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KDE Plasma development switches to Qt 6 tomorrow
- smoldesu 4y agoHats off to the KDE team for a really great release cycle. I understand that there were some licensing issues with Qt in the back half, but Plasma 5.27 really pushed the Wayland session into excellence. It's unclear what Plasma 6 is going to look like, but they've got a damn fine launchpad with the current KWin Wayland session.
- mariusor 4y agoI thought that Plasma 6 will look exactly like Plasma 5, the only change being the Qt version they depend on.
- babypuncher 4y ago5.27 is the first KDE release in a while that has actually broken things for me. Fedora recently updated to it and the breeze theme broke, causing me constant crashes and glitchy window decorations.
- oynqr 4y agoWhenever I hear about completely broken KDE installs, it's Fedora in 90% of cases.
- babypuncher 4y agoYeah. In my case, the Discover app didn't fully update all of the packages like it was supposed to. Easy enough of a fix, though I doubt an average PC user would have been able to figure that out.
- LorenDB 4y agoDiscover really has never worked all that well for me when it comes to updating packages. I have used the terminal to install updates for a long time now, with both Ubuntu and openSUSE.
- oynqr 4y agoI have a feeling PackageKit is to blame here, since I remember Gnome Software being just as bad.
- babypuncher 4y agoThat's probably good practice, though I feel that the updater which pops up in your tray to let you know updates are ready should "just work".
- ahartmetz 4y agoDo not use GUI package managers except YaST. They are all terrible.
- LorenDB 4y agoI personally hope that one of the first new UI changes to land in Plasma 6 is support for rounded window corners in all corners, not just the titlebar ;)
- Jiocus 4y agoYou only seem half-serious, so I suspect there's something I've missed about KDE corner history. Anyway, 'picom' can at least grind down those edges (or smooth out, depending on your point of view) ################################# # Corners # ################################# # Sets the radius of rounded window corners. When > 0, the compositor will # round the corners of windows. Does not interact well with # `transparent-clipping`. corner-radius = 5 # Exclude conditions for rounded corners. rounded-corners-exclude = [ "window_type = 'desktop'", "window_type = 'dock'", ]
- sho_hn 4y agoThere's an infamous very, very long dev discussion thread on the quo vadis of bottom corner trimming (with working patches) :-)
- Jiocus 4y agoThanks for much hoped for context )
- LorenDB 4y agoI am mostly serious. I mean, it's not a huge deal, but it would look awesome :) I guess maybe I could look into picom. There was also a third party kwin plugin that could do the same thing IIRC.
- Jiocus 4y agoThe picom version is kinda brute, basically crop corners right off. Maybe a KWin plugin would do it more elegantly - but I guess such a plugin would also have an upper limit to radius... ;]
- haolez 4y agoIs this the Qt version that drops the custom metaprogramming stuff for QObject and friends and adopts modern C++ in its place? If so, it's a very cool development! :)
- aw1621107 4y agoNope, Qt 6 still uses moc. I don't think modern C++ metaprogramming is quite capable of entirely replacing moc. The closest thing I'm aware of is [0], but it requires additional macros compared to what moc requires, and compilation speed can suffer. Chances are moc won't be dropped until full reflection lands, if ever, and even then if compilation speed is too bad I wouldn't be entirely surprised if moc remains. [0]: https://github.com/woboq/verdigris https://github.com/woboq/verdigris
- justin66 4y agoApart from just not having all the widgets, why do you think CopperSpice falls short? Getting rid of the moc was pretty much the first thing they accomplished.
- jchw 4y agoIt is possible to get rid of moc by manually writing out the equivalent code (using macros or not) or gutting out features that require it. Qt uses it to do things that would otherwise not be possible, like expose QObjects to scripting languages. That requires reflection that modern C++ doesn't support and thus needs either redundancy of some kind (to generate the necessary metadata to do 'reflection') or code generation (to generate the necessary metadata to do 'reflection'). MOC was never simply superfluous.
- jcelerier 4y ago> Getting rid of the moc was pretty much the first thing they accomplished. but it's not a proper replacement. With Qt's moc you just annotate the class: class Foo { Q_OBJECT Q_SIGNAL void f(int a, int b); Q_INVOKABLE void g(int c, int d); }; with CopperSpice (and verdigris, and anything else that does not use an external code generator) you have to repeat all the names and use much more macros: class Foo { CS_OBJECT(Foo) CS_SIGNAL_1(Public, void f(int a, int b)); CS_SIGNAL_2(f, a, b); CS_INVOKABLE_METHOD_1(Public, void g(int c, int d)); CS_INVOKABLE_METHOD_2(g, c, d); };
- shmerl 4y agoNice! I was waiting for this to happen so $HOME/.kde would be finally removed for good.
- IYasha 4y agoI celebrate these news with a bit of unease. I've heard a lot of criticism regarding Qt 6 licensing policy. And personally I'd rather prefer more stability.
