ended up forking KWin into KWinFT (plus supporting libs) with a heavy Wayland focus. He got frustrated by upstream KDE not merging his extensive refactorings on a timeline that worked for to him and is now trying to out-compete the original. Roman Gilg's blog is a good read on that matter. Both parties seem very reasonable to me. So far, the jury is still out on where things will end up - KWinFT has some good momentum and ideas, while upstream KWin with David Edmundson and other steady contributors are also continuing to fix lots of Wayland issues with every release. Either way it looks like we'll be in a good spot soon.
  - Zhyl 6y ago
    Thank you, I will give his blog a read!
laszlokorte 6y ago
Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments.
- viseztrance 6y ago
  Honestly KDE has always been this way, adding features over polish. For example I used gnome shell and mac os back to back and gnome holds up very well against mac os, and if anything it feels like a more cohesive experience (consistent hotkeys, ui).
  - shaan7 6y ago
    Yep that is the beauty of having alternatives :) Ideally I'd have a DE which is polished and has features that I need. Unfortunately there's nothing (macOS, Windows included) that does both, so we choose our poison.
- eitland 6y ago
  > Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments. You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-) I used Mac for three years. In my opinion it had some extremely weird behavior by default (CMD-tab couldn't switch between instances and to make matters worse there is no configuration option or tool you can use to get sane behaviour.) And bugs: - opening a dialog in one browser window would lock all windows from that browser. Good luck looking up the documentation for where the files you are supposed to upload are without either closing the upload dialog or opening a different browser. - keyboard shortcuts vary wildly between apps: In one app CMD - Shift - leftarrow selects tobthe start of the line. In Safari however it meant go back. Guess how I still know after 8 years. Yes, filling out forms and losing everything because I wanted to select a lkne of text. Windows also often used to drive me mad. It is better now but the performance tax when compiling is still 30%! And even their own dotnet applications use 3 seconds to start on their OS vs 127 ms or something in a virtual Linux machine on top if that Windows box. Crazy bad performance and latency issues and insane keyboard shortcuts are UX problems just as well as flickering and reflowing. KDE isn't worse. Just different. For some of us it has already been the least annoying option for years already.
est31 6y ago
Not verified it myself yet, but I read that middle click copy/paste is finally fixed on Wayland. That's awesome! It's an amazing usability improvement if you don't have to press ctrl+c/ctrl+v and can just select the text instead. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907
cupofjoakim 6y ago
Good job, as expected by the Plasma team. I really feel like this is a big step in the right direction. A personal wish however would be that we got a more modern look to more desktop environments. Both Gnome, Plasma and Pantheon (default in Elementary OS) are talked about as the best looking desktop environments, but I'd be lying if I said that any of them looked awesome. There's just something about them that make them feel weird. Sometimes it's just margins and whitespace, sometimes the font scale that seems inconsistent and sometimes it's the default icon packs that look a bit dated. I don't know, I'm not a designer, but it is definitely worse than both win10 and macOS 10.15.6 I think that if we want to grow the unix user base there's a bit of progress to be made in this department. Customisability is where we win today - but the defaults need to get better to attract more non tech oriented people.
- brightball 6y ago
  PopOS is really impressing me
  - numlock86 6y ago
    That's GNOME.
    - brightball 6y ago
      It is, but the adjustments that they are making to it especially with the PopOS Shell to build in tiling window management on top of gnome has dramatically improved the experience (for me at least).
- xyquadrat 6y ago
  I fully understand that opinion - it is a big pain point for many users. Inside KDE, our VDG (Visual Design Group) is working on ironing out those inconsistencies and visual problems. It's a gigantic task, but I do believe we are making progress - especially System Settings has been getting a lot better lately. They are also working on a evolutionary update to our default 'Breeze' design theme. Check it out at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891 https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891. (And if you do find specific problems e.g. regarding margins or fonts, please report them on bugs.kde.org, and we'll take a look.)
teekert 6y ago
Man, my entire life I've been going back and forth between Gnome and KDE, I just settled (again) on stock Ubuntu (for some months now) but now that I see this video and the grass looks greener, again. Guess I'm installing KDE Neon tonight... Edit, I have to say that for the kids I'll stay on Gnome, it's very recognizable for them when compared to the iPads they use at school, much more so than KDE (and Win10 for that matter).
- brylie 6y ago
  I recently decided to give stock Ubuntu with Gnome a try, coming from KDE. After about two weeks of missing some of the simple pleasures of KDE, like being able to right-click in the file browser to create a new file or resizing windows to the left/right side of the window with Meta-left/right (which is somehow buggy in Gnome), I landed back in KDE-land with Neon. I briefly toyed with the idea of Manjaro, but am not sure I'll be able to install some software that is readily available as .deb. I have been using KDE as my daily driver for both work and personal computing for five years now.
  - teekert 6y ago
