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KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace
- johnchristopher 12y agoBased on the screenshots it seem KDE devs tone down their interface to simpler visuals (icons, colours, shades and all the blingbling I usually associate KDE with). Is that the trend for the next iteration of KDE ? (I like it)
- veeti 12y agoYes, they have a new design project: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/ http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/ Although in my opinion their work hasn't exactly been a huge improvement so far. It's just a flatter coat of paint with the same issues that already plague KDE: inconsistent padding and spacing, terrible organization (think system settings) and so on.
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoYou link to a blog and yet you apparently don't read it. KDE System Settings is being redisigned as well. Just scroll down a bit: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings-and-new-vdg-members.html http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings-and-n... The redesign is not in this beta and, depending how long it takes, maybe won't make it into the first final release either. Partially it's even by design. It's not intended that Plasma 5 diverges too much from the current release to ease the transition.
- nailer 12y agoNice: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings-and-new-vdg-members.html http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings-and-n... That said, at the top level the breadcrumbs on the left aren't needed.
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoI bet your voice is better heard over at the VDG forum on kde.org ;-)
- nailer 12y agoThat's not me, that's a well known general design principle: "It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away." I did a lot of Linux desktop stuff 10 years ago. Now I feel most of the action takes place inside the browser. KDE's biggest contribution to computing will always be KHTML.
- ama729 12y agoI have to say, this[1] looks downright impressive. Congrats everyone! Edit: To add a bit more to the conversation, does the change from Canonical to Blue Systems[2] changed much to the development of Kubuntu/KDE? [1] https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-asFPvnoidnw/U4cXbGCcv2I/AAAAAAAAM3I/dEIyVSNFf_w/s1600/SystemSettings-New_zpsce8cb0ac.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-asFPvnoidnw/U4cXbGCcv2I/AAAAAAAAM... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoCanonical never contributed much to KDE. Yes, a few bits here and there but overall mostly negligible. Blue Systems OTOH is a big KDE contributor. Things like KDE Search improved a lot thanks to Blue's involvement. As for Kubuntu: It appears to me that mostly the same people are involved with it. The only KDE thing mostly specific to Kubuntu is Muon (and that's being ported to Debian as we speak). Everything else by Blue Systems is AFAIK cross-distro. The Kubuntu guys already announced that Canonical's own display server Mir is not an option. Therefore it remains to be seen how feasible Kubuntu remains with Canonical pushing a Wayland competitor.
- baldfat 12y agoOnly my opinion and probably wrong BUT KUbuntu = Worst KDE integration and the cause for why so many people have a negative view of KDE! OpenSUSE = Best KDE integration
- veeti 12y agoYes, I read it and I know the settings are being redesigned. The system settings is just one example and perhaps the most egregious. It's also the one that is still a constant annoyance after years of using KDE when trying to find something.
- vacri 12y agoTry a different heavy DE and see if you can even find the settings these days. I hadn't used KDE since back when they first released 4 and have just started using it again. I'm loving it - a heavyweight DE where things are properly integrated (sorry XFCE and similar) and that you can actually personally tune the settings for. The settings can be a little difficult to find... but at least they're there to be found :)
- keithpeter 12y agoXubuntu 14.04, xfwm-whisker-menu bound to Super-Space, Finding settings: Press Super-and-Space type 'set...' Gnome 3.x, just about any version, e.g. RHEL7 RC Finding settings: Press Super, type 'set...' Windows 8 Press Windows key, type 'control' Windows 7 Press Windows key and letter R and type 'control' Seriously, each of us uses what we find best and produces work. Settings tend to be easy to find these days
- wlesieutre 12y agoWindows key and type 'control' applies on Windows 7 as well. When the start menu opens, the search box has focus.
- keithpeter 12y agoThanks, could not remember (at home, no Win7 machine)
- vacri 12y agoSeriously, it was a rhetorical statement that didn't mean "no-one can literally find the settings", but "you're not allowed to change much these days". Gnome 3.x in particular is horribly bad. KDE allows a lot of tweaking.
