Good job, as expected by the Plasma team. I really feel like this is a big step in the right direction.
A personal wish however would be that we got a more modern look to more desktop environments. Both Gnome, Plasma and Pantheon (default in Elementary OS) are talked about as the best looking desktop environments, but I'd be lying if I said that any of them looked awesome. There's just something about them that make them feel weird. Sometimes it's just margins and whitespace, sometimes the font scale that seems inconsistent and sometimes it's the default icon packs that look a bit dated. I don't know, I'm not a designer, but it is definitely worse than both win10 and macOS 10.15.6
I think that if we want to grow the unix user base there's a bit of progress to be made in this department. Customisability is where we win today - but the defaults need to get better to attract more non tech oriented people.
I fully understand that opinion - it is a big pain point for many users. Inside KDE, our VDG (Visual Design Group) is working on ironing out those inconsistencies and visual problems. It's a gigantic task, but I do believe we are making progress - especially System Settings has been getting a lot better lately. They are also working on a evolutionary update to our default 'Breeze' design theme. Check it out at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891.
(And if you do find specific problems e.g. regarding margins or fonts, please report them on bugs.kde.org, and we'll take a look.)
Nate Graham blogs about these types of consistency improvements every week. Lots of screenshots to show what has improved and what features are coming. Well worth a read. I think this shows the progress you are hoping to see.
It is, but the adjustments that they are making to it especially with the PopOS Shell to build in tiling window management on top of gnome has dramatically improved the experience (for me at least).
Default GNOME theming has been quite atrocious (to me), but I've been using Arc-Dark with Papirus icons and Noto Sans fonts (usually already packaged in Debian-based distributions). I couldn't be more satisfied, and they play well with Nord (from Arctic Ice Studio) color themes.
One of the most important design principles is consistency. Unfortunately that's an objective which is difficult for open source to fulfill. It would be great if the desktop environments themselves took the task of providing a couple of unified themes out of the box, where the colors, icons, fonts and everything else fit together.
Why do you want to attract uninterested users who's interested are primarily superficial and not aligned with the core values and spirit of linux/foss? This is how you breed corruption.
I think you and me see different values in linux as a platform. What I want is for linux to be a true alternative to windows or macOS for all users - not only the tech-savy. The goal should be for someone like my mom or my wife to be handed a linux based machine and for her to not see it as a scary thing, but as a viable daily driver.
I'd argue that your comment is somewhat elitist - what does it even mean to say that someones interest are "primarily superficial and not aligned with the core values and spirit of linux/foss"? Plenty of linux users already care about how their interface looks, that does not mean that they don't care about open source.
I'm not meaning to be elites in the sense that i'm trying to look down on certain linux users. But if someone is going to use linux or not use it at all based just on how it looks then they don't need linux and can use a regular desktop os just fine. Linux is important because of how it is used technically to build software systems and that it is open source. If you start bringing on users that don't have that interest then then it is just another web/chrome platform waiting to be commercialized and have it's true purpose undermined. Take Canonical to the extreme. Not everything needs to try to grab the attention of random person off the street.
That sounds like a personal goal? I'm not sure I see any necessary reason that linux exist solely in either category (open-source true purpose, or popular desktop). Did I miss the argument?
I honestly do think you missed it and it's been laid out by my two comments. This isn't a personal goal of mine it's just how I see the economics of it. People that want their grandma/gf to use linux as a desktop - that is a personal goal. None of those people give a shit about using linux or they would already.
Read more -still not getting it. "Breeding corruption" is a throwaway line. How? What happens? Folks use the software in some way, that interferes with the open-source users' own use? I can't see that happening.
It's not the users the cause corruption it's who builds and desires to take control of the system. If billions of people are using something it becomes corrupt because of the immense value of billions of users attention. Looks at every tech company. Spying, ads, censorship. Taken to the extreme these goals are counter to each other. Just look at what Canonical did when Ubuntu got a whiff of becoming a desktop os. You could call it 'selling out'. It's a very common, perhaps inevitable, consequence of popularity.
And what does this do to open source forks of the code? How does it affect those developers at all?
I guess I'm obliquely commenting that keeping the project small and in the hands of open-source developers, may be pointless. Otherwise, why agonize over what others are doing with it? Either we want others to use the open-source version too so its a popular desktop with lots of attention, or we don't and becoming a popular desktop with lots of attention doesn't affect those open-source die-hards at all. Either way, a successful project becomes popular on a lot of desktops.
I’ve been using Plasma for years, but after this release talking so much about the wayland improvements, the actual result is more than disappointing.
First, to explain my setup: I've got a Dell UP2718Q in landscape, 3840x2160, 10-bit in DCI-P3 colorspace at 1.5x scale at 60Hz, side-by-side with a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 in portrait, 1024x1280, 8-bit in sRGB colorspace at 1x scale at 75Hz
10-bit support isn’t there yet, color calibration support isn’t there yet either, but that’s something where I’ll just have to wait for the future. Discover currently fails to install due to mismatched dependencies, but this is also something the future will solve.
So far: KScreen still refuses to save changed settings, so on every boot I have to manually set my Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 to Portrait at 75Hz again.
The scaling somewhat works, but not properly, especially GTK applications are upscaled rather than downscaled. (See Firefox in the screenshot linked below)
The plasma panels overlap about half a virtual pixel at 1x, or 1 pixel at 1.5x, so the panel on the right monitor opens the dashboard on the left one, and the panel on the left monitor sometimes doesn’t even open a panel at all. Screenshot: https://i.k8r.eu/sEDfiQ.png
Overall it’s a good start, but still not quite there yet.
