7 ms·
KDE desktop cube effect returns
- tomrod 3y agoI have always loved this effect and was sad when I had an OS thst didn't support compiz. Yaye!
- vasdae 3y agohttps://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-kde-wayland-color-management-the-desktop-cube-returns-and-optional-shadows-in-spectacle/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-... KDE should pay attention to font families and sizes. This looks really cheap.
- JohnFen 3y agoIt does? It looks great to me: clear and very readable. What's cheap about it? Or, alternatively, what would not look cheap?
- gumballindie 3y agoFonts in screenshots do look a bit microsofty (cheap and low quality) to be honest. But fortunately fonts are trivial to install and change in kde.
- JohnFen 3y agoWhat qualities about it make is seem cheap and low quality to you? I'm genuinely curious, because I'm not understanding this...
- vasdae 3y agoIt has absolutely no personality. If you go to a font search engine and look for "plain" you probably get that one.
- JohnFen 3y agoSure, it's plain -- but that doesn't seem like a bad thing for a default font in a utilitarian UI. In any case, is it the lack of frills that makes it seem "cheap"?
- gumballindie 3y agoLooks thin and enlarged. Somehow “weak” - i dont know how else to describe it. Not a major issue, and is subjective. When i dont like fonts i just install others, its trivial.
- JohnFen 3y agoYes, I agree it's a trivial "issue". It's not even really an issue, especially because it's just a default that is easily changed to suit anyone's taste. I'm just interested in getting a glimpse of how others view the world.
- graphe 3y agoThe fonts look ugly to me as well. As I read the news on the middle east, I was distracted by the beauty of this font. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-account https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl... It is DISTRACTINGLY beautiful, especially the numbers. I'd rather have ugly fonts than forget everything but the way the numbers of people looked here.
- JohnFen 3y agoHuh. I guess I must be aesthetically impaired. That font doesn't look any more or less beautiful to me than the KDE one. It's just different. They're both fine to my eyes.
- graphe 3y agoIt's just my opinion. Yours is just as valid. The KDE font looks like a basic font with AA. Both are fine to me too, but this font was distracting to me. As a font it fails to convey as much information to me but I LOVE the text. This site is very SEO written but has great readability although the font I'd consider ugly, it's very usable and functional. https://www.linearity.io/blog/old-english-font/ https://www.linearity.io/blog/old-english-font/
- mibsl 3y agoTo me this one feels cluttered, way too much going on. Definitely distracting, but I wouldn't call it beautiful.
- continuational 3y agoI think the kerning is slightly off, looking at the end of the word "Their".
- sterlind 3y agorandom font tangent as an ignorant Westerner, but the Arabic writing system is incredibly beautiful, and there are many incredibly beautiful fonts, yet I often see fonts that look like they're welded together from PVC pipes. no slant at all, uniform weight, lots of circular bends. do these look ugly to native Arabic speakers too, or just to my Western aesthetics?
- ognarb 3y agoThe font used in Plasma is Noto Sans and the reason we (I'm a kde developer) use it is because it has a very large support for all language in the world, which makes it an appropriate default.
- jwells89 3y agoYeah, one of the first things I do on a KDE install is to set all the fonts to Inter[0]. It helps a lot but still doesn’t fix KDE’s selection of text sizes and weights which has always felt odd to me. [0]: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
- throw555chip 3y agoI like the the way KDE looks and operates, the fonts are clear and easy to read. Please KDE developers keep them as they are, KDE is great!
- spandextwins 3y agoYay! Haven't been able to use that since around 10 years ago! Welcome back, friend!
- bloopernova 3y agoOh boy that's a blast from the past. I really liked the Compiz Fusion cylinder effect with windows 3D hovering, I used that effect for both alt-tab and virtual desktop switching. It looked something like this, although I'm pretty sure mine was anti-aliased more effectively: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NPnXddu4LL4/UPRszBHQynI/AAAAAAAAAU8/ySnnfa-E2Q8/s1600/compiz-fusion.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NPnXddu4LL4/UPRszBHQynI/AAAAAAAAAU... Now I just use 3 monitors (| - - is a great layout, highly recommended) and switch windows using what was called Exposé and is now called Mission Control on macOS. I miss the experimentation; wobbly windows, flames, all sorts of zoom effects, and edge attraction effects.
