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KDE Ships First Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace
- mikevm 12y agoThe black font over the grey window. The buttons with the cartoon icons. The hideous tray icons. Sheer ugliness. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop.
- KerrickStaley 12y agoHave you tried GNOME 3?
- mikevm 12y agoNot yet. Is it worth it?
- miloshadzic 12y agoIt is the most polished Linux desktop IMO.
- Arnor 12y agoI thought Gnome 3 wasted a lot of screen real estate. I recently tried going back to XFCE and found I missed Unity. They dragged me kicking and screaming, but I've come to like it afterall.
- rthomas6 12y agoHave you tried Cinnamon? It also uses gtk3 but it's a more traditional layout. Cinnamon desktop is my favorite out of the desktops I've tried.
- miloshadzic 12y agoProbably all of the options waste a lot of screen by default. Elementary would be an exception. I was thinking more about just general polish.
- andor 12y agoI thought Gnome 3 wasted a lot of screen real estate Fonts are quite large by default. I usually set the font scaling factor to 0.9 with gnome-tweak-tool, this also reduces the size of the top panel. Since 3.10, the tendency for apps is to save space by placing buttons directly in the window title bars. For example, this is what Nautilus looks like in 3.12: http://imgur.com/3a4zIfQ http://imgur.com/3a4zIfQ
- ossreality 12y agoI love KDE. They've completely dropped the ball so far in ditching their design baggage and starting fresh. Meanwhile, everything in GNOME 3 looks great out of the box and is just smooth and slick. But I hate client side decorations and GTK+. Come on KDE devs, this is a steal.
- asolove 12y agoYou forgot to mention the blue shadow on the active window.
- scrollaway 12y agoWhat about it? Go in the settings and change it to vermillion-fuchsia with a hint of magenta if you so please. I'd like to know what's wrong with a blue shadow that indicates an active window.
- lucisferre 12y agoI'll bite. It's completely over the top, looks like a radioactive comic book character.
- scrollaway 12y agoIt's useful. It displays what window is focused. It's not just there to look pretty, it's also functional.
- lucisferre 12y agoExcept it isn't pretty it's actually horrendous. Function and form are equals.
- nly 12y agoThat's current with KDE 4.1x as well, with the Oxygen theme. Generally KDE looks a lot better with desktop effects enabled. All the gradients and halos make sense with transparency.
- samyxp17 12y agoPretty hard to believe that this is the best that the KDE Visual Design Team - http://vdesign.kde.org/index.html http://vdesign.kde.org/index.html could come up with. Are they even trying hard enough ? This is 2014, the post PC era and they are delivering something that looks like windows 95. UX innovation == O. Boring, lame. Window 8 was clearly a mess but at least Microsoft is trying something.
- Spittie 12y agoIgnore everything that's not the wallpaper or the taskbar, those are the only items that got touched by the KDE VDT for now. The Windows are still using the old Oxygen theme. You can see some of the work going on in the widget/decorator theme in some blog posts of the VDT: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/05/monday-report-14-lazyit-edition.html http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/05/monday-report-14-lazy... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-12-amazement.html http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-12-amaz... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-11-go-time.html http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-11-go-t...
- pestaa 12y agoDo they have an ETA on these upgrades? Seems I can't find it in these reports.
- Spittie 12y agoNo ETA, as far as I know. I think the plan is to ship it with the second release of KDE5, but it's information gathered from the forum, not official words.
- dvirsky 12y agoAwesome! That theme looks like a huge step forward. Overall KDE still feels a bit cluttered to me, but at least that clutter won't be so ugly anymore soon!
- JasonFruit 12y agoDo we need UX innovation? Whenever I hear about something lacking "UX innovation", the specifics just point out where it's ugly. I'd like to know what the problems are that you'd like to have solved; I've been using KDE for the last several months, and my experience as a user has been excellent.
- rthomas6 12y agoCinnamon for me. It's a gtk3 desktop, but I can actually figure out how to do things in it.