The combination of both monitors allows me to check each of my designs both on a high-quality monitor, as e.g. a mac user would have, and on a low-quality monitor.
You probably also have encountered websites which are designed for tiny monitors, and end up with text stretched across 40cm (e.g. HN) or websites with razor-thin text that is basically unreadable on cheaper monitors.
As I work in UI/UX design, I want to avoid that issue :)
KScreen is weird, i had a scaling issue that happen if at boot, both my 21"+27" are connected (they are both FHD), but if i boot with 27" monitor then after login connect 21" there is no scaling issue. Maybe that could help you somehow
You can also try to put your PC in Sleep instead of restart each time, if you have a good UPS and some redundancy
Wouldn't a lower resolution result in worse clarity?
I also have a 4k and a 1080p. The 4k is my primary work monitor - i want crisp text. The 1080p is actually a gaming monitor (plus 244hz), since my card can't push 4k for gaming at 244hz hah.
Could i have two 4ks? Yes, but originally this setup was used by my macbook pro, and i wasn't confident it could push two 4ks. Futhermore my 1080p gaming monitor would have to go somewhere, and i'd like to not have two different desk setups.
My setup these days is to scale everything x2 (in KDE or XFCE, currently i'm on XFCE), and then scale my 1080p _down_ via xrandr (as i'm not on Wayland).
Sidenote, Mac handles these two monitors _perfectly_. I complain a lot about Mac, hence me being on Linux at the moment - but these monitor scaling issues were entirely gone in OSX. I never noticed a single scaling issue. Where as on Windows there are lots of quirks, and Linux i could barely get it to work.
Hopefully Wayland makes this experience better.
*(Sidenote: i'm on XFCE atm because KDE on NixOS felt a bit sluggish. Maybe it was just the animations, hard to say. XFCE felt a bit snappier. GNOME was a laggy mess, hah. KDE and XFCE were both good though, XFCE was just a bit better for me on unmeasured performance feel)
Is it? It apparently is not good enough for the main screen.
The thing is that scaling works just fine if all your displays use the same one. Two 4k screens -> awesome. Two fhd screen -> works just fine. It is only the combination of one hires and one lowres screen that is problematic.
So my maybe naive take away is that if you care that your main screen is 4k, then no your old screen is not good enough. And if you think it was good enough, then why did you feel the need to upgrade your main screen?
As I answered earlier: Different screens can be used for different purposes, and different purposes may have different requirements :)
Even if money was no issue and I could have two screens of the same quality, I’d still keep the old screen as a third screen.
For most people, more screens = better, but for me there’s also the fact that to actually design content, you need to be able to verify what this content is going to look like on the devices the users are going to use.
Because I use the main screen for more than displaying docs and chat? And it's a problem to spend large-ish amounts of money just to workaround software problems?
> Overall it’s a good start, but still not quite there yet.
If you mean Wayland, both the linked article and the video within the article acknowledge this, calling Wayland a work-in-progress. I too am looking forward to the day they get there.
Can I ask how you managed to set a different scale factor for each screen? In the system settings I can only find a global scale factor... Or is this only supported using Wayland?
KDE on wayland supports it natively, on X11 you could set the environment variable QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS, but this will only affect Qt/KDE applications, not Gtk/Gnome applications
I don't think X is so limited. You can use the xrandr tool to set pretty much arbitrary positioning and scaling for each screen, at least with the proprietary NVidia drivers.
Would someone from the KDE team be able to give an update on the Valve funding for KDE? [0]
I remember being quite happy when I heard this, as it might be paving the way for a renewed SteamOS initiative, or another Linux offensive, but I don't follow KDE closely and I haven't heard anything since around the time of this article.
Any indication of what was achieved and what has happened since would be interesting to me!
I haven't checked whether Roman Gilg is still working for Valve, but he ended up forking KWin into KWinFT (plus supporting libs) with a heavy Wayland focus. He got frustrated by upstream KDE not merging his extensive refactorings on a timeline that worked for to him and is now trying to out-compete the original. Roman Gilg's blog is a good read on that matter.
Both parties seem very reasonable to me. So far, the jury is still out on where things will end up - KWinFT has some good momentum and ideas, while upstream KWin with David Edmundson and other steady contributors are also continuing to fix lots of Wayland issues with every release. Either way it looks like we'll be in a good spot soon.
Does it now support using two monitors with different scaling factors? With display calibration?
This is what is holding me back at the moment: heterogenous scaling is only available in wayland, but color calibration (colord-kde) only works in X11.
I think I'll give Gnome another try this time around.
I had the same issue with my 14,0" WQHD (2560x1440) laptop screen and my external monitor. I wanted to scale up only the laptop's screen so that I can read the text on it, but then my external monitor got scaled too large.
After using it for months like that I solved this by simply setting the resolution on the laptop to 1920x1080, and scaling to 1. I felt really stupid after that I did not do this sooner.
That's not an optimal solution though, because you're relying on your screen to do non-integer scaling and you'll have blurrier fonts etc. as a result.
If your software supports non-integer scaling it can render things with that knowledge and give you crisp edges on the edge of text and UI elements.
KDE 5 Plasma is amazing. Subjectively, I feel the following about it: after over 2 decades of being extremely buggy and extremely ugly, KDE has became a culmination of desktop PC GUI design, the best I've experienced so far (tiling WMs can be better in certain tasks and settings but not universally).