- sho_hn 4y agoThe licensing policy in Qt 6 isn't really changed vs. 5 -- the change that upset the community was the commercial-only LTS releases, which started with 5.15. KDE has been maintaining Qt 5.15 by itself with the "KDE Qt Patch Collection" since then, as the 5.15.y bugfix releases are commercial-only for a year before they get released as open source. In Qt 6 the situation is theoretically better as you get a new 6.x feature release faster than that one-year wait period, whereas 5.15 was the end of the line for Qt 5. The commercial-only also only happens after the first two bugfix releases, so there should be no significant waiting periods without releases. If the general quality of Qt releases is sufficiently high, the Patch Collection effort may no longer be needed. That said, The Qt Company remains a topic of concern, publishing (also on LinkedIn by employees, with lame/thin "does not necessarily represent my employer's opinion" disclaimers) lots of "why open source software is scary" content lately, apparently unaware that the only reason anyone cares about their product is its open source pedigree and credibility: https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free This is probably a reaction to competition by the BSD-licensed Flutter which has seen a lot of interest from their traditional commercial audience. Doubling down on "we're less open source" as a differentiator vs. _Google_ of all companies is quite a mind-bender. Also considering licensing/open source is why Flutter is getting that attention in the first place, and that Qt could tell a fantastic story here if it wanted to.
- LorenDB 4y ago> That said, The Qt Company remains a topic of concern, publishing (also on LinkedIn by employees, with lame/thin "does not necessarily represent my employer's opinion" disclaimers) lots of "why open source software is scary" content lately, apparently unaware that the only reason anyone cares about their product is its open source pedigree and credibility: https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free I don't think that article is really pushing for Qt to go closed source; rather, they're just trying to sell commercial subscriptions in order to make money (after all, the Qt Company has to stay alive somehow). And Schnieder makes it clear that building your stuff opensource is not a bad idea in many situations; he's just promoting Qt's commercial subscriptions (which IMO really are probably nice for corporations who want priority support and who don't want to deal with licensing issues).
- filereaper 4y agoAnyone know how we can provide features and sponsor them for KDE 6. I've wanted to pin virtual desktops to a specific monitor (same as i3) and be able to independently switch virtual desktops on each monitor. Its a widely requested feature which hasn't landed, I was hoping to get this on their radar and if necessary pay for this feature. Its something that's been bothering me since KDE 3 days.
- shinyeye4 4y agoIf you're on X, there's no reason why you shouldn't just use i3 on the top of Plasma. https://github.com/avivace/dotfiles https://github.com/avivace/dotfiles
- LorenDB 4y agoI suppose you could mail one of the KDE mailing lists[0] to ask about this. Probably you want either kde or kde-devel. [0]: https://kde.org/support/mailinglists/ https://kde.org/support/mailinglists/
- postcert 4y agoThe one thing holding me back from switching to KDE in full. The hacks and Kwin scripts just simply aren’t enough. If you find out more on this (solutions or ticket to sponsor) please update!
- b112 4y agoTake a look at TDE/Trinity. I do not know if it does as you wish, but it is a fork of kde2, with enhancements, and they are actually open to actual, usable, needed change.
- 0xDEF 4y agoDoes Autodesk still only use the LGPL licensed Qt to avoid paying a single cent to The Qt Company? I think it's weird that big megacorps don't actively support the very foundation their software is built upon.
- Pet_Ant 4y agoSomeone has to sign the cheque. That number is going to come off of their results. The tragedy of the commons happens within companies as well.
- jacooper 4y agoHopefully KDE 6 has a modern theme, Plasma is very 2015.
- anthk 4y ago2015 it's modern enough. I use an IceWM style mimicking Motif and a Solaris 8 theme close to OpenLook/Motif, so anything which came later than 2008 looks the same to me.
- shrimp_emoji 4y agoThey need to update to modern design, a minimalist Apple GUI aimed at tablets.
- jacooper 4y agoLol, if you think Gnome is an apple copy, you haven't seen any of the new Chinese DEs. Also from experience, Gnome absolutely destroyes MacOS in usability, macOS is really crappy.
- midoridensha 4y ago>Also from experience, Gnome absolutely destroyes MacOS in usability, macOS is really crappy. This isn't exactly a high bar... Even Windows destroys MacOS in usability.
- abudabi123 4y agoThe authoritarian Windows PC in the workplace didn't let me dial the color the way I want. That was before the recent firings at Redmond. All window managers need to let users adjust the color, especially the absolute #ffffff white. Because eye hurts.
- brnt 4y agoLeave KDE alone! Seriously, it's the last DE that seems to be doing something else but to make everything ever flatter and more whitespacier. I like the slight retro touch to Breeze, makes everthing more visible.
- butz 4y agoI wonder how long will it take for all major KDE apps to move to Qt 6? Or is this trivial, as they are using KDE libraries?
- sho_hn 4y agoKDE's apps Plasma use the same set of libraries (KDE Frameworks), and Plasma only made this move after the Qt 6 port of the libraries achieved a certain level of maturity. This in turn has also enabled many app ports already. In a way, the Plasma bits are a somewhat later step in this campaign as some of the hardest to port pieces that need the most supporting infrastructure. You can check up on overall KDE-wide progress here: https://iskdeusingqt6.org/ https://iskdeusingqt6.org/
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoWill that finally give me ISO dates in all my kde programs (mainly dolphin)?