- collyw 12y agoCinnamon is nice, but it had a habit of chewing up a load of CPU for no apparent reason on my machines. XFCE is fast, easy and stable, and doesn't try to do anything too fancy.
- scrollaway 12y ago> I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop. And I can't believe I'm saying this on hacker news but there is a difference between "polished" and "subjectively ugly". What's wrong with the "cartoon icons"? They look like Windows 7 icons. You know Windows 7, right? A lot of people called it "Microsoft's most polished desktop ever".
- jbeja 12y agoYeah..those people are not me and probaly anyone i know, so don't even care.
- mwfunk 12y agoThe point is that this confuses a purely subjective statement that is more about the observer than the observed (such as, "I don't like the style of the icons"), with an attempted objective statement (such as, "KDE is not polished") which is supposed to be purely about the thing being discussed rather than the tastes of person making the comment. AFAICT this is at the root of pretty much all pointless arguments about anything remotely technical on the Internet. Put another way, if X is designed to do Y, you can't say "X sucks" just because Y isn't interesting to you. You might say, "X is a bad implementation of Y". You might say, "I don't like Y therefore I don't use X". You might discuss whether or not Y is a valid goal, or whether or not X does a good job of achieving Y, but any serious discussion about anything requires that everyone involved make an effort to recognize that X and Y are two completely different things. The key here is "serious discussion". If people don't want to seriously discuss this, then by all means just post opinions about whether or not something is good at what it does based on how well it matches up with your particular tastes and requirements. But the whole point of HN ought to be that everyone makes at least a token effort to seriously discuss this stuff. You can go anywhere if you just want to have conversations about what sucks and what rules and leave it at that.
- jbeja 12y agoYou draw a lot a words out my comment just for the sake of comment something that you got on your mind even before i commented on this thread. Regardless i am mostly agree with you. But i don't have the energy nor mood to discuss anything that i am not even involve with, and there is nothing wrong to feel that way.IMHO,if you truly want to bring a meaningful discussion go to the source of this project and with the poeople that are interested on working on it, instead something so ephimeral like this thread.
- sixothree 12y agoI really do like Unity, but I just can't stand the default choice of colors; and finding a good scheme seems difficult for me.
- donniezazen 12y agoKDE is an enormously big project. There is only one theme Oxygen that is feature full. It is a humongous task to make every element of it beautiful and it won't happen without your help.
- dscrd 12y agoWhen in actuality the most polished Linux desktop is the ones that give you a simplicity experience unmatched by the competition. I would look for awesome and i3. If only somebody made one of these things easier to configure, that'd be the sweet spot.
- johnwalker 12y agoI like the new look. What is the icon in the bottom-right and top-left for?
- qbrass 12y agoIt's probably the options menu for that element. KDE4 used a crescent shaped thing. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png
- adrianlmm 12y agoThere are so many things wrong in that screenshot, but since is work in progress, I'll hold any critic till the final versión.
- truncate 12y agoI always loved how configurable KDE is and prefer it over others. I somehow always felt more comfortable using KDE than say Unity or Gnome. Its very stable , fluid and fast now as well. However, there are certain problems that just don't seem to be addressed much - 1. Cartoonish or early 2000's looking icons. They simply are not pleasing to eyes any more. 2. Lack of UI widget themes. Although there is plethora of colour schemes and window decorations, which I hardly care about. What I want is complete themes, with different widgets. Its just Oxygen or Windows 98 kinda themes. GTK has really strong community in this case. 3. I don't know how to put this, but most kde apps (except base apps) feel overloaded. This is common complaint too I guess. I'm not asking that they should do what GNOME is doing, but there must be something that can be done. When I use Windows, many apps still have a lot of functions but still manage to look better. I think some of this can be addressed by building a better widget set - (better tabs, toolbars with smaller icons and less whitespace overall) Overall my complaint is 90% about how it looks.