Manjaro with recent KDE provides me what I call "a lot like Mac but way better" experience (surely, there are aspects in which Mac or any other system is better, I just don't know which particular).
And it has made a great replacement once Ubuntu lost its Unity (right at the moment it became polished enough).
The only disappointing part are the plasmoids - I could make a lot of use of some desktop widgets but it's pain to find useful plasmoids and make them work, making your own plasmoids seems complicated.
In fact I'd be comfortable with a generic terminal plasmoid (with a read-only mode option) and a generic browser (just display a specific URL, refresh periodically, basic HTML support is enough) plasmoid but it seems too much hassle to build them. I just wonder why these are not available OOTB.
More (and easy) hackability could also make KDE even cooler.
UPDATE (some more things I'd like to be fixed just came to my mind as I had a cup of tea):
KDE still has not reached the Unity level of the Mac-like global menu (D-BUS menu) support: some apps which worked with Unity global menu perfectly (and also work on Mac) still won't work with the global menu in KDE. I had to fall-back to the "Windows way" of having menus in every window to maintain uniform experience among different apps - too many apps left the global menu bar empty. This isn't a particularly serious problem though. Unity's facility of searching through menu items was also insanely cool and should be ported (as we have the D-BUS menu anyway).
I want to completely disable clipboard management so it wouldn't remember clipboard history (which is a security issue) and wouldn't clear the clipboard as soon as I close the window (extremely inconvenient - I often want to open a window just to copy something, close it and paste that somewhere else). But I could never find how.
I don't want tray messages to pop-up as soon as I start copying files. I'm not even sure I want them when the process finishes (perhaps there is a less annoying way to know it's done).
I'd like an option for Yakuake to actually replace Konsole so whenever I click "open terminal here" (preferably - in any app) it would open a new tab in Yakuake.
That's all the improvements to make KDE effectively perfect IMHO.
We added recently more documentation around plasmoids: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/. I wouldn't qualify our documentation as great yet, but there is a currently a lot of effort in making it better.
There is also already a web view plasmoids, but it is probably included in the plasma-addons package.
It's still absolutely wild to me that KDE4 got released in the state it was in. I loved KDE3, maybe it had some issues but it mostly Just Worked as a Windows XP-like desktop environment. KDE4 was unusably broken for years and years, it's basically why I stopped using a Linux desktop.
I had strong opinions about KDE 3 & 4, and have been using KDE 5 exclusively for over a year now. I love it and couldn't imagine going back to a different DE or operating system.
> I loved KDE3, maybe it had some issues but it mostly Just Worked as a Windows XP-like desktop environment.
But Windows XP had way more polished look&feel (as did any other Windows version). KDE 3 looked ugly. KDE 4 looked OK but kind of wasteful in terms of screen area.
> KDE4 was unusably broken for years and years, it's basically why I stopped using a Linux desktop.
I just went to XFCE which has hardly changed at all since then. XFCE is always a perfect fallback DE for weird times. I also went XFCE (for about a year or 2 every time) when Unity was first introduced and when it got retired. I just disabled the standard XFCE panels and added a 3-rd party dock instead.
> I don't want tray messages to pop-up as soon as I start copying files. I'm not even sure I want them when the process finishes (perhaps there is a less annoying way to know it's done).
If you disable the progress animations + count badges in the taskbar I think it'll show it's own dedicated window like Windows.
> Yakuake to actually replace Konsole so whenever I click "open terminal here"
Agreed, and you can easily add proper tiling support with the Krohnkite extension, which makes anybody coming from a DWM-inspired tiling WM like Xmonad feel instantly at home.
I want to completely disable clipboard management so it wouldn't remember clipboard history (which is a security issue) and wouldn't clear the clipboard as soon as I close the window (extremely inconvenient - I often want to open a window just to copy something, close it and paste that somewhere else). But I could never find how.
If you disable clipboard management on X11 then the clipboard goes away when the application does - that's how X11 works and the whole reason clipboard management exists.
If you don't want it to keep any history but the most recent item, then just disable that.
People using KDE Plasma and not using some sort of rolling release distro are missing out, I think. 5.18 LTS was a very very solid release, but 5.19 and 5.20 have so much new that it's a bummer for people whose distros won't be seeing them any time soon.
On the other hand, I'm running KDE Neon (the "stable" version, insofar as there is one) where everything is supposed to "just work" and even there I got a really dumb dependency error this morning[0] that lead to KWIN almost automatically uninstalling itself to "fix" the problem. This has happened a few times in the last months - including the desktop wanting to uninstall itself.
Of course I know how to behave in that context, and I don't want to sound ungrateful since I get all of this quality software for free, but it somewhat saddens me that I still can't recommend these kinds of distros to my family.
I really think Linux should make it harder somehow to uninstall critical parts of your operating system.
I'm sure it might not be easy to work out a mechanism for this that would not add friction for those who need to swap out large components of their desktop experience, but I personally think this is one of those things that sometimes really scares people about Linux (along with rm -Rf /)
Every couple years I find myself not paying enough attention to the apt update text and then I end up swearing off any interaction with Linux for months.
I really think Linux should make it harder somehow to uninstall critical parts of your operating system.
Yes. This was one of the things we had to polish way back in the first Linux boom when I was working at Lindows. We got a report from QA that "when I uninstall this random thing called dpkg I can no longer use the app store". After the lead dev managed to collect himself from off the hallway floor (the only literal ROFL I have ever seen), everyone realized that yes, you should be prevented from uninstalling the core software.