- leorocky 12y agoTheir icons are not good. Too glassy and cartoony and too many gradients. They don't look modern, they look like icons for a kids app from 10 years ago.
- zanny 12y agoThey are planning to adopt Font Awesome as the default icon theme. Right now they are still using the old Oxygen set. And at that, you can pick your own icon themes anyway. There are Hycons, Numix, Faenza, etc. I do agree defaults matter and the Oxygen icon set is gaudy, but it shouldn't stop an HN user from trying it since you can change them.
- zanny 12y agoNote that the wheeldesigners are just making a new default theme. With minor tweaks all kde 4 series themes are still usable. Also, the inconsistencies are mostly due to app developers themselves. The difference between plasma and the software compilation can exemplify that - you use two entirely different application stacks if you are developing for one or the other (qt widgets enhanced by kdelibs vs qml enhanced by plasma). And then there are multiple ways to actually develop the app interfaces - you can use anchor based widgets, ui files, or raw custom positioning which I find in reviewing a lot of codebases a bit too common for my liking. When I have the time I try to fix it, though. The problem right now is that while the Qt world's future is QML based, the KDE applications and libraries were developed for over a decade around widgets. So when I develop something new I'm using QML and it can scale, animate, and orient really well for arbitrary window sizes and devices, but some widgets applications just anchor a toolbar to 50px indents and then it looks like puke on high DPI. I mean you can still do that in QML, but the anchors and layouts are so easy to use it seems insane to do so.
- pestaa 12y agoI hope this trend continues. Mainstream desktop environments sort of lost their roots. I never wanted widgets, I just need to organize my windows!
- davidgerard 12y agoIs Xfce mainstream yet? It's pretty popular for a non-default desktop - I can't find the cite, but I have a vague memory of something like 16% of Ubuntu being Xubuntu.
- pestaa 12y agoIn Linux circles, I'd say yes, it's pretty well known. It used to be my choice of DE, but takes a lot of tinkering and is not as feature complete as KDE is (which is a plus for others, I suspect).
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoIt's mainstream in the sense that the Gnome community fragmented so much in recent years (see Mate and Cinnamon "spin offs") that these days Xfce has roughly the same mind share as Gnome -- if the recent poll on Slashdot it any indication. http://slashdot.org/poll/2751/which-desktop-environment-do-you-like-the-best http://slashdot.org/poll/2751/which-desktop-environment-do-y...
- velodrome 12y agoNo, XFCE development is very slow. Last I checked, I think they still working on GTK 3 support. LXDE/Lubuntu is probably closer to that "16%." I can get <200M initial RAM usage pretty easily with LXDE. XFCE is really not that lightweight. They are both pretty lacking compared to current versions of GNOME/KDE.
- vacri 12y agoDebian is currently considering shifting it's default desktop to XFCE, as guh-nome has taken some ridiculous turns for the worse. It'd be a good step for XFCE, as it'd start getting a lot more attention to the areas where the integration is lacking.
- Touche 12y agoBut they're still using those gaudy start menu icons that looked gaudy 5 years ago.
- zanny 12y agoThe developers intend to adopt Font Awesome as the icon theme, they are just designing all the missing icons in the background right now. Which probably includes the start menu icons. And remember you can change the icon theme. Numix, Faenza, and Hycons are all popular alternatives available already. Though I'm still using the Oxygen icons on kde4 because all those themes are missing swathes of icons...
- jacquesm 12y agoKDE is slowly losing ground. It used to be my desktop of choice but that was in the knoppix days. Now there is of course Kubuntu but I switched (more or less by accident rather than by design) a while ago and I don't think I'll be switching back. My desktop is practically invisible to me anyway, all I run on a normal workday is firefox, a terminal window and thunderbird. The one piece of software from the KDE distro that I really love is Konsole.