- Spittie 12y ago1. I don't really like Oxygen too, I always just install KFaenza. The design team is working on a new icon set for KDE5 too (http://wheeldesign.blogspot.it/2014/02/monday-report-4.html http://wheeldesign.blogspot.it/2014/02/monday-report-4.html). 2. I agree too, but you have a third and fourth option, QtCurve and Bespin. Personally I'm quite happy with the Aeri theme (http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Aeri+?content=162303 http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Aeri+?content=162303). Screen: http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094470.png http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094470.png The design team is working on a new widget theme too, I think it's going to look kinda similar to Aeri (from what I gather on the forum, at least). There's also Fusion, which is the Qt5 default theme and it's really nice. 3. I agree as well, some applications are just confusing and overwhelming out of the box. You don't even have to look at 3rd party applications, Amarok and Gwenview are a good example and are base applications. Thankfully usually it's possible to hide away most of the stuff (This is how I've configured them, http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094841.png http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094841.png and http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094897.png http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094897.png, I like to think that I've got a "clean" effect). But, to be honest, I'd rather have applications that have tons of features and shove them in my face than oversimplified applications that have no settings/features.
- msoad 12y agoI want to switch to Linux as my primary desktop but they are not appealing to me. Specially if you're a OSX user, you need a really good desktop environment to convince yourself. Why all Linux desktops still look like Windows 98? Is it too hard to remove all those shadows and make the UI a bit lighter?
- ohm 12y agoThere's Elementaryos http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ Crunchbang if you like minimal desktop http://crunchbang.org/ http://crunchbang.org/
- nileshtrivedi 12y agoWhy are these entire operating systems instead of simply themes for GNOME/KDE/XFCE/Unity? Edit: Never mind. I checked the links.
- asabjorn 12y agoHave you had a look at Gnome 3? - http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ I find their aesthetic pleasing and minimal, and stuff generally gets out of my way. To me it feel Mac-ish in its simplicity.
- jamesbritt 12y agoWhy all Linux desktops still look like Windows 98? Pretty much all Linux desktop choices make it easy to change to some other pre-installed theme. Plus it's usually easy to tweak any theme you select.
- randallsquared 12y agoUnity doesn't look like Win98. But there are a lot of UIs that don't work like Windows (KDE) or Mac (Unity or Elementary, sorta). For example, I use i3, which drops the "desktop" abstraction completely in favor of fully tiling the screen with windows.
- jbeja 12y agoI begin to think that people that compare Linux's desktop like Unity, KDE, GNOME, Pantheon, etc with Windows 95, or 98 are just trolling around and shouldn't be taken seriously.
- kolev 12y agoFeels like '95 again.
- reaand 12y agosorry to say, but it still looks ugly. get half of a visual designer guys....
- Htsthbjig 12y agoLinux needs professional designers as it needs programmers. It remembers me to Enligtenment old themes, a genius programmer but horrible designer, the theme the KDE people are displaying is hideous, not consistence at all. The people that designed this thing has no training in visual arts whatsoever. I have to agree that Unity looks better than this. Where is Everaldo when we need him?
- johng 12y agoDoes anyone else still wish that some of the OS's would look more like BeOS did/does?
- qbrass 12y agohttps://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/so_i_got_bored_while_waiting_haiku_mature https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/so_i_got_bored_whil...
- y0ghur7_xxx 12y agoI'm using KDE 4.13, and I really love it. I think it's the most usable and polished Linux desktop out there. Downloading the beta now. Thanks KDE Team. I love you.
- azinman2 12y agoOi vey. I love how the settings has a quit and help, somehow different from the ? and X in the upper right? And they have a design team now? Has any of their work gone into that screenshot? I don't mean to be so dismissive of OSS work, but at this point why even bother building such a non-competitive product stuck in time? If you can't do any better, just copy. There are so many talented graphic designers out there that even if the UX blows, at least it could look pretty.
- DrinkWater 12y agoI dont know if it is just me, but it looks really outdated.