Sometimes a newer version of package A will declare that it conflicts with package B. Maybe package C depended on both before the conflict was added. Then the package manager might find that the only way to resolve all conflicts is to remove C, which then auto-removes everything C depended on. Maybe C happens to be the "kububtu-desktop" package.
That seems like a poor design in apt. Does any other package manager allow such a thing? I know Arch's pacman has no autoremove - you have to gather a list of unneeded packages then remove them as a separate step. And Gentoo's emerge builds a dependency tree rooted in the @world package set, so if kde-plasma/plasma-meta is there it will never be removed by an automatic depclean.
apt does try to keep track of unneeded packages/dependencies though - and will suggest you remove them with apt autoremove. This should always be safe... Unless a package is missing dependency information (has a packaging bug).
To be fair, that is not "the desktop wanting to uninstall itself", as if it is a problem in Plasma, but it is the package manager wanting to uninstall the desktop. It seems to be a problem with the Ubuntu packages. If the same thing happened a few times, maybe it is time for a bugreport at Ubuntu.
I am using some old LTS version and I am fine, I run Arch many years ago so I had my time of updating to latest and greatest but now I no longer need latest apps or libraries and only thinking that the next system update will bring me new bugs or changes I don't want to handle at this moment does not appeal to me anymore.
When I need something I will intentionally up[grade that program (for my IDE I keep old versions around to revert) and for my system I upgraded my video driver only when I had to, the rest is all LTS stiff.
Just making my a point that for some people the updates is no longer(or was never) an exiting thing and as long as your current machine just works there is no reason to break it.
>when you open several windows with the same application (like when you open several LibreOffice documents), the Task Manager will group them together.
This is exactly the opposite of what I want. Why don't the designers of 21st-century desktop environments understand that my 3 PDF files have nothing to do with one another? The same goes for my terminals, my text buffers, my web pages....
Why group things that are involved in unrelated tasks?
It's just one more setting for the already extremely configurable Task Manager. For new users, it changes a default (the option to group is already there, with an extra toggle that activates it only when the task bar is full). I think the "cycle window on click" is a new option.
KDE is all about giving lots of options to users, but at the same time they aren't afraid to experiment and change its defaults to try to appeal to first-time users. In this case, window groups is a nice default that avoids scrolling or too-small buttons.
Before this KDE grouped them by default when task bar is full, it's one of the settings you have to change which take about 2 seconds. It's impossible to make a DE that fit all tastes with default settings, that's why we have settings
Well maybe it's what everyone else wants. Either way it's just the default they're changing, one good thing about grouping in Plasma is it lets you exclude certain applications so you can exclude your PDF viewer. Alot of other environments give an all or nothing approach.
There maybe some people who want this but they are not the marority. A task and an application are unrelated things. A task most likely spans one/several browser tabs + a couple of documents in different apps.
I haven't got into the habit of using them but the original issue we're talking about is arbitrary grouping that does not seem to help how people work in reality.
This is actually the first time I hear a user making this argument. Aaron J. Seigo would love you, as he added Activities in kde 4 for this exact use case.
Because it takes up less real estate and I know what app I’m looking for. I don’t have separate windows for all my Firefox tabs even though you could consider them to belong to 5 or 6 different categories.
Why not let the application decide, like with browser tabs?
I absolutely hate it that the default for Gnome is to group all windows of the same application together under the same icon. When I have multiple terminals open, then they are in no way related. I want a specific one. Like writing code in an editor and a terminal for running the application or compiling, and then another one for some shell access.
> Why not let the application decide, like with browser tabs?
That means you need to wait for each application to add support for it whereas here it is the window manager.
What you want it seems is to group the windows by workflow. You can do what. Use a different desktop per workflow. I have 1 main 2 reference 3 utilities Then set your task bar to only show windows from the current desktop.
Gnome is also incredibly slow to allow one to select a particular window when Alt-Tabbing. It is a one second delay every time you want to change window.
A nice solution is to simply put each icon/task of the same application side by side, so for instance you get 3 firefox icons in a row in the taskbar/dock, that's what I do, there's enough space anyway. That way you can quickly tell what's open and switch to them.
For me mentally, it makes more sense that all windows of the same application are grouped. In your example, when I want to focus the PDF file, I first look for the icon of my PDF viewer and I don't want there to be three icons; I want just one icon and if I (right)click it get a list in which I see the window titles.
It's not what I want either, and it's not what most other Linux users I know want either.
It's copying the behavior of MacOS, plain and simple, and I disagree with them doing that. I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.
> It's copying the behavior of MacOS, plain and simple
And of Windows 7-8-10 (and of Unity). And the opposite is just copying the behavior of Windows 95-2000 (XP would already group taskbar buttons by default although it still couldn't "pin" them and required separate launcher buttons).
And, by the way, MacOS doesn't group all the windows by default, some get a separate icon when launched (at least they did some years ago, I don't know about the recent versions).
> I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.
Fortunately, there are many different WMs/DEs on Linux and you don't have to use KDE (or its default set-up) either. You can either tweak it, or choose a different WM/DE or write your own (I would totally do so if I had more spare time).
> I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.
Same here, but grouping applications when the taskbar is full isn't too unreasonable, is it? It is not even necessarily copied from Mac, it might have been Windows who introduced or at least made it mainstream I think (It wouldn't surprise me at all if it existed on some Linux Desktop environment as an option before that.)