- MegaDeKay 3y agoEffects like Wobbly Windows and Magic Lamp are still in KDE waiting for you to come back :-) Those are built in, and more effects are available for download from the settings window at the click of a button. I really appreciate the sense of whimsy that comes with stuff like this. Best of all, it is there if you want it and not if you don't.
- CSSer 3y agoHow about the window going up in flames on close?
- tekeous 3y agoWe have that too, it’s called BurnMyWindows in the KDE effects repo
- CSSer 3y agoThat’s such a blast from the past. It may seem frivolous, but it’s funny what draws a kid in. I spent a lot of time in middle school fussing with drivers to get hardware acceleration to run on crappy secondhand laptops, all so I could play with the cube, wobbly windows, and the flame effects. I had no idea it was doing this at the time, but it helped familiarize me with POSIX concepts that later gave me a jumpstart on my career.
- kelsey9876543 3y agoI remember how much I loved compiz and beryl in high school, my classmates always enjoyed watching me do assignments. I remember it becoming increasingly difficult to make work with OS releases and it forced me to just adopt a "normal" workspace based workflow, a 3 by 3 flat grid instead of the many sided cubes and shapes I used for compiz. I stayed on gtk2 longer than most people via mate, but now I mostly use Mac os with a flat 11 workspaces and it feels so limiting. I wish I could use a 3x3 workspace layout instead of a flat row of workspaces.
- qup 3y agoI can only really use two these days, although one of them is cheating --it's a terminal running tmux with four windows. But I would replace tmux with four terminals which would go on two workspaces (2 each). The other is my browser, of course. I was a full time developer working like this. Tmux was my workspace killer, but of course not everyone works in a terminal. But I still gotta ask, how are you making use of 11 workspaces?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI use 4-8 at a time by using one per task or activity type. So one for my main web browser, one per project I have going, one to throw tools like volume controls, another for each additional web browser profile.
- kossTKR 3y agoI easily use 9 as a full stack dev. 1) Coding apps 2) Dev browsers 3) Terminals 4) Sql /DB apps 5) FTP/File handling apps 6) Non work browsing / leisure 7) Specs and text 8) Graphics / Figma / Ps 9) Music / podcast player Once this is setup with shortcuts it becomes super fast to switch to DB-stuff, or terminal windows etc.
- o11c 3y agoI use 12, though if I'm using them correctly many are usually empty. I assign custom visible labels, for which I use just a single letter. Also I am very familiar with the custom shortcuts to switch desktops or move a window between them; I use the wrap-between-rows shortcuts for the left-right ones. On occasion, I've found that many non-KDE environments are very primitive, often supporting only a single row and not even wrapping around the ends! There's significant overlap compared to yours but I don't quite all of the dedicated app types you do. One thing I will note is that I don't have a desktop for music - I use VLC and collapse it to the systray (I've tried other players, but kept finding audio files that would break them, and also it was often tricky to make global keyboard controls work). Column 1: I = internet, for general-purpose browsing that doesn't fit elsewhere. A = application, for programs (including) that don't fit elsewhere R = reading, for blogs and stories, assuming they don't fit better elsewhere Column 2: C = code, D = debug (or was it documentation? I admit I'm sloppy within a column), E = ... I don't remember, but basically I use it if I need a third virtual desktop for code-related stuff Column 3: G = games, H = help (usually a wiki or walkthrough), J = journal (a place for me to record my own notes, since most games don't provide a builtin way to do that, and even if they do their primitive text editor usually sucks) Column 4: X = extra, Y, Z - in case I need another set.
- seltzered_ 3y ago"Here comes the hotstepper..." ( see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798448 for context linking to a popular video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ from 2007 demoing some cube effects alongside burning windows and such.)
- snvzz 3y agoIt is just added latency for questionable benefit. OTOH, it could actually be helpful to conceptualize the idea of virtual desktops. Once already used to virtual desktops, the cube becomes cruft.
- hnlmorg 3y agoIt’s fun. That’s benefit alone for a lot of people.
- tssva 3y ago"It is just added latency for questionable benefit." I guess it depends on how beneficial you consider whimsy. I'll trade a little efficiency for a little whimsy most days.
- JohnFen 3y agoFun is a valuable benefit.
- snvzz 3y agoAbsolutely. If you love it, go ahead. I remember I even used it without the switch animation, as the latency irritated me. Just to fiddle by manually grabbing the cube and spinning it, while thinking.