- andmarios 12y agoIf you love Konsole, give yakuake a try. It is Konsole in quake fashion; you press F12 and a terminal drops down. I can't imagine life without it.
- dikei 12y agoI absolutely love yakuake. One of the reason why I'm still using KDE.
- ableal 12y agoI liked Konqueror as a web browser. Nice touches such as stopping image animations ...
- Zardoz84 12y agoRekonq it's like a faster and lightweight Chrome
- intull 12y agoI like KDE a lot for its UI/UX. KDE actually has the potential to intuitively replace Windows in many households with shared systems and also in educational institutions. But the only major problem with KDE is that its very heavy and takes a lot of resources. Does the next generation workspace just change the UI/UX or optimize stuff too? The post doesn't talk much about that.
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoActually more optimization is taking place than visual refreshes. Porting the stuff to Qt5 (esp. QtQuick2) should speed everything up on non-ancient PCs. Visual refreshes are just easier to explain. ;-)
- intull 12y agoIts not speed I'm bothered about. KDE is more or less very smooth at that. Its the resources it takes! The CPU is always nearly being utilized on a small-medium scale, and nearly 700mb is taken away at boot-time and gathers upto 2gb upon usage. That's too high, at least I think so. Would KDE actually require so much for all the features it gives or can that actually come down?
- cubancigar11 12y agoKDE devs are known to live on the bleeding edge. A lot of people complained about it when KDE moved from v1 to v2, v2 to v3 and v3 to v4. But KDE remains targeted to 'relatively recent' desktops. It might not be that big of a problem this time around, when(ever) we move from v4 to v5, because hardware isn't evolving as fast as it used to. But KDE will remain a behemoth.
- milliams 12y agoWhy would it matter if a piece of software uses CPU and RAM if it doesn't negatively affect the performance of the system?
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- oridecon 12y agoKickstart me some decent icons already, geez. I think it's the number one complain every single time somebody opens a KDE thread. Anyway, I don't use KDE but I think it does a lot of good things and I wish them luck. Using XFCE right now and couldn't be happier. Also: they could take a very clean approach, like really minimal design and leverage their customization options (that they are famous for) to a few themes and let the community do the rest. Like "sane defaults" that don't scare newbies. I know it's not easy.
- gnufied 12y agoAbout 4 years ago, I switched from KDE/Kubuntu to OSX. Not because I hated KDE, but because my job needed OSX. It takes divvy, sizeup, apptivate, bartenderapp to do, what I was able to do with KDE out of box. The dual monitor support in OSX is still not in par with KDE. I have been using Kubuntu/KDE as my main workstation for last couple of months and I love depth of how much is possible with window environment. I think KDE works pretty well for powerusers as well as beginners and I am excited to see its new update!
- pestaa 12y agoI was constantly surprised how KDE makes it possible to configure my environment exactly the way I like, while maintaining a bearable level of complexity in the control panel. Really excited to see this visual update.
- tenken 12y agoand yet every OSX diehard will think you're on crack and KDE is inferior.
- mwfunk 12y agoYou are correct sir. People who prefer OS X to KDE will prefer OS X to KDE, and people who prefer KDE to OS X will prefer KDE to OS X. Funny how it works out that way. :)
- micampe 12y agoPlease don’t stir conflict by only reasoning in terms superior and inferior. Things are different, no need to order them, especially on one single axis.
- mwfunk 12y agoYou made the point I was trying to make far better than I did. Whether or not it's the poster's intent, the terms superior and inferior imply that there is some objective judgement being made about the thing being discussed that is independent of one's personal preferences. I honestly think that almost all pointless flamewars in tech forums about the relative merits of various languages/operating systems/editors/desktop environments/whatever stem from confusion among the participants over whether personal preferences or objective qualities are being discussed. It doesn't help that for a lot of people in the larval hacker stage, there is no distinction between objective and subjective judgements- if they happen to prefer vi to emacs, they interpret that as meaning that vi is intrinsically better in some way, and isn't just a better fit for their particular workflow or whatever.