I get you point (it's perfectly valid and I even believe I can feel what you feel) but as for me I want it to be "one app = one icon" (same icon used to launch, minimize and activate any of the windows of the same app) and it drives me crazy no Linux DE other than KDE and good old Unity support this. I wish LXDE (the Raspberry Pi default), LXQt and XFCE didn't insist the Windows95 way of having separate buttons to launch and to minimize/activate a running app (which feels untidy to me) is the only correct way. C'mon, it's been a long since Windows 7 and Ubuntu Unity appeared, why keep emulating Windows 95?
Today, working on a Windows 10 machine at the office, I've actually realized strict "one app = one icon" scheme, with every window of the same app hidden under one button, isn't actually convenient for me either.
It makes switching between different documents (with the mouse) too much hassle: click/hover on the button, wait for the documents list to pop up, click the one you want - that's too much.
Single-click can actually be handier in many cases.
But I still want the same button to launch and to represent a running app.
And an extra button to be added right after the main one when a second window of the same app gets opened.
This is can be achieve on Windows using an easy hack[1], despite there seemingly is no "official" way.
Well, on Windows, you just move the cursor over the group and then you get a detailed list, so you still do the same with the same number of clicks, almost the same amount of motion, and less screen space. I think it's a pretty good UX.
I use xmonad, windows grouped in virtual workspaces by task.
1 - quick browsing
2 - development (editor and browser)
3...7 - if "development" accumulates too many windows (uncomfortable) and I don't want to close them yet, subset I work with pushed to next number (or subset I want to investigate later)
It is what I want. All depends on how you work. If I have several PDFs open at once, they're related. I'm not doing my taxes, reading hardware docs, and filing insurance forms at the same time.
KDE is quite good at customizing this stuff. You can pin documents and windows to Workspace or Activity. It even remembers this config between sessions.
Are you sure KDE is that good at customizing stuff?
I hated the fact that it displays a huge speaker icon in the middle of the screen whenever adjusting volume, I know I adjust volume, I don't need to see it in the middle of the screen every time, this is a productivity computer, not a television.
The only way I found to disable that behavior was to change some javascript code somewhere within KDE. But everytime I update archlinux, it was restored and I had to apply my change again!
There's no normal setting or config file to turn it off...
I'm using Cinnamon now though, that one is much better at just being exactly how it should be (= KDE 3.5-ish) and not changing in annoying ways all the time. Or running undesired, not easy to disable, CPU hogging "nepomuk" and other oddly named things in the background. Or being too integrated with other software like PIM stuff, while all I want is a good window manager.
Release linked here reworked on screen notifications. So that sound problem may be fixed. Otherwise you can change association for volume keys and use your own command.
I don't think he's referring to notifications, but to those visual feedback icons that show up in the middle of the screen whenever you change brightness or volume (or mute sound) via keyboard.
I believe you're meant to be using virtual desktop/workspaces to group tasks (which each have their own task bar), and then within a workspace they get grouped.
Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments.
Honestly KDE has always been this way, adding features over polish. For example I used gnome shell and mac os back to back and gnome holds up very well against mac os, and if anything it feels like a more cohesive experience (consistent hotkeys, ui).
Yep that is the beauty of having alternatives :)
Ideally I'd have a DE which is polished and has features that I need. Unfortunately there's nothing (macOS, Windows included) that does both, so we choose our poison.
> Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments.
You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-)
I used Mac for three years. In my opinion it had some extremely weird behavior by default (CMD-tab couldn't switch between instances and to make matters worse there is no configuration option or tool you can use to get sane behaviour.) And bugs:
- opening a dialog in one browser window would lock all windows from that browser. Good luck looking up the documentation for where the files you are supposed to upload are without either closing the upload dialog or opening a different browser.
- keyboard shortcuts vary wildly between apps: In one app CMD - Shift - leftarrow selects tobthe start of the line. In Safari however it meant go back. Guess how I still know after 8 years. Yes, filling out forms and losing everything because I wanted to select a lkne of text.
Windows also often used to drive me mad. It is better now but the performance tax when compiling is still 30%! And even their own dotnet applications use 3 seconds to start on their OS vs 127 ms or something in a virtual Linux machine on top if that Windows box.
Crazy bad performance and latency issues and insane keyboard shortcuts are UX problems just as well as flickering and reflowing.
KDE isn't worse. Just different. For some of us it has already been the least annoying option for years already.
You are right that all desktop environments have their issues and sure open source gives you more freedom. But:
1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app
2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place
3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined. Visual states like this [1] should not appear. If they are inside a promotional video I assume that some people have seen it happening and either did not care or it is very hard to fix because the issue is rooted deeply in the system. Maybe I overreact but I stumble across glitches like this all the time I try to use linux on the desktop.
> 1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app
I'm fully aware, it is just so utterly inefficient for my workflows and my head.
With alt-tab it is back-to-the-last-thing I worked on, I don't even think. On Mac it is: was-the-last-thing-I-worked-on-another-app-or-another-document-it-was-another-etc
This can happen hundreds of times in a day, costs up to a few seconds at a time and more importantly it is insanely annoying when you know how snooth it can be.
And to rub it in: Gnome 3 has something similar to Mac but you can disable it if you are a keyboard person like me.
KDE is like Windows but can be configured however you like it.
> 2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place
Good thing they fixed that since 2012.
