8 ms·

KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown

91 points by bondia 12y ago

jfreax 12y ago
Maybe it's a well-researched article, but am I the only one that bothers the structure of the website? I am not able to read it. The text is just in the middle, really big white space left and right. Than there is this big wallpaper on every page. By the way, why so many pages? Sorry for off-topic.
- jfreax 12y ago
  Ahh, okay, it seems to be fixed now. There was a fullscreen image on top of every site (you could not even see the headline!). The width looks good now, maybe it way just my high resolution monitor (UHD)?
- ch215 12y ago
  I think the article is actually quite readable. However, the fact that javascript is required to render any text does irk me a little. Edit: I may have jumped the gun: the site now seems to be loading fine without js.
- 16bytes 12y ago
  Looks to be an attempt at setting a readable line-length. http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability I usually like reading articles with this width, but there's usually a different color background to differentiate the article from the page so there's not this huge white-space void. Other than that I thought the article easy to read.
- from_elsewhere 12y ago
  The the column width is just about ideal at approximately 77 characters per line.It could be slightly wider without detracting from the readability, but not all that much. [1][2] The negative space left and right is to ensure an optimal column width. If there is nothing important to place to the sides, anything added there would serve only to distract from the flow of article content. That is to say, filling space for no reason is unreasonable. Pagination is its own thing, and I won't comment one way or another on that. [1] http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/recommended-column-width-for-text-reading-digital-vs-printed http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/recom... [2] http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-width-for-paragraphs-online http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-widt...
- anindyabd 12y ago
  Maybe they did that for sake of responsiveness? The site looks really good from my phone.
Scarbutt 12y ago
It is because that the "best" apps for Linux distros are written with GTK the reason for KDE being much less mainstream than Gnome?
- lmm 12y ago
  I'd say more of the best apps are written for Qt. Certainly the only high-profile case I know of an app switching from one to the other was Rosegarden, which switched to Qt and found it to be a much better toolkit. Part of the reason is history (if we're talking about 15 years ago then Qt had a more restrictive license - and, sad to say, the gnome website still spreads FUD about this, or did the last time I looked). But mostly I think it's that big distros have Gnome as the default - probably because it's easier to support since it's much less configurable than KDE. (And I don't think it's a clear case of one being "more mainstream"; rather, my impression is that Americans tend to use Gnome/GTK and Europeans tend to use KDE/Qt)
- jfreax 12y ago
  Are you sure about that? I would think the exact opposite, that there are more good QT/KDElibs programs then GTK ones. And more recently more and more apps switch to QT (like wireshark for example). And I heard somewhere that Gnome is very popular in the US, but everywhere else KDE is slightly more favored (apart from all the small DEs and WMs).
  - adrianlmm 12y ago
    Was popular, XFCE is now more used than KDE in the rest of the world.
    - sigzero 12y ago
      Is that true? XFCE was my favorite DE.
  - dviola 12y ago
    QuickTime has nothing to do with KDE.
eklavya 12y ago
KDE folks have managed a huge feat, congratulations to everyone on the team.
toyg 12y ago
> Third party high-DPI support for applications like Steam and Firefox will be much more mixed Dude, Steam is still sucky on OSX/Retina, almost three years from release; and Firefox took its sweet time to get there as well (and it's still not perfect). It's not KDE's fault.
bmn_ 12y ago
A big raised middle finger goes to the developers who thought it was a good idea to make it impossible to opt out of akonadi, nepomuk, baloo, activities, monochrome tray icons, that fucking cashew icon and having an additional separate colour scheme just for the task bar. All of KDE is configurable and can be switched off, except these "innovations". Still using KDE, because it's the least bad desktop environment, but these v4.x era additions annoy me to no end. v5 does nothing to improve this.
- frik 12y ago
  It's a bit harsh. Though, the desktop search incarnations were a hype topic back in the early KDE 4 era and strigi, nepomuk and its later re-implementations and the related services like dbus were sadly sub-par/sluggish compared to Windows search and Mac Spotlight. The biggest let down was the rewrite of KDE 4 itself. KDE 3 had so many features that were never re-implemented in KDE 4.x. I had the impression that the developers lost touch with the user base back then. In the days before Novell bought SuSE KDE 2 and 3 were very popular.
- mwfunk 12y ago
  It must be awesome for the KDE developers to have such appreciative users with such constructive attitudes. It really makes you wonder why so many people who volunteer on open source projects get burned out on it after a while, or why so many mailing lists/forums/etc. for those projects have a unfortunate tendency to devolve into flamewars, bikeshedding, whining, and everyone crapping on everyone else for no particular reason. Hooray for human nature, huh?