    Usually small things get to me like, Kmail won't keep my emails de-collapsed, or Kwin puts a border around Firefox so my tabs are not at the top and I have to aim (true for Gnome also btw), same goes for VScode. Or I want to use git over sshfs but KDE uses kioslaves and not gvfs so it's not a normal FS if you mount ssh in dolphin. Stuff like that. Gnome usually make me miss some configuration options or they remove them. But as I grow older I get better at accepting defaults and I think Gnome will capture me once and for all soon. I do like how Ubuntu looks ootb (I only set dark theme, autohide the panel and keep 4 virtual desktop at all times (normally they are removed when empty)). Sometimes I choose Mate (similar to XFCE I guess). I like it a lot but it just doesn't look that good (ark-darker makes it better). I do like change every now and then.
    - jpetso 6y ago
      For the record, I prefer SSH-via-kioslave over SSH-via-fuse. On my previous work Macbook, I'd bind it as "normal filesystem" and that worked great until I suspended my laptop or disconnected the VPN, at which point filesystem semantics are a giant drag on the experience. If implemented as badly as on macOS, it makes your file dialog and command line access hang. At least kioslaves handle disconnects gracefully and are right back in service whenever your network is, without having to remount anything.
dleslie 6y ago
Every few years I give KDE a shot, and the result is always the same; it's too unstable and slow to be a daily driver. The latest time was just last month, and the _stock_ panel widgets kept crashing, forgetting their preferences, and so on. The desktop environment itself occasionally crashed-to-login. Well, back to Gnome2! (MATE).
- shmerl 6y ago
  I've been using it for a long time and didn't notice any slowness (make sure file search is off). What's bugging me though is that subsurfaces clipping bug in Wayland session. Kmail is still broken in 5.19.x.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Critically, I tend to use low-power machines because I hate fan noise and excessive heat. I was using KDE on an RPi4 and Pinebook Pro. For basically all the computing that I do these machines are more than powerful enough; but apparently not for KDE (or Gnome3!)
    - shmerl 6y ago
      I like silent operation too, but I do the opposite, get a big case with 200 mm Noctua fans and double Noctua CPU cooler :) It runs very silently even with high end Ryzen. The heat as long as it's dissipated out of the case to keep the system cool doesn't bother me.
      - dleslie 6y ago
        That doesn't provide a low-power solution, just a silent solution; you're still dissipating a lot of heat.
        shmerl 6y ago
        Yes, but I don't need a low power solution. I need something that can compile things in reasonable time.
brnt 6y ago
Although perhaps not part of Plasma does anyone know why certain regressions in Kmail are not addressed? Things like reply to all by default were removed as a prefernce and there seems to be no discussion on that possible. What gives? Kmail is very powerful and deserves much wider use, but somehow a group has managed to take charge of the project and is keeping defaults suited for 90ies style clients and is actively removing preferences that fit with more modern (outlookish/gmailish) UX.
ashton314 6y ago
Ugh! KDE is so pretty and so configurable except in the one way that I really need: I need an easy way to set Emacs-style keystrokes globally. Do this and I’m sold forever. (That aside, very exciting update!) Is there anything like Karabiner or AutoHotKey for KDE that lets you download predefined keyboard shortcuts?
- whateveracct 6y ago
  This is pretty much the only feature I miss from MacOS.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  At this point it is a bit of a mystery to me why something like AutoHotKey isn't built in to every OS.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Pretty sure you can customize what you want under the Standard Shortcuts and Global Shortcuts in KDE's settings.
- bmn__ 6y ago
  • Run `systemsettings5 kcm_keys` and configure or edit `~/.config/kdeglobals`, section `[Shortcuts]`. • https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://github.com/autokey/autokey
brmgb 6y ago
I don't understand why the KDE teams let so many padding and alignment issues go through each release. Some of them are particularly jarring. For example, if you look at the screenshot of the system settings in the announcement, the pictures with two lines of subtext are above the ones with only one line despite them being the same size. It might seem minor but the situation repeats everywhere. I understand it might not be a priority of the project but it leaves me with the feeling of something left unfinished and makes KDE completely unusable for me. Edit: I feel like I need to edit my post because I am unnecessarily negative. Fixing the visual might actually be a huge task and I think KDE is getting better every release. A huge thank you to the team for the effort they pour into developing free software.
- ognarb 6y ago
  You will be happy to hear that a fix for the padding in the system settings should come with the next update of the KDE frameworks. Sadly the libraries release schedule is a bit out of sync with Plasma release schedule.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  While I agree with you, that's nothing a custom theme / engine can't fix. Fonts on linux are not that great as well, by default. KDE is quite a useful Desktop Environment packed with functionality; I miss KDE a lot when using Mac OS X or Windows.
  - konart 6y ago
    >While I agree with you, that's nothing a custom theme / engine can't fix. For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time). Even now you have to compile and install a custom theming engine[1] in KDE to apple decent themes [1] https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum/tree/master/Kvantum https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum/tree/master/Kvantum
    - eitland 6y ago
      > For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time). I don't follow: you point out an issue with KDE styling before saying you use MacOS that is even harder to style?
LockAndLol 6y ago
Well worth my donation https://kde.org/donations https://kde.org/donations A very happy user of KDE. Other DEs on Linux and other OSes seem so limiting compared to KDE. Good job, fellas.
jula432vdf 6y ago