- jbert 12y agoIs there an easy way with KDE4/dbus to get functionality similar to KDE3/dcop? Example task: 1) inspect running konsole task to find exposed interfaces 2) find one related to background colour 3) script up "change background colour to red in current konsole" command Last time I looked at the KDE+dbus situation (early KDE4) it seemed this was really hard.
- guard-of-terra 12y agoI hated dbus from the moment it was conceived. Even if we forget Gnome's track record for infrastructure, it was notoriously command-line-hostile. So I guess DCOP is bye bye and dbus is no good.
- catern 12y agoYes. An easy way for someone not familiar with dbus: Use d-feet (should be in your repos) to find the running Konsole and the relevant interface, activate it and play around with it inside d-feet, and then activate it on the command line with dbus-send (you'll need to read dbus-send(1) to get the syntax). Or you could try: https://code.google.com/p/dbus-tools/wiki/DBusCli https://code.google.com/p/dbus-tools/wiki/DBusCli or http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/609 http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/609
- emilsedgh 12y agoOf course. It's DBUS. You can trigger dbus functions using QDbus. `qdbus org.kde.konsole` shows you available functionality. Browse through it.
- jbert 12y agoThanks. qdbusviewer shows some available interfaces. Looks like a bunch of konsole stuff never got implemented as dbus interfaces in KDE4. This specific use case seems to be covered by the konsoleprofile command (I wonder why the devs chose that route instead of exposing a dbus interface).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sjtrny 12y agoWhat sort of machine are you using that causes a desktop environment to use a non negligible amount of system resources?
- riquito 12y agoNormal people don't think "how many CPU cycles does this DE use?". They look for familiar, frictionless, easy to use and pleasant to the eye interfaces. If you're happy with dwm, good for you. I'm happy with xmonad. DE are made for the majority of people, not for nerd.
- XorNot 12y agoAlso "lightweight" gets too much play in Linux UI circles. What people actually mean, I think, is "not janky and broken". Heck, why is Linux Mint exciting? Because it's explicitely not trying to revolutionize anything, they're just trying to make the basic idea work as well as possible.
- Daishiman 12y agoWhat do you use to control application volumes and audio routes when using dwm?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jcromartie 12y agoThis screenshot: http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/plasma50b2-networks.png http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/plasma50b2-netw... Is this supposed to illustrate the "beta-ness" of the release? Because it's an atrocious UI. Two different-sized "wrench" icons next to each other? What are those checkboxes for? What does the little blue bar above the wireless symbol supposed to indicate? The blue lock is lost in the wireless icon in the network list (the eye is terrible at distinguishing blue shapes on a noisy background like that). It goes on and on...
- eyko 12y agoI think it's just supposed to illustrate that this is KDE. Speaking as a past KDE user (and with zero experience of KDE in the past 7 years or more) I would say that each wrench is for a different purpose. Maybe one leads to Network Settings and the other lets you configure the widget. At least that's how using KDE used to feel back in the days.
- Touche 12y agoThe blue bar above the wireless symbol (guessing) indicates that the menu is open. Agree with your other points though.
- Yaggo 12y agoKDE versions 1-3 were great piece of software. Remember kioslave's support for ssh/sftp? Awesome stuff. The current state of the project makes me sad.
- emilsedgh 12y agofish/sftp/ftp/smb, all the KIO Slaves are still here, working fine on KDE4 and are all ported to KF5 as well.
- mpyne 12y ago> Remember kioslave's support for ssh/sftp? Yes, such support is still there. In fact, it's even easier to get to than it was in KDE 3 (where you effectively had to be good at understanding how KDE converted URIs into kioslave requests).
- Sharphunter 12y agoThe latest update really disappointed. I'd rather re-built the distro myself.