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Never saw any flamewars on KDE forums. Users there are very helpful.
  - bmn_ 12y ago
    I write software professionally and can't afford hobbyist conduct. I have all right to be pissed, era v4 ruined KDE's promise of full customisability. I assure you the KDE devs don't care what anyone says, they just do what they want, not what the users want. Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker was ripping the devs a new one over that attitude not listening to users; apparently that went into one ear and out of the other.
dman 12y ago
Can anyone paste the content? Site seems down here
- publicfig 12y ago
  It's a long, multipage article with many images. I'm not seeing any issues with it being down.
frik 12y ago
I used SuSE Linux with KDE 2 and KDE 3 more than 10 years ago. It was a good Win95 style shell with many customization options back then. Later I switched to Gnome 2 because of the KDE 4.0 fiasco and no one forked off KDE 3. Thankfully Ubuntu decided to change the shell, as Gnome 3 was another fiasco. Nowadays I just connect from a Mac, Windows, Android or iOS shell to Linux servers. It seems both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 (5?) lost their UX-design goal - that's why Linux Mint MGSE emerged, and Ubuntu created their own shell. It seems that HTML based shells like ChromeOS/ChromiumOS, WebOS and FirefoxOS are the future.
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  So you not try KDE >= 4.4 ? I can understand why you wouldn't like initial versions of KDE 4 , but since 4.4 has become one of the best desktops that anyone could use.
- nerdo 12y ago
  KDE 3 was forked: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
adrianlmm 12y ago
Looks like KDE4 with a new theme, I don't feel hyped for it.
- shmerl 12y ago
  For the end user it is more or less cosmetic change. But for developers the change is huge and very important. KDE didn't plan to radically change design with 5.x.
mlinksva 12y ago
Pleasantly surprised by: > Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5.2 form a fairly lean pair compared to historic KDE releases; This is mostly anecdotal and other factors are in play, but no matter how you slice it Plasma 5 uses less RAM, somewhere between 20-40% less RAM is consumed on a freshly booted machine, exactly how much mileage you’ll get out of it will widely vary depending on your system, configuration, and distribution. (on p3; is there a pages=all type URL hack for wordpress?)
- micampe 12y ago
  > (on p3; is there a pages=all type URL hack for wordpress?) If you have Safari its Reader View works. Unfortunately none of the “readability”-type bookmarklets I know of work in this case.
azinman2 12y ago
Oi. I wish the nice designers of Silicon Valley could give some "pull requests" easily to the KDE team. The design is such a mix of things that don't go together -- some places of translucency, others don't, the pop ups are mostly flat yet the calculator has shadows, the search results and bookmarks have borders on every row yet the launch menu doesn't, the spacing between items in the left side of dolphin is off (too close), the icons are seemingly all over the place (the life preserver is more photo realistic while the hard drive is more cartoony), etc. I know there are mailing lists and whatnot for this but if the process of helping was easier for normal (and good) designers to help out a little I think we all would benefit. Or at least if you're going to copy Apple pay attention to their ratios.
- andmarios 12y ago
  KDE has a great Visual Design Team. Also they rely on user feedback for their UX design. https://vdesign.kde.org/ https://vdesign.kde.org/
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I wish the nice designers of Silicon Valley could give some "pull requests" easily to the KDE team. The design is such a mix of things that don't go together" Is this maybe due to the nature of open source? If you look at the big design teams in SV they are typically run by a dictator (e.g. Jony Ive or Duartes at Google). Maybe for good design that's necessary or you end up with a large mix of conflicting ideas.
- hysan 12y ago
  It's actually very easy to contribute to the design process. Especially for this entire redesign. It was announced right from the start on the website / blog, the mentioned Visual Design Group website was put up, they created a subforum for design discussion and input (very active and so easy that even I, a non-designer, was able to participate), and they regularly posted detailed updates on the design process asking for feedback (sometimes in the form of polls). So I'm not quite sure how much easier you are expecting the process to be.
- donniezazen 12y ago
shmerl 12y ago
Is it coming to Debian testing soon after the freeze is over?
keithpeter 12y ago
OA is using fairly capable hardware, so, out of curiosity, I installed the Kubuntu 15.04 alpha2 iso on my test laptop which is a 7 year old Thinkpad x61s dual core with 2.5Gb ram. The result works responsively, with reasonably smooth graphical effects including the 'white out' and transparency effects mentioned in the OA. Baloo search: baloosearch <word> works from command line and from the application launcher. Finds both file names and words within files (.pdf,text). Dolphin does not return results. Fresh install gives 'invalid protocol' error within Dolphin. Installing baloo-utils gets rid of that error but still no results. There are older bug reports about this stuff.