So I see lots of comments about certain defaults or options some people would like to see in the blank, not customized KDE. But here's the thing, many defaults are just choices made by some dev, designer. In KDE many options have nothing to do with the MacOS or Gnome defaults, even more, the defaults have been choosed specifically to avoid a known behavior or default in MacOS or Gnome Luckily for everyone, KDE has so many customization options that you can make it work like almost any GUI you know, the popular one is of course MacOS aesthetics, but some guys like to configure it to behave just like Windows 10. You could also create your own kind of GUI, nothing like any other GUI available. The lesson is, in KDE most defaults can be changed, and that's mostly why it still exists as a software project probably.
nilsocket 6y ago
Problem with KDE is they have too many user-level applications. KDE team could have put focus and resources on core desktop environment. It had many problems, but still they keep diversifying further. I really like KDE, it's been my goto desktop from nearly 4 years.
Angeo34 6y ago
People in this thread got accustomed to the walled garden that is Macos so much that they don't realize KDEs philosophy. Literally every singular think in KDE is configurable even stuff you wouldn't have even thought about is.configurable. The de to just use with default values is Gnome. If you want to have it however you want it you use Plasma.
nanna 6y ago
Serious question: I enabled a Plasma option to make windows transparent when I hover over their corresponding 'application rectangle' (sorry, not sure what to call it) in the panel. It drives me mad but I just can't figure out how I everenabled it. Ditto with transparent menus. Can anyone advise? In general I'm very happy with Plasma but it does expose UI options that can really harm the experience.
- Jedd 6y ago
  Configure Task Manager (get there by right-clicking on the task manager panel that you're talking about). Appearance (tab) -- and deselect 'Highlight Windows when hovering over tasks'.
  - nanna 6y ago
    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
m1cl 6y ago
I installed and deinstalled. I have a 4k monitor, somehow everything looks like 1984. fonts not sharp, I can count the pixels on the screen. It s enough. I quit.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Windows 10 look and feel for your Linux desktop. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but reminds me once again of how little respect developers have for spending resources like GPUs and instruction cycles for "bling" essentially. I am always saddened a bit (as you can probably tell) that my desktop machine is easily 1000x more capable in terms of compute and rendering than my desktop in 1995 and yet is no more responsive, no quicker, no less of a burden on the underlying machine.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  I don't mean to sound snarky, but you can also just not install a DE? Window managers like i3 and Awesomewm don't use the GPU at all.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    FWIW I don't consider it snarky, I don't use KDE. Used TWM for a long time and lately LXDE for when I want something more desktop like. But I'm also a kind of weird case in that I want to be able to run X11 apps on my laptop, which is a win10 install, so running a local X server (VcXsrv). I find LXDE as a DE fairly lightweight and not too troublesome. The Qt version had some issues with my older X server (Qt for some software defined radio apps that use Qt rather than Gtk or other toolkits).
- ryan-allen 6y ago
  > Windows 10 look and feel for your Linux desktop. That's exactly what I wanted! I've been using Manjaro KDE for a couple of months now exclusively. I am extremely happy, it's very convenient developing on Linux directly! It's much snappier than Windows 10 on the same hardware, and you can turn lots of the bling off to get better performance.
8bitsrule 6y ago
A line-up of comments from a frequent reviewer: "The Year of the Linux dissatisfaction" https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-year-of-dissatisfaction.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-year-of-dissatisfa...
- vvillena 6y ago
  That reviewer will be forever unsatisfied until Linux manages to cover all main and niche markets. That won't happen because there's no market drive for it. There's no company with a huge budget trying to develop a consumer-tailored Linux-based OS: the other two companies that develop consumer OSs do it just to sell additional hardware (Apple) or services (Microsoft). And expecting a community of people, each with their own interests, to just work for a goal that's not their own is but a fool's dream.
lupinglade 6y ago
Still an awful UI. Even that clock in the bottom right - what is going on with padding there? Flickering, poor layout, poor icons. It is all wrong. KDE needs to pay more attention to UI consistency and keep it more streamlined - needs polish. I’d love to use it, but the UI just feels so wrong.
filereaper 6y ago
Looking forward to try out the new tiling features of KWin when it gets released to Manjaro. I've been trying to simulate the use of i3wm inside KDE for a while now, most of the online tutorials end up failing as some floating toolbar from KDE ends up grabbing focus and breaks the i3wm workflow. If anyone has gotten this to work with the latest builds, I'd be happy to try out their configs. I've also tried out the alternatives of krohnkite (hi esjeon!) but what really breaks KDE is that you can't assign a workspace to each monitor. I have 3 monitors and I can independently assign each workspace to each monitor in i3wm and you can switch between them really easily. Its a massive productivity boost which keeps me sticking to i3wm even though KDE is more fully featured (blue-tooth, OSD etc...)
WorldPeas 6y ago
Nice! If any KDE devs are lurking here, please remove that annoying as all hell bug that makes a sticky note on your desktop whenever you hit ctrl+v. I've tried pasting files several times only to see something I copied 10 minutes ago pop up on an annoying widget I have to spend 30 seconds removing. This happens several times a week, if not daily.