- aruggirello 12y agoI'm enthusiast of KDE. Keep up the good work guys! BTW I'm using KDevelop to edit PHP. It's come a long way since its introduction, and is now almost on par (feature-wise) with Netbeans, which makes it the second best free PHP IDE for Linux!
- doktrin 12y agoI think what strikes me about DE upgrades like this is that they don't appear to add anything fundamentally new or promise to provide me with a meaningfully improved or more efficient experience. For my part - ever since switching to i3, I can't really see myself using any other WM. Once I got used to not touching the mouse, I lost all desire to use a traditional mouse centric GUI.
- pestaa 12y agoI use KDE at work and rarely touch the mouse to switch between windows. I have two monitors, and a couple of keyboard shortcuts, but power-usage comes with a price. I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too.
- doktrin 12y ago> I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too. IIRC, the only real tinkering I did was to re-jig the navigation shortcuts to resemble VIM bindings. From a user's perspective i3 is comparable to xmonad, but configuration wise it's an order of magnitude simpler. i3 does, however, come at a price. Not being inside a fully functional DE means a lot of normally trivial tasks require active thought and engagement, at least at first, since they will have to either be handled via the command line or by seeking out the correct application (e.g. managing wi-fi connections, handling dual-monitors & monitor rotation, etc.)
- KAMiKAZOW 12y ago> I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too. It needs a lot of tinkering once Wayland is the accepted standard.
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoThe focus for Plasma 5.0 is -- for the most part -- the port to Qt 5, not adding many new features (although there are a few new ones). Most new features will appear in subsequent Plasma releases.
- tormeh 12y agoCan I press super/win-key, type [name of application], press enter and it brings up the [application]? It didn't when I last tried, and I don't want a window manager that doesn't behave in that way. Windows, Gnome shell and Unity does it - it's not hard.
- klearvue 12y agoAlt+F2 in KDE to bring up KRunner but you can change it to whatever keys you like
- tormeh 12y agoNice. I don't get why they can't just use the super key by default like everyone else, but it's not a very big problem. Is it a fuzzy search? How does it handle "term" and "temrinal"?
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoThey can use the key. They just don't change default keyboard shortcuts during a release cycle (first generation Plasma precedes both Unity and Gnome Shell).
- Zardoz84 12y agoCorrect, but actually you can't setup Krunner (or any other KDE shortcut) to be launched pressing ONLY Super/Windows key.
- emidln 12y agoAlt+F2 does this. It's actually done this since at least KDE 2.x, maybe a bit earlier.
- noobSemanticist 12y agoI wish we had a way to run KDE on a retina MBP...
- gpo 12y agoFor God's sake. I don't care a dime about fancy UIs. I mean, I really, really, really don't care. I want a robust and reliable system that doesn't change all the time for no good reason. I want a worthy Outlook alternative. Outlook is much more than just an email client. Kontact, Evolution and Thunderbird+Lightning just aren't good enough (they're simply full of bugs and I've tried all 3 of them). Why waste all those manhours in useless ice candy and not improve those instead?
- edoloughlin 12y agoI don't care a dime about fancy UIs Neither do I. I love the fact that, after years of wasting pixels on 3D effects and shadows, we're moving beyond that. This release of KDE seems to be a step in that direction.
- KAMiKAZOW 12y agoPeople who develop desktop themes are NOT the same who program PIM software.
- gpo 12y agoYou're right. After all, what we're seeing here is just a small theme revamp.
- cmpaul 12y agoThis tickles me: "With a substantial new toolkit stack below come exciting new crashes and problems that need time to be shaken out." I think I'll refer to all crashes as "exciting" from now on.
- madprops 12y agoI see they got rid of that peanut to manage widgets in the panel. I never liked that.
- josephschmoe 12y agoI would be so happy if when companies make announcements, they included a link at the top telling you what their product is.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kozhevnikov 12y agoI found it hilarious that the first screenshot links to a thumbnail ending in '-wee.png' and goes to full size when 'wee' removed. I'm easily amused. Are developers Scottish?