91 points by bondia 12y ago

Maybe it's a well-researched article, but am I the only one that bothers the structure of the website? I am not able to read it. The text is just in the middle, really big white space left and right. Than there is this big wallpaper on every page. By the way, why so many pages? Sorry for off-topic.

jfreax 12y ago
Ahh, okay, it seems to be fixed now. There was a fullscreen image on top of every site (you could not even see the headline!). The width looks good now, maybe it way just my high resolution monitor (UHD)?
ch215 12y ago
I think the article is actually quite readable. However, the fact that javascript is required to render any text does irk me a little. Edit: I may have jumped the gun: the site now seems to be loading fine without js.
16bytes 12y ago
Looks to be an attempt at setting a readable line-length. http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability I usually like reading articles with this width, but there's usually a different color background to differentiate the article from the page so there's not this huge white-space void. Other than that I thought the article easy to read.
from_elsewhere 12y ago
The the column width is just about ideal at approximately 77 characters per line.It could be slightly wider without detracting from the readability, but not all that much. [1][2] The negative space left and right is to ensure an optimal column width. If there is nothing important to place to the sides, anything added there would serve only to distract from the flow of article content. That is to say, filling space for no reason is unreasonable. Pagination is its own thing, and I won't comment one way or another on that. [1] http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/recommended-column-width-for-text-reading-digital-vs-printed http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/recom... [2] http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-width-for-paragraphs-online http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-widt...
anindyabd 12y ago
Maybe they did that for sake of responsiveness? The site looks really good from my phone.

Scarbutt 12y ago

It is because that the "best" apps for Linux distros are written with GTK the reason for KDE being much less mainstream than Gnome?

lmm 12y ago
I'd say more of the best apps are written for Qt. Certainly the only high-profile case I know of an app switching from one to the other was Rosegarden, which switched to Qt and found it to be a much better toolkit. Part of the reason is history (if we're talking about 15 years ago then Qt had a more restrictive license - and, sad to say, the gnome website still spreads FUD about this, or did the last time I looked). But mostly I think it's that big distros have Gnome as the default - probably because it's easier to support since it's much less configurable than KDE. (And I don't think it's a clear case of one being "more mainstream"; rather, my impression is that Americans tend to use Gnome/GTK and Europeans tend to use KDE/Qt)
jfreax 12y ago
Are you sure about that? I would think the exact opposite, that there are more good QT/KDElibs programs then GTK ones. And more recently more and more apps switch to QT (like wireshark for example). And I heard somewhere that Gnome is very popular in the US, but everywhere else KDE is slightly more favored (apart from all the small DEs and WMs).
- adrianlmm 12y ago
  Was popular, XFCE is now more used than KDE in the rest of the world.
  - sigzero 12y ago
    Is that true? XFCE was my favorite DE.
- dviola 12y ago
  QuickTime has nothing to do with KDE.

eklavya 12y ago

KDE folks have managed a huge feat, congratulations to everyone on the team.

toyg 12y ago

> Third party high-DPI support for applications like Steam and Firefox will be much more mixed Dude, Steam is still sucky on OSX/Retina, almost three years from release; and Firefox took its sweet time to get there as well (and it's still not perfect). It's not KDE's fault.

bmn_ 12y ago

A big raised middle finger goes to the developers who thought it was a good idea to make it impossible to opt out of akonadi, nepomuk, baloo, activities, monochrome tray icons, that fucking cashew icon and having an additional separate colour scheme just for the task bar. All of KDE is configurable and can be switched off, except these "innovations". Still using KDE, because it's the least bad desktop environment, but these v4.x era additions annoy me to no end. v5 does nothing to improve this.

frik 12y ago
It's a bit harsh. Though, the desktop search incarnations were a hype topic back in the early KDE 4 era and strigi, nepomuk and its later re-implementations and the related services like dbus were sadly sub-par/sluggish compared to Windows search and Mac Spotlight. The biggest let down was the rewrite of KDE 4 itself. KDE 3 had so many features that were never re-implemented in KDE 4.x. I had the impression that the developers lost touch with the user base back then. In the days before Novell bought SuSE KDE 2 and 3 were very popular.
mwfunk 12y ago
It must be awesome for the KDE developers to have such appreciative users with such constructive attitudes. It really makes you wonder why so many people who volunteer on open source projects get burned out on it after a while, or why so many mailing lists/forums/etc. for those projects have a unfortunate tendency to devolve into flamewars, bikeshedding, whining, and everyone crapping on everyone else for no particular reason. Hooray for human nature, huh?
- shmerl 12y ago
  Never saw any flamewars on KDE forums. Users there are very helpful.
- bmn_ 12y ago
  I write software professionally and can't afford hobbyist conduct. I have all right to be pissed, era v4 ruined KDE's promise of full customisability. I assure you the KDE devs don't care what anyone says, they just do what they want, not what the users want. Source: I've been at Desktop Summit (incidentally, that's where the v5 library reorganisation was announced that's just now bearing fruit). The keynote speaker was ripping the devs a new one over that attitude not listening to users; apparently that went into one ear and out of the other.