234 points by xyquadrat 6y ago

I was already running the beta and this version looks really solid.

People using KDE Plasma and not using some sort of rolling release distro are missing out, I think. 5.18 LTS was a very very solid release, but 5.19 and 5.20 have so much new that it's a bummer for people whose distros won't be seeing them any time soon.

simion314 6y ago
I am using some old LTS version and I am fine, I run Arch many years ago so I had my time of updating to latest and greatest but now I no longer need latest apps or libraries and only thinking that the next system update will bring me new bugs or changes I don't want to handle at this moment does not appeal to me anymore. When I need something I will intentionally up[grade that program (for my IDE I keep old versions around to revert) and for my system I upgraded my video driver only when I had to, the rest is all LTS stiff. Just making my a point that for some people the updates is no longer(or was never) an exiting thing and as long as your current machine just works there is no reason to break it.
vanderZwan 6y ago
On the other hand, I'm running KDE Neon (the "stable" version, insofar as there is one) where everything is supposed to "just work" and even there I got a really dumb dependency error this morning[0] that lead to KWIN almost automatically uninstalling itself to "fix" the problem. This has happened a few times in the last months - including the desktop wanting to uninstall itself. Of course I know how to behave in that context, and I don't want to sound ungrateful since I get all of this quality software for free, but it somewhat saddens me that I still can't recommend these kinds of distros to my family. [0] https://imgur.com/a/9OeZsjW https://imgur.com/a/9OeZsjW
- InfiniteRand 6y ago
  I really think Linux should make it harder somehow to uninstall critical parts of your operating system. I'm sure it might not be easy to work out a mechanism for this that would not add friction for those who need to swap out large components of their desktop experience, but I personally think this is one of those things that sometimes really scares people about Linux (along with rm -Rf /) Every couple years I find myself not paying enough attention to the apt update text and then I end up swearing off any interaction with Linux for months.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Why would apt uninstall things automatically? I’ve never noticed pacman doing that but maybe I’m lucky
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Sometimes a newer version of package A will declare that it conflicts with package B. Maybe package C depended on both before the conflict was added. Then the package manager might find that the only way to resolve all conflicts is to remove C, which then auto-removes everything C depended on. Maybe C happens to be the "kububtu-desktop" package.
      - piedar 6y ago
        That seems like a poor design in apt. Does any other package manager allow such a thing? I know Arch's pacman has no autoremove - you have to gather a list of unneeded packages then remove them as a separate step. And Gentoo's emerge builds a dependency tree rooted in the @world package set, so if kde-plasma/plasma-meta is there it will never be removed by an automatic depclean.
    - e12e 6y ago
      apt does try to keep track of unneeded packages/dependencies though - and will suggest you remove them with apt autoremove. This should always be safe... Unless a package is missing dependency information (has a packaging bug).
deleted 6y ago
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AzzieElbab 6y ago

Always loved kde for ease of customization. Wish it had better support for auto tiling

Shared404 6y ago
You probably know this already, but you can use KDE with your choice of WM, allowing you to swap out kwin for i3/sway or whatever else floats your boat/gives you tiling. Edit: Spelling
- d_tr 6y ago
  Only on X11 though, and you can only use X11 window managers.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    Ah, thanks for the correction. Do you happen to know if this is on KDE's roadmap for Wayland? Edit: A little bit of internet later, I found these: https://drewdevault.com/2018/04/28/KDE-Sprint-retrospective.html https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma#cite_note-1 It looks like it will probably be done at some point, and is definitely possible.
    - d_tr 6y ago
      Thanks, I actually had a vague memory of having read about this somewhere. Cool!
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  I tried that but ran into weird app behaviour and gave up at some point. Might give it another try at some point
  - Shared404 6y ago
    Some apps do behave badly with strictly tiling managers in my experience. Usually what I do is make one floating workspace and open them in there.

eznit 6y ago

I see they still don't have any graphic designer.

bengale 6y ago
Apart from the clock I think its not too bad.
- eznit 6y ago
  This is awful: https://i.imgur.com/gTf25am.png https://i.imgur.com/gTf25am.png
  - eitland 6y ago
    Someone should dig out the relevant source code for you to fix it. I'm sure a good PR will be well received :-)
    - ognarb 6y ago
      The UI code for the system tray can be found here: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/tree/master/applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/tree/master... and the HiddenItemsView.qml is the part show on the screenshot. MR are always welcome.
      - lallysingh 6y ago
        > cellWidth: hiddenTasks.width / hiddenTasks.columns > cellHeight: hiddenTasks.height / hiddenTasks.rows Looks like the window should default smaller to make the sizes reasonable, or whatever decides the columns/row counts needs some tweaking.
  - vvillena 6y ago
    I've just upgraded to 5.20 and the icons are slightly bigger than in the image. It doesn't look as harmonious as the Windows 10 sidebar, but the slight size increase makes a difference. All in all, it's an improvement over the previous list-style panel, because the information is easier to read.

mac01021 6y ago

>when you open several windows with the same application (like when you open several LibreOffice documents), the Task Manager will group them together. This is exactly the opposite of what I want. Why don't the designers of 21st-century desktop environments understand that my 3 PDF files have nothing to do with one another? The same goes for my terminals, my text buffers, my web pages.... Why group things that are involved in unrelated tasks?

seego 6y ago
Why configure it when it denies an opportunity to rant?
- mac01021 6y ago
  Well, I can do both.... :) Configure for my own use, and rant about the predominance of an inferior way of thinking. And, with less-configurable DEs, ranting (or being silently tolerant) is the only option.
Shared404 6y ago
It's KDE, so I would guess that it's fairly simple to configure to not do that. Haven't used this version though, so what do I know. Edit: It says about two lines down that it's configurable.
cies 6y ago
Since it's KDE you can switch this feature off :) You may be looking for activities (they are useful to group related tasks together).
thomond 6y ago
> This is exactly the opposite of what I want. Well maybe it's what everyone else wants. Either way it's just the default they're changing, one good thing about grouping in Plasma is it lets you exclude certain applications so you can exclude your PDF viewer. Alot of other environments give an all or nothing approach.
- 6y ago

andmarios 6y ago

In time for its 24th birthday which is tomorrow!

Derbasti 6y ago

Does it now support using two monitors with different scaling factors? With display calibration? This is what is holding me back at the moment: heterogenous scaling is only available in wayland, but color calibration (colord-kde) only works in X11. I think I'll give Gnome another try this time around.