> 3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined.
From my perspective: if a file chooser can block all other windows and I know people keep talking about the separation between apps and windows on that particular OS I conclude that they messed up that particular one.
When I see rendering glitches on an open source project (I rarely see them, but thats maybe just me) I conclude that they haven't had time to fix it yet and probably the graphics drivers they have to build on aren't as polished as those on other OSes.
But back to my conclusion: I'm happy all OSes and DEs exist. Some people honestly prefer every one of them for different reasons.
I'm just so tired of people pretending KDE is kind of subpar because it doesn't excel in all areas at once.
So I see lots of comments about certain defaults or options some people would like to see in the blank, not customized KDE.
But here's the thing, many defaults are just choices made by some dev, designer.
In KDE many options have nothing to do with the MacOS or Gnome defaults, even more, the defaults have been choosed specifically to avoid a known behavior or default in MacOS or Gnome
Luckily for everyone, KDE has so many customization options that you can make it work like almost any GUI you know, the popular one is of course MacOS aesthetics, but some guys like to configure it to behave just like Windows 10.
You could also create your own kind of GUI, nothing like any other GUI available.
The lesson is, in KDE most defaults can be changed, and that's mostly why it still exists as a software project probably.
I don't understand why the KDE teams let so many padding and alignment issues go through each release. Some of them are particularly jarring. For example, if you look at the screenshot of the system settings in the announcement, the pictures with two lines of subtext are above the ones with only one line despite them being the same size. It might seem minor but the situation repeats everywhere.
I understand it might not be a priority of the project but it leaves me with the feeling of something left unfinished and makes KDE completely unusable for me.
Edit: I feel like I need to edit my post because I am unnecessarily negative. Fixing the visual might actually be a huge task and I think KDE is getting better every release. A huge thank you to the team for the effort they pour into developing free software.
You will be happy to hear that a fix for the padding in the system settings should come with the next update of the KDE frameworks. Sadly the libraries release schedule is a bit out of sync with Plasma release schedule.
>While I agree with you, that's nothing a custom theme / engine can't fix.
For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time).
Even now you have to compile and install a custom theming engine[1] in KDE to apple decent themes
> For many people this is a turn off rather than a great thing. I've been using Ubuntu and the Arch for many years before switching to macOS (OSX at the time).
I don't follow: you point out an issue with KDE styling before saying you use MacOS that is even harder to style?
That isn't necessarily a bad thing but reminds me once again of how little respect developers have for spending resources like GPUs and instruction cycles for "bling" essentially.
I am always saddened a bit (as you can probably tell) that my desktop machine is easily 1000x more capable in terms of compute and rendering than my desktop in 1995 and yet is no more responsive, no quicker, no less of a burden on the underlying machine.
FWIW I don't consider it snarky, I don't use KDE. Used TWM for a long time and lately LXDE for when I want something more desktop like. But I'm also a kind of weird case in that I want to be able to run X11 apps on my laptop, which is a win10 install, so running a local X server (VcXsrv).
I find LXDE as a DE fairly lightweight and not too troublesome. The Qt version had some issues with my older X server (Qt for some software defined radio apps that use Qt rather than Gtk or other toolkits).
I has been a decade since I used KDE. It was eating too much memory of slow computer. I always missed a desktop environment for power users, instead of one aiming for the average user. Kde always the best one with this objective
Memory usage has greatly improved in my experience compared to a decade ago. (At least, in comparison to the available RAM.) Actually I felt that nowadays Gnome Shell with some extensions is more resource hungry.
I switched from KDE 3.5 / 4.0 to Unity and later Gnome around the time KDE 4 was first released (apparently 2008), for the same reason as you. But last year I switched back to KDE Plasma because Gnome felt unstable and slightly glitchy, and KDE is much smoother now.
> I always missed a desktop environment for power users, instead of one aiming for the average user.
What types of things make a big difference for you?
When I sit at my computer, it's to do something in an application. The desktop environment doesn't do much for me once I've launched the program that I'm actually there to use, does it? I'm generally pretty happy in Ubuntu or Windows or macOS or iPadOS.
No, but organizing the environment into separate groups of windows and apps that are related, and being able to use different settings on each task is totally a power user feature and a differentiatior. I've seen nothing out there as powerful as KDE activities.
Although perhaps not part of Plasma does anyone know why certain regressions in Kmail are not addressed? Things like reply to all by default were removed as a prefernce and there seems to be no discussion on that possible. What gives? Kmail is very powerful and deserves much wider use, but somehow a group has managed to take charge of the project and is keeping defaults suited for 90ies style clients and is actively removing preferences that fit with more modern (outlookish/gmailish) UX.
Serious question: I enabled a Plasma option to make windows transparent when I hover over their corresponding 'application rectangle' (sorry, not sure what to call it) in the panel. It drives me mad but I just can't figure out how I everenabled it. Ditto with transparent menus. Can anyone advise?
In general I'm very happy with Plasma but it does expose UI options that can really harm the experience.
Ugh! KDE is so pretty and so configurable except in the one way that I really need: I need an easy way to set Emacs-style keystrokes globally. Do this and I’m sold forever.
(That aside, very exciting update!)
Is there anything like Karabiner or AutoHotKey for KDE that lets you download predefined keyboard shortcuts?
Looking forward to try out the new tiling features of KWin when it gets released to Manjaro.