dman 12y ago

Can anyone paste the content? Site seems down here

publicfig 12y ago
It's a long, multipage article with many images. I'm not seeing any issues with it being down.

frik 12y ago

I used SuSE Linux with KDE 2 and KDE 3 more than 10 years ago. It was a good Win95 style shell with many customization options back then. Later I switched to Gnome 2 because of the KDE 4.0 fiasco and no one forked off KDE 3. Thankfully Ubuntu decided to change the shell, as Gnome 3 was another fiasco. Nowadays I just connect from a Mac, Windows, Android or iOS shell to Linux servers. It seems both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 (5?) lost their UX-design goal - that's why Linux Mint MGSE emerged, and Ubuntu created their own shell. It seems that HTML based shells like ChromeOS/ChromiumOS, WebOS and FirefoxOS are the future.

Zardoz84 12y ago
So you not try KDE >= 4.4 ? I can understand why you wouldn't like initial versions of KDE 4 , but since 4.4 has become one of the best desktops that anyone could use.
nerdo 12y ago
KDE 3 was forked: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

adrianlmm 12y ago

Looks like KDE4 with a new theme, I don't feel hyped for it.

shmerl 12y ago
For the end user it is more or less cosmetic change. But for developers the change is huge and very important. KDE didn't plan to radically change design with 5.x.

mlinksva 12y ago

Pleasantly surprised by: > Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5.2 form a fairly lean pair compared to historic KDE releases; This is mostly anecdotal and other factors are in play, but no matter how you slice it Plasma 5 uses less RAM, somewhere between 20-40% less RAM is consumed on a freshly booted machine, exactly how much mileage you’ll get out of it will widely vary depending on your system, configuration, and distribution. (on p3; is there a pages=all type URL hack for wordpress?)

micampe 12y ago
> (on p3; is there a pages=all type URL hack for wordpress?) If you have Safari its Reader View works. Unfortunately none of the “readability”-type bookmarklets I know of work in this case.

azinman2 12y ago

Oi. I wish the nice designers of Silicon Valley could give some "pull requests" easily to the KDE team. The design is such a mix of things that don't go together -- some places of translucency, others don't, the pop ups are mostly flat yet the calculator has shadows, the search results and bookmarks have borders on every row yet the launch menu doesn't, the spacing between items in the left side of dolphin is off (too close), the icons are seemingly all over the place (the life preserver is more photo realistic while the hard drive is more cartoony), etc. I know there are mailing lists and whatnot for this but if the process of helping was easier for normal (and good) designers to help out a little I think we all would benefit. Or at least if you're going to copy Apple pay attention to their ratios.

andmarios 12y ago
KDE has a great Visual Design Team. Also they rely on user feedback for their UX design. https://vdesign.kde.org/ https://vdesign.kde.org/
k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "I wish the nice designers of Silicon Valley could give some "pull requests" easily to the KDE team. The design is such a mix of things that don't go together" Is this maybe due to the nature of open source? If you look at the big design teams in SV they are typically run by a dictator (e.g. Jony Ive or Duartes at Google). Maybe for good design that's necessary or you end up with a large mix of conflicting ideas.
hysan 12y ago
It's actually very easy to contribute to the design process. Especially for this entire redesign. It was announced right from the start on the website / blog, the mentioned Visual Design Group website was put up, they created a subforum for design discussion and input (very active and so easy that even I, a non-designer, was able to participate), and they regularly posted detailed updates on the design process asking for feedback (sometimes in the form of polls). So I'm not quite sure how much easier you are expecting the process to be.
donniezazen 12y ago

shmerl 12y ago

Is it coming to Debian testing soon after the freeze is over?

keithpeter 12y ago

OA is using fairly capable hardware, so, out of curiosity, I installed the Kubuntu 15.04 alpha2 iso on my test laptop which is a 7 year old Thinkpad x61s dual core with 2.5Gb ram. The result works responsively, with reasonably smooth graphical effects including the 'white out' and transparency effects mentioned in the OA. Baloo search: baloosearch <word> works from command line and from the application launcher. Finds both file names and words within files (.pdf,text). Dolphin does not return results. Fresh install gives 'invalid protocol' error within Dolphin. Installing baloo-utils gets rid of that error but still no results. There are older bug reports about this stuff.