ognarb 6y ago
Sadly color calibration is not yet available in KWin-wayland. I saw a MR around but it didn't got merged yet. It will probably come in Plasma 5.21.
ZetaH 6y ago
I had the same issue with my 14,0" WQHD (2560x1440) laptop screen and my external monitor. I wanted to scale up only the laptop's screen so that I can read the text on it, but then my external monitor got scaled too large. After using it for months like that I solved this by simply setting the resolution on the laptop to 1920x1080, and scaling to 1. I felt really stupid after that I did not do this sooner.
- seabrookmx 6y ago
  That's not an optimal solution though, because you're relying on your screen to do non-integer scaling and you'll have blurrier fonts etc. as a result. If your software supports non-integer scaling it can render things with that knowledge and give you crisp edges on the edge of text and UI elements.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

qwerty456127 6y ago

KDE 5 Plasma is amazing. Subjectively, I feel the following about it: after over 2 decades of being extremely buggy and extremely ugly, KDE has became a culmination of desktop PC GUI design, the best I've experienced so far (tiling WMs can be better in certain tasks and settings but not universally). Manjaro with recent KDE provides me what I call "a lot like Mac but way better" experience (surely, there are aspects in which Mac or any other system is better, I just don't know which particular). And it has made a great replacement once Ubuntu lost its Unity (right at the moment it became polished enough). The only disappointing part are the plasmoids - I could make a lot of use of some desktop widgets but it's pain to find useful plasmoids and make them work, making your own plasmoids seems complicated. In fact I'd be comfortable with a generic terminal plasmoid (with a read-only mode option) and a generic browser (just display a specific URL, refresh periodically, basic HTML support is enough) plasmoid but it seems too much hassle to build them. I just wonder why these are not available OOTB. More (and easy) hackability could also make KDE even cooler. UPDATE (some more things I'd like to be fixed just came to my mind as I had a cup of tea): KDE still has not reached the Unity level of the Mac-like global menu (D-BUS menu) support: some apps which worked with Unity global menu perfectly (and also work on Mac) still won't work with the global menu in KDE. I had to fall-back to the "Windows way" of having menus in every window to maintain uniform experience among different apps - too many apps left the global menu bar empty. This isn't a particularly serious problem though. Unity's facility of searching through menu items was also insanely cool and should be ported (as we have the D-BUS menu anyway). I want to completely disable clipboard management so it wouldn't remember clipboard history (which is a security issue) and wouldn't clear the clipboard as soon as I close the window (extremely inconvenient - I often want to open a window just to copy something, close it and paste that somewhere else). But I could never find how. I don't want tray messages to pop-up as soon as I start copying files. I'm not even sure I want them when the process finishes (perhaps there is a less annoying way to know it's done). I'd like an option for Yakuake to actually replace Konsole so whenever I click "open terminal here" (preferably - in any app) it would open a new tab in Yakuake. That's all the improvements to make KDE effectively perfect IMHO.

adambyrtek 6y ago
Agreed, and you can easily add proper tiling support with the Krohnkite extension, which makes anybody coming from a DWM-inspired tiling WM like Xmonad feel instantly at home.

swebs 6y ago

So how do I install it on Ubuntu?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vvillena 6y ago
KDE is probably too much of a core package to install, unless you are doing for the fun of it. The best way would be to wait until Ubuntu ships it in its next release.
- eitland 6y ago
  Or reinstall KDE Neon which is Ubuntu base with KDE on top. That's what I've been running as my main desktop at home for 5 years or so and at work on and off for 5 years.
- brnt 6y ago
  KDE Neon is what youre looking for.
FeepingCreature 6y ago
sudo apt install kde-full
- e12e 6y ago
  Presumably that would get you the previous release, if running Ubuntu 20.04? You'd either need a custom ppa, build it yourself, or run the early version of 20.10 (oth look at the date, I guess 20.10 is out? So maybe wait for 21.04?). Ed: not quite yet, October 22nd, apparently : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases And 20.10 will "only" come with plasma 5.19 - so it's ppa/bacports or 21.04 alpha for 5.20 looks like: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GroovyGorilla/Beta/Kubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GroovyGorilla/Beta/Kubuntu https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/kde-plasma-5-20-release-features https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/kde-plasma-5-20-release-...

neves 6y ago

I has been a decade since I used KDE. It was eating too much memory of slow computer. I always missed a desktop environment for power users, instead of one aiming for the average user. Kde always the best one with this objective

xbar 6y ago
This is how I feel. But it's been more like 2 decades since I used KDE. Time to come back to it.
JW_00000 6y ago
Memory usage has greatly improved in my experience compared to a decade ago. (At least, in comparison to the available RAM.) Actually I felt that nowadays Gnome Shell with some extensions is more resource hungry. I switched from KDE 3.5 / 4.0 to Unity and later Gnome around the time KDE 4 was first released (apparently 2008), for the same reason as you. But last year I switched back to KDE Plasma because Gnome felt unstable and slightly glitchy, and KDE is much smoother now.
criddell 6y ago
> I always missed a desktop environment for power users, instead of one aiming for the average user. What types of things make a big difference for you? When I sit at my computer, it's to do something in an application. The desktop environment doesn't do much for me once I've launched the program that I'm actually there to use, does it? I'm generally pretty happy in Ubuntu or Windows or macOS or iPadOS.
- vvillena 6y ago
  You're lucky to have a workflow that depends in just one application and one window, then.
  - criddell 6y ago
    Multiple windows isn't a power user feature and it isn't a differentiator for KDE.

inoffensivename 6y ago

I've been using KDE for nearly 20 years and it just keeps getting better. Good stuff!

kuschku 6y ago

I’ve been using Plasma for years, but after this release talking so much about the wayland improvements, the actual result is more than disappointing. First, to explain my setup: I've got a Dell UP2718Q in landscape, 3840x2160, 10-bit in DCI-P3 colorspace at 1.5x scale at 60Hz, side-by-side with a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 in portrait, 1024x1280, 8-bit in sRGB colorspace at 1x scale at 75Hz 10-bit support isn’t there yet, color calibration support isn’t there yet either, but that’s something where I’ll just have to wait for the future. Discover currently fails to install due to mismatched dependencies, but this is also something the future will solve. So far: KScreen still refuses to save changed settings, so on every boot I have to manually set my Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 to Portrait at 75Hz again. The scaling somewhat works, but not properly, especially GTK applications are upscaled rather than downscaled. (See Firefox in the screenshot linked below) The plasma panels overlap about half a virtual pixel at 1x, or 1 pixel at 1.5x, so the panel on the right monitor opens the dashboard on the left one, and the panel on the left monitor sometimes doesn’t even open a panel at all. Screenshot: https://i.k8r.eu/sEDfiQ.png https://i.k8r.eu/sEDfiQ.png Overall it’s a good start, but still not quite there yet.