I've been trying to simulate the use of i3wm inside KDE for a while now, most of the online tutorials end up failing as some floating toolbar from KDE ends up grabbing focus and breaks the i3wm workflow. If anyone has gotten this to work with the latest builds, I'd be happy to try out their configs.
I've also tried out the alternatives of krohnkite (hi esjeon!) but what really breaks KDE is that you can't assign a workspace to each monitor. I have 3 monitors and I can independently assign each workspace to each monitor in i3wm and you can switch between them really easily. Its a massive productivity boost which keeps me sticking to i3wm even though KDE is more fully featured (blue-tooth, OSD etc...)
You probably know this already, but you can use KDE with your choice of WM, allowing you to swap out kwin for i3/sway or whatever else floats your boat/gives you tiling.
Man, my entire life I've been going back and forth between Gnome and KDE, I just settled (again) on stock Ubuntu (for some months now) but now that I see this video and the grass looks greener, again.
Guess I'm installing KDE Neon tonight...
Edit, I have to say that for the kids I'll stay on Gnome, it's very recognizable for them when compared to the iPads they use at school, much more so than KDE (and Win10 for that matter).
I recently decided to give stock Ubuntu with Gnome a try, coming from KDE. After about two weeks of missing some of the simple pleasures of KDE, like being able to right-click in the file browser to create a new file or resizing windows to the left/right side of the window with Meta-left/right (which is somehow buggy in Gnome), I landed back in KDE-land with Neon.
I briefly toyed with the idea of Manjaro, but am not sure I'll be able to install some software that is readily available as .deb.
I have been using KDE as my daily driver for both work and personal computing for five years now.
>like being able to right-click in the file browser to create a new file or resizing windows to the left/right side of the window with Meta-left/right
It's been possible to create files in the file browser (in Nautilus/Gnome) for as long as I can remember – you just have to have "templates" for the files you want to create in your Templates directory (e.g. "C file.c", "Text file.txt"). That being said, unfortunately this is one of those things where Ubuntu and Gnome are objectively worse than they were ten years ago – due to the changes related to renaming files in Nautilus, you can no longer give your new files a proper name as you create them, but have to manually rename them afterwards. Compared to all the clicks that takes (with typing in between), it's faster and more convenient to just click "Open Terminal here" and create any files you need with touch.
I don't know of any problems with Super-left/right, though.
"it's faster and more convenient to just click "Open Terminal here" and create any files you need with touch."
Reminds me of another thing I love about Dolphin: hit f4 and a terminal pops up at the bottom of the window. That feature is addictive and I had withdrawal symptoms when I switched to Gnome (again) :)
Usually small things get to me like, Kmail won't keep my emails de-collapsed, or Kwin puts a border around Firefox so my tabs are not at the top and I have to aim (true for Gnome also btw), same goes for VScode. Or I want to use git over sshfs but KDE uses kioslaves and not gvfs so it's not a normal FS if you mount ssh in dolphin. Stuff like that.
Gnome usually make me miss some configuration options or they remove them. But as I grow older I get better at accepting defaults and I think Gnome will capture me once and for all soon. I do like how Ubuntu looks ootb (I only set dark theme, autohide the panel and keep 4 virtual desktop at all times (normally they are removed when empty)).
Sometimes I choose Mate (similar to XFCE I guess). I like it a lot but it just doesn't look that good (ark-darker makes it better).
For the record, I prefer SSH-via-kioslave over SSH-via-fuse. On my previous work Macbook, I'd bind it as "normal filesystem" and that worked great until I suspended my laptop or disconnected the VPN, at which point filesystem semantics are a giant drag on the experience. If implemented as badly as on macOS, it makes your file dialog and command line access hang.
At least kioslaves handle disconnects gracefully and are right back in service whenever your network is, without having to remount anything.
Not verified it myself yet, but I read that middle click copy/paste is finally fixed on Wayland. That's awesome! It's an amazing usability improvement if you don't have to press ctrl+c/ctrl+v and can just select the text instead. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907
Nice! If any KDE devs are lurking here, please remove that annoying as all hell bug that makes a sticky note on your desktop whenever you hit ctrl+v. I've tried pasting files several times only to see something I copied 10 minutes ago pop up on an annoying widget I have to spend 30 seconds removing. This happens several times a week, if not daily.
Still an awful UI. Even that clock in the bottom right - what is going on with padding there? Flickering, poor layout, poor icons. It is all wrong. KDE needs to pay more attention to UI consistency and keep it more streamlined - needs polish. I’d love to use it, but the UI just feels so wrong.
That reviewer will be forever unsatisfied until Linux manages to cover all main and niche markets. That won't happen because there's no market drive for it. There's no company with a huge budget trying to develop a consumer-tailored Linux-based OS: the other two companies that develop consumer OSs do it just to sell additional hardware (Apple) or services (Microsoft). And expecting a community of people, each with their own interests, to just work for a goal that's not their own is but a fool's dream.
Every few years I give KDE a shot, and the result is always the same; it's too unstable and slow to be a daily driver.
The latest time was just last month, and the _stock_ panel widgets kept crashing, forgetting their preferences, and so on. The desktop environment itself occasionally crashed-to-login.
Critically, I tend to use low-power machines because I hate fan noise and excessive heat.
I was using KDE on an RPi4 and Pinebook Pro. For basically all the computing that I do these machines are more than powerful enough; but apparently not for KDE (or Gnome3!)
I like silent operation too, but I do the opposite, get a big case with 200 mm Noctua fans and double Noctua CPU cooler :) It runs very silently even with high end Ryzen.