- kaba0 3y agoAnimations have a useful role - they provide often necessary visual cues on the context. For example, randomly jumping in a text page won’t tell you where you are now in relation to the previous position. Scrolling through does.
- Narishma 3y ago> For example, randomly jumping in a text page won’t tell you where you are now in relation to the previous position. That's what scrollbars used to be good at, before they were dumbed down for dubious aesthetic reasons.
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- t0mas88 3y agoI liked those effects back in the day, but have to admit I've set my macbook to "reduce motion" because it's faster to use with most effects disabled. For example alt-tabbing between spreadsheets to look at something while typing in another, the effects just waste your time at every window switch.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoSame goes for (Android) phones. If your phone ever starts to feel sluggish, just turn down animation durations.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThe problem is that animations happen before the transition instead of after. I would love to see more desktop animations that happen after a change. One idea I have is to make some waves around the window you alt-tabbed to.
- ognarb 3y agoOriginal source for this news: https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-kde-wayland-color-management-the-desktop-cube-returns-and-optional-shadows-in-spectacle/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-...
- khobragade 3y agoPeople on Gnome, try this rn it's great fun https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4648/desktop-cube/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4648/desktop-cube/
- 7thaccount 3y agoRotating cube!! I remember playing with this 15 years ago on KDE. Unfortunately I only used Linux for hobby reasons, so I never had many tabs or applications open often enough to really make use of it. Does Windows finally have this rotating workspaces and maybe I'm just not aware?
- joshuaissac 3y ago> Does Windows finally have this rotating workspaces and maybe I'm just not aware? There used to be a Windows program called Yod'm 3D that did this. https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-yodm-3d-windows-255448 https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-yodm-3d-windows-2... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLulkmwvwis https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLulkmwvwis
- 7thaccount 3y agoThanks. I use Windows for work, so it's not worth the effort trying to get this type of thing past the IT folks.
- jwells89 3y agoThe first place I saw effects like this was in OS X 10.4 Tiger, where fast user switching (switching users without logging out logged in users) utilized a rotating 3D cube transition a lot like the desktop cube (just without gaps on the cube edges and the camera looking straight on instead from an upper angle). I thought it was a bit of a brilliant metaphor for multiple users, with each user’s desktop representing a different “face” of the computer, and switching users is an infrequent enough of a thing that the effect doesn’t become grating. It’s a bummer they removed the effect a few releases ago. Full-on compiz effects with burning windows and all isn’t quite my thing, but I think that modern desktops would benefit a lot from judicious usage of “fancy” animations that go beyond the bog standard fade and scale effects. If designed well they can communicate a lot to users.
- phendrenad2 3y agoWow! I thought it would never happen. Good to see some people still value fun in the community.
- layer8 3y agoI always found those effects where you show on a 2D display a 3D view of a 2D UI to be like a weird category error for a GUI.
- appleaday1 3y agoyes
- aeonik 3y agoNixie Pixel was the first person I saw on the Internet that introduced to me this 10+ years ago. Loved that old tricked out desktop. https://youtube.com/@NixiePixel?si=YZ3b-gHNAb1_m0Tv https://youtube.com/@NixiePixel?si=YZ3b-gHNAb1_m0Tv
- winrid 3y agohttps://github.com/KDE/kdeplasma-addons/tree/master/kwin/effects/cube https://github.com/KDE/kdeplasma-addons/tree/master/kwin/eff...
- yellow_lead 3y agoI'm looking forward to Plasma 6, which also fixes night color mode on Wayland. Have to wait a few months though. > Plasma 6 is built on top of Qt 6 and is scheduled to be released in early February 2024. This page outlines important information and major changes coming in Plasma 6.
- boredumb 3y agowhat a trip, when i was a young'n I learned a lot about linux by breaking my display trying to get compiz fusion to decorate my terminals and turn into a cylinder.
- filereaper 3y agoSort of related but if anyone wants to step into a time-machine when Compiz/Beryl were the eyecandy there's this video from 17 years ago... https://youtu.be/lawkc3jH3ws?si=l6yu98DEnSxdZFRu https://youtu.be/lawkc3jH3ws?si=l6yu98DEnSxdZFRu
- nicholasbraker 3y agoThere used to be such a feature on Macs also. Either native in one of the old OS X versions are via a plug-in of some sort. Anyone knows if this is till possible on the latest OS X release?