JW_00000 6y ago
Can I ask how you managed to set a different scale factor for each screen? In the system settings I can only find a global scale factor... Or is this only supported using Wayland?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Yes, it is only supported in Wayland because X is limited to one global scaling factor.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I don't think X is so limited. You can use the xrandr tool to set pretty much arbitrary positioning and scaling for each screen, at least with the proprietary NVidia drivers. But that is GPU scaling, not framework scaling.
- 6y ago

Zhyl 6y ago

Would someone from the KDE team be able to give an update on the Valve funding for KDE? [0] I remember being quite happy when I heard this, as it might be paving the way for a renewed SteamOS initiative, or another Linux offensive, but I don't follow KDE closely and I haven't heard anything since around the time of this article. Any indication of what was achieved and what has happened since would be interesting to me! [0] - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Funding-KWin-Work https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Fu...

jpetso 6y ago
I haven't checked whether Roman Gilg is still working for Valve, but he ended up forking KWin into KWinFT (plus supporting libs) with a heavy Wayland focus. He got frustrated by upstream KDE not merging his extensive refactorings on a timeline that worked for to him and is now trying to out-compete the original. Roman Gilg's blog is a good read on that matter. Both parties seem very reasonable to me. So far, the jury is still out on where things will end up - KWinFT has some good momentum and ideas, while upstream KWin with David Edmundson and other steady contributors are also continuing to fix lots of Wayland issues with every release. Either way it looks like we'll be in a good spot soon.
- Zhyl 6y ago
  Thank you, I will give his blog a read!

laszlokorte 6y ago

Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments.

viseztrance 6y ago
Honestly KDE has always been this way, adding features over polish. For example I used gnome shell and mac os back to back and gnome holds up very well against mac os, and if anything it feels like a more cohesive experience (consistent hotkeys, ui).
- shaan7 6y ago
  Yep that is the beauty of having alternatives :) Ideally I'd have a DE which is polished and has features that I need. Unfortunately there's nothing (macOS, Windows included) that does both, so we choose our poison.
eitland 6y ago
> Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments. You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-) I used Mac for three years. In my opinion it had some extremely weird behavior by default (CMD-tab couldn't switch between instances and to make matters worse there is no configuration option or tool you can use to get sane behaviour.) And bugs: - opening a dialog in one browser window would lock all windows from that browser. Good luck looking up the documentation for where the files you are supposed to upload are without either closing the upload dialog or opening a different browser. - keyboard shortcuts vary wildly between apps: In one app CMD - Shift - leftarrow selects tobthe start of the line. In Safari however it meant go back. Guess how I still know after 8 years. Yes, filling out forms and losing everything because I wanted to select a lkne of text. Windows also often used to drive me mad. It is better now but the performance tax when compiling is still 30%! And even their own dotnet applications use 3 seconds to start on their OS vs 127 ms or something in a virtual Linux machine on top if that Windows box. Crazy bad performance and latency issues and insane keyboard shortcuts are UX problems just as well as flickering and reflowing. KDE isn't worse. Just different. For some of us it has already been the least annoying option for years already.

est31 6y ago

Not verified it myself yet, but I read that middle click copy/paste is finally fixed on Wayland. That's awesome! It's an amazing usability improvement if you don't have to press ctrl+c/ctrl+v and can just select the text instead. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907

cupofjoakim 6y ago

Good job, as expected by the Plasma team. I really feel like this is a big step in the right direction. A personal wish however would be that we got a more modern look to more desktop environments. Both Gnome, Plasma and Pantheon (default in Elementary OS) are talked about as the best looking desktop environments, but I'd be lying if I said that any of them looked awesome. There's just something about them that make them feel weird. Sometimes it's just margins and whitespace, sometimes the font scale that seems inconsistent and sometimes it's the default icon packs that look a bit dated. I don't know, I'm not a designer, but it is definitely worse than both win10 and macOS 10.15.6 I think that if we want to grow the unix user base there's a bit of progress to be made in this department. Customisability is where we win today - but the defaults need to get better to attract more non tech oriented people.

brightball 6y ago
PopOS is really impressing me
- numlock86 6y ago
  That's GNOME.
  - brightball 6y ago
    It is, but the adjustments that they are making to it especially with the PopOS Shell to build in tiling window management on top of gnome has dramatically improved the experience (for me at least).
xyquadrat 6y ago
I fully understand that opinion - it is a big pain point for many users. Inside KDE, our VDG (Visual Design Group) is working on ironing out those inconsistencies and visual problems. It's a gigantic task, but I do believe we are making progress - especially System Settings has been getting a lot better lately. They are also working on a evolutionary update to our default 'Breeze' design theme. Check it out at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891 https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891. (And if you do find specific problems e.g. regarding margins or fonts, please report them on bugs.kde.org, and we'll take a look.)