The heat as long as it's dissipated out of the case to keep the system cool doesn't bother me.
For what it's worth, I use a T480. It has a nice quad core i7 processor and it draws 5 watts at idle. That's hardly more than your Pi4 or your Pinebook Pro. The fan never spins up unless I'm burning 100% CPU. I run Plasma 5 and it's always perfectly snappy.
I don't think you're gaining a lot, using such low end hardware.
Well, okay. You said you hated "fan noise and excessive heat", not "spending money". I'm just pointing out that this isn't a reason to avoid a fast, x86_64 computer.
That said, I'm sure there are many modern laptops for a fraction of the price of a T480 which will do the job just as well, and a lot better than a Pi4. What is "minspec" anyway? You have to draw a line somewhere. Should I expect to run a modern DE on my smartphone from 2011? How about my desktop from 2005?
That said, by the spec sheet, those machines should be easily capable of running Plasma. If you're having problems, perhaps it's not Plasma's fault, but something to do with the blobby GPU driver stack?
> Should I expect to run a modern DE on my smartphone from 2011?
No. That's a phone.
> How about my desktop from 2005?
Why not? That's approximately within the ability scope of the Pi4 and Pinebook Pro that I have.
DEs haven't really improved so significantly since then that they should need that much more power.
Their need for more computing ability has more to do with shoddier development practices than it does features.
The problems with KDE that I noted were mostly crashes and general broken behaviour; performance is more a Gnome3 problem, it only recently was capable of running on a Pi.
Ah. So, to be clear, this entire performance discussion was a red herring?
For completeness's sake I will just note that DEs are vastly different from 2005, notably in using GPU compositing; this is nicer in many ways and more power efficient, but stresses the driver stack a lot more. The crashing issues you mention are not common, so I would try running it on some different machines before blaming the instability on Plasma.
Interestingly, 2011 smartphones and 2005 desktops have broadly similar specs.
IMHO, KDE has better perf on low end machines than Gnome3, but it's still a problem.
I had compiz back in the day; compositing isn't new. It's also not all that important; I'm basically using the same bones of the Windows 95 DE, 25 years later. Except Win95 was fast, lean, and incredibly unstable. ;)
I try KDE every year or so, and _always_ abandon it due to instability. I've filed tickets in the past but KDE developers, and to be fair Gnome devs too, seem to have your attitude: old and slow devices aren't worth their time, despite the large install base worldwide.
Hell, they're not much slower than Chromebooks or the previously popular Netbooks.
KDE is probably too much of a core package to install, unless you are doing for the fun of it. The best way would be to wait until Ubuntu ships it in its next release.
Or reinstall KDE Neon which is Ubuntu base with KDE on top. That's what I've been running as my main desktop at home for 5 years or so and at work on and off for 5 years.
Presumably that would get you the previous release, if running Ubuntu 20.04? You'd either need a custom ppa, build it yourself, or run the early version of 20.10 (oth look at the date, I guess 20.10 is out? So maybe wait for 21.04?).
That always comes up and I and many other KDE aren't bothered at all by it.
That said, I guess Open Source as a whole could always need more talented artists as long as they don't try to insert themselves as arbiters of anything UX related, for example demanding to remove every configuration option or make everything work like in Mac/iOS.
Edit, also: I guess they have multiple graphic designers/artists and if it was possible to measure I'd bet $20 that they are more skilled than the majority of people complaining :-)
Yes we have many skilled designers and we are planning a big update of the default theme for Plasma 5.21 and a part of it is already in the master branch. Unfortunately it is often more complex to implement the mock-ups and we always need more manpower. See the mockups https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891
That mockup still looks bad! It may be moving in the right direction, but it's not the destination we need. Spacing is inadequate in many places, such as left padding on the window title, left padding on the sidebar text (this should line up with the title text btw), the window chrome colours are too pale, the font is too small, the view change icons are confusing, what is all that empty space in the path bar?... sigh the second screenshot link is even worse.
Don't take this the wrong way, I appreciate the work the KDE team is putting into this, but the UI just make me cringe when I try to use it. I have used all versions of KDE and IMO KDE 1 and 2 had the most consistent UIs. I think you guys should really focus a release on just the UI, rework it entirely to give it a polished, unique feel that can really push the experience forward. Something more like BeOS maybe? That had a nice polished, clean UI. All this transparency/blurring by the way, is unnecessary, the next UI should not be full of it.
Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.
> Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.
Basically you are saying you want KDE to be something it isn't.
You don't need to use widgets if you don't want to, why do you want to remove them from everyone else?
I've just upgraded to 5.20 and the icons are slightly bigger than in the image. It doesn't look as harmonious as the Windows 10 sidebar, but the slight size increase makes a difference. All in all, it's an improvement over the previous list-style panel, because the information is easier to read.
A personal wish however would be that we got a more modern look to more desktop environments. Both Gnome, Plasma and Pantheon (default in Elementary OS) are talked about as the best looking desktop environments, but I'd be lying if I said that any of them looked awesome. There's just something about them that make them feel weird. Sometimes it's just margins and whitespace, sometimes the font scale that seems inconsistent and sometimes it's the default icon packs that look a bit dated. I don't know, I'm not a designer, but it is definitely worse than both win10 and macOS 10.15.6
I think that if we want to grow the unix user base there's a bit of progress to be made in this department. Customisability is where we win today - but the defaults need to get better to attract more non tech oriented people.