teekert 6y ago

Man, my entire life I've been going back and forth between Gnome and KDE, I just settled (again) on stock Ubuntu (for some months now) but now that I see this video and the grass looks greener, again. Guess I'm installing KDE Neon tonight... Edit, I have to say that for the kids I'll stay on Gnome, it's very recognizable for them when compared to the iPads they use at school, much more so than KDE (and Win10 for that matter).

brylie 6y ago
I recently decided to give stock Ubuntu with Gnome a try, coming from KDE. After about two weeks of missing some of the simple pleasures of KDE, like being able to right-click in the file browser to create a new file or resizing windows to the left/right side of the window with Meta-left/right (which is somehow buggy in Gnome), I landed back in KDE-land with Neon. I briefly toyed with the idea of Manjaro, but am not sure I'll be able to install some software that is readily available as .deb. I have been using KDE as my daily driver for both work and personal computing for five years now.
- teekert 6y ago
  Usually small things get to me like, Kmail won't keep my emails de-collapsed, or Kwin puts a border around Firefox so my tabs are not at the top and I have to aim (true for Gnome also btw), same goes for VScode. Or I want to use git over sshfs but KDE uses kioslaves and not gvfs so it's not a normal FS if you mount ssh in dolphin. Stuff like that. Gnome usually make me miss some configuration options or they remove them. But as I grow older I get better at accepting defaults and I think Gnome will capture me once and for all soon. I do like how Ubuntu looks ootb (I only set dark theme, autohide the panel and keep 4 virtual desktop at all times (normally they are removed when empty)). Sometimes I choose Mate (similar to XFCE I guess). I like it a lot but it just doesn't look that good (ark-darker makes it better). I do like change every now and then.
  - jpetso 6y ago
    For the record, I prefer SSH-via-kioslave over SSH-via-fuse. On my previous work Macbook, I'd bind it as "normal filesystem" and that worked great until I suspended my laptop or disconnected the VPN, at which point filesystem semantics are a giant drag on the experience. If implemented as badly as on macOS, it makes your file dialog and command line access hang. At least kioslaves handle disconnects gracefully and are right back in service whenever your network is, without having to remount anything.

dleslie 6y ago

Every few years I give KDE a shot, and the result is always the same; it's too unstable and slow to be a daily driver. The latest time was just last month, and the _stock_ panel widgets kept crashing, forgetting their preferences, and so on. The desktop environment itself occasionally crashed-to-login. Well, back to Gnome2! (MATE).

shmerl 6y ago
I've been using it for a long time and didn't notice any slowness (make sure file search is off). What's bugging me though is that subsurfaces clipping bug in Wayland session. Kmail is still broken in 5.19.x.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Critically, I tend to use low-power machines because I hate fan noise and excessive heat. I was using KDE on an RPi4 and Pinebook Pro. For basically all the computing that I do these machines are more than powerful enough; but apparently not for KDE (or Gnome3!)
  - shmerl 6y ago
    I like silent operation too, but I do the opposite, get a big case with 200 mm Noctua fans and double Noctua CPU cooler :) It runs very silently even with high end Ryzen. The heat as long as it's dissipated out of the case to keep the system cool doesn't bother me.
    - dleslie 6y ago
      That doesn't provide a low-power solution, just a silent solution; you're still dissipating a lot of heat.
      - shmerl 6y ago
        Yes, but I don't need a low power solution. I need something that can compile things in reasonable time.

brnt 6y ago

Although perhaps not part of Plasma does anyone know why certain regressions in Kmail are not addressed? Things like reply to all by default were removed as a prefernce and there seems to be no discussion on that possible. What gives? Kmail is very powerful and deserves much wider use, but somehow a group has managed to take charge of the project and is keeping defaults suited for 90ies style clients and is actively removing preferences that fit with more modern (outlookish/gmailish) UX.

ashton314 6y ago

Ugh! KDE is so pretty and so configurable except in the one way that I really need: I need an easy way to set Emacs-style keystrokes globally. Do this and I’m sold forever. (That aside, very exciting update!) Is there anything like Karabiner or AutoHotKey for KDE that lets you download predefined keyboard shortcuts?

whateveracct 6y ago
This is pretty much the only feature I miss from MacOS.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
At this point it is a bit of a mystery to me why something like AutoHotKey isn't built in to every OS.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Pretty sure you can customize what you want under the Standard Shortcuts and Global Shortcuts in KDE's settings.
bmn__ 6y ago
• Run `systemsettings5 kcm_keys` and configure or edit `~/.config/kdeglobals`, section `[Shortcuts]`. • https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://github.com/autokey/autokey

brmgb 6y ago

I don't understand why the KDE teams let so many padding and alignment issues go through each release. Some of them are particularly jarring. For example, if you look at the screenshot of the system settings in the announcement, the pictures with two lines of subtext are above the ones with only one line despite them being the same size. It might seem minor but the situation repeats everywhere. I understand it might not be a priority of the project but it leaves me with the feeling of something left unfinished and makes KDE completely unusable for me. Edit: I feel like I need to edit my post because I am unnecessarily negative. Fixing the visual might actually be a huge task and I think KDE is getting better every release. A huge thank you to the team for the effort they pour into developing free software.

ognarb 6y ago
You will be happy to hear that a fix for the padding in the system settings should come with the next update of the KDE frameworks. Sadly the libraries release schedule is a bit out of sync with Plasma release schedule.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
While I agree with you, that's nothing a custom theme / engine can't fix. Fonts on linux are not that great as well, by default. KDE is quite a useful Desktop Environment packed with functionality; I miss KDE a lot when using Mac OS X or Windows.
- konart 6y ago
  >While I agree with you, that's nothing a custom theme / engine can't fix. For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time). Even now you have to compile and install a custom theming engine[1] in KDE to apple decent themes [1] https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum/tree/master/Kvantum https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum/tree/master/Kvantum
  - eitland 6y ago
    > For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time). I don't follow: you point out an issue with KDE styling before saying you use MacOS that is even harder to style?

LockAndLol 6y ago

Well worth my donation https://kde.org/donations https://kde.org/donations A very happy user of KDE. Other DEs on Linux and other OSes seem so limiting compared to KDE. Good job, fellas.

jula432vdf 6y ago

So I see lots of comments about certain defaults or options some people would like to see in the blank, not customized KDE. But here's the thing, many defaults are just choices made by some dev, designer. In KDE many options have nothing to do with the MacOS or Gnome defaults, even more, the defaults have been choosed specifically to avoid a known behavior or default in MacOS or Gnome Luckily for everyone, KDE has so many customization options that you can make it work like almost any GUI you know, the popular one is of course MacOS aesthetics, but some guys like to configure it to behave just like Windows 10. You could also create your own kind of GUI, nothing like any other GUI available. The lesson is, in KDE most defaults can be changed, and that's mostly why it still exists as a software project probably.

nilsocket 6y ago

Problem with KDE is they have too many user-level applications. KDE team could have put focus and resources on core desktop environment. It had many problems, but still they keep diversifying further. I really like KDE, it's been my goto desktop from nearly 4 years.

Angeo34 6y ago

People in this thread got accustomed to the walled garden that is Macos so much that they don't realize KDEs philosophy. Literally every singular think in KDE is configurable even stuff you wouldn't have even thought about is.configurable. The de to just use with default values is Gnome. If you want to have it however you want it you use Plasma.

nanna 6y ago

Serious question: I enabled a Plasma option to make windows transparent when I hover over their corresponding 'application rectangle' (sorry, not sure what to call it) in the panel. It drives me mad but I just can't figure out how I everenabled it. Ditto with transparent menus. Can anyone advise? In general I'm very happy with Plasma but it does expose UI options that can really harm the experience.

Jedd 6y ago
Configure Task Manager (get there by right-clicking on the task manager panel that you're talking about). Appearance (tab) -- and deselect 'Highlight Windows when hovering over tasks'.
- nanna 6y ago
  THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

m1cl 6y ago

I installed and deinstalled. I have a 4k monitor, somehow everything looks like 1984. fonts not sharp, I can count the pixels on the screen. It s enough. I quit.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Windows 10 look and feel for your Linux desktop. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but reminds me once again of how little respect developers have for spending resources like GPUs and instruction cycles for "bling" essentially. I am always saddened a bit (as you can probably tell) that my desktop machine is easily 1000x more capable in terms of compute and rendering than my desktop in 1995 and yet is no more responsive, no quicker, no less of a burden on the underlying machine.

Kaze404 6y ago
I don't mean to sound snarky, but you can also just not install a DE? Window managers like i3 and Awesomewm don't use the GPU at all.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  FWIW I don't consider it snarky, I don't use KDE. Used TWM for a long time and lately LXDE for when I want something more desktop like. But I'm also a kind of weird case in that I want to be able to run X11 apps on my laptop, which is a win10 install, so running a local X server (VcXsrv). I find LXDE as a DE fairly lightweight and not too troublesome. The Qt version had some issues with my older X server (Qt for some software defined radio apps that use Qt rather than Gtk or other toolkits).
ryan-allen 6y ago
> Windows 10 look and feel for your Linux desktop. That's exactly what I wanted! I've been using Manjaro KDE for a couple of months now exclusively. I am extremely happy, it's very convenient developing on Linux directly! It's much snappier than Windows 10 on the same hardware, and you can turn lots of the bling off to get better performance.

8bitsrule 6y ago

A line-up of comments from a frequent reviewer: "The Year of the Linux dissatisfaction" https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-year-of-dissatisfaction.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-year-of-dissatisfa...

vvillena 6y ago
That reviewer will be forever unsatisfied until Linux manages to cover all main and niche markets. That won't happen because there's no market drive for it. There's no company with a huge budget trying to develop a consumer-tailored Linux-based OS: the other two companies that develop consumer OSs do it just to sell additional hardware (Apple) or services (Microsoft). And expecting a community of people, each with their own interests, to just work for a goal that's not their own is but a fool's dream.

lupinglade 6y ago

Still an awful UI. Even that clock in the bottom right - what is going on with padding there? Flickering, poor layout, poor icons. It is all wrong. KDE needs to pay more attention to UI consistency and keep it more streamlined - needs polish. I’d love to use it, but the UI just feels so wrong.

filereaper 6y ago

Looking forward to try out the new tiling features of KWin when it gets released to Manjaro. I've been trying to simulate the use of i3wm inside KDE for a while now, most of the online tutorials end up failing as some floating toolbar from KDE ends up grabbing focus and breaks the i3wm workflow. If anyone has gotten this to work with the latest builds, I'd be happy to try out their configs. I've also tried out the alternatives of krohnkite (hi esjeon!) but what really breaks KDE is that you can't assign a workspace to each monitor. I have 3 monitors and I can independently assign each workspace to each monitor in i3wm and you can switch between them really easily. Its a massive productivity boost which keeps me sticking to i3wm even though KDE is more fully featured (blue-tooth, OSD etc...)

WorldPeas 6y ago

Nice! If any KDE devs are lurking here, please remove that annoying as all hell bug that makes a sticky note on your desktop whenever you hit ctrl+v. I've tried pasting files several times only to see something I copied 10 minutes ago pop up on an annoying widget I have to spend 30 seconds removing. This happens several times a week, if not daily.