
KDE's Plasma 5.2 – The Quintissential Breakdown - bondia
https://kver.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/plasma-5-2-the-quintissential-breakdown/
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eklavya
KDE folks have managed a huge feat, congratulations to everyone on the team.

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mlinksva
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
_> (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.

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azinman2
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.

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andmarios
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/)

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toyg
_> 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.

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keithpeter
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.

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

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ljoshua
Slightly related, but can someone clear up for me (a person who occasionally
administers a headless Fedora box but doesn't venture into desktop Linux land)
how different WMs and distros work when I want to install a particular piece
of software? Does a desktop application have to be specifically written to run
in KDE or Gnome or Unity? Or does it just look funny if I try to run a K*
application in Gnome?

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freehunter
Generally the UI is written with one of the two big GUI toolkits: GTK (Gnome)
or Qt (KDE). If you run Gnome, you get GTK and all the apps work without
needing to download anything else, but if you have Gnome and want an app using
the Qt framework, you'll need to download the Qt libraries, which can be
substantial. Even after downloading the Qt libraries, though, the application
might still look weird, since it's not a native GTK UI.

The state of WMs on Linux is really, really more complicated than it needs to
be.

~~~
donniezazen
> The state of WMs on Linux is really, really more complicated than it needs
> to be.

Choice is always going to be a prominent force in Linux. There will always be
folks who are going to write new toolkits and apps and there they will find
users who would want to promote it. That is just the nature of Open source.

That being said I think no one really likes to use GTK+ app if they are
targeting multiple desktop environment and operating system. Ubuntu's Unity 8
and KDE both are using Qt and Qt is already available on all possible
platforms including Android.

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freehunter
I haven't done a whole lot of GUI development, but I briefly looked at Qt and
it seemed like it cost a huge amount of money to use, so I wrote it off. Is
that not the case?

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frik
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.

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Zardoz84
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.

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

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

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shmerl
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.

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dman
Can anyone paste the content? Site seems down here

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

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jfreax
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.

~~~
from_elsewhere
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/recom...](http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/recommended-
column-width-for-text-reading-digital-vs-printed)

[2] [http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-
widt...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3618/ideal-column-width-for-
paragraphs-online)

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bmn_
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.

~~~
mwfunk
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?

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bmn_
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.

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jensreuterberg
Yeah as someone who works with the KDE and Plasma Devs - I can tell you that
you're wrong...

but [prediction of the future coming]: you won't care anyway. Which is ok,
dear bmn_1! You get to be ... I guess "upset" about something that happened 6
years ago! You get to post about how horrible it is that no one listens to you
(you, a professional programmer and all!)! It's fine, it really is.

You know what I can't afford? This shit. Now I don't mind (really you're SO
right there its really into one ear and out the other) because I'm a big boy
and been doing this for years and years. I don't know about the programmers
but for designers and especially designers in open source and ESPECIALLY-
especially young designers testing the waters in open source, honing their
skills and learning how to work in a team - my advice will always be "Do the
opposite of what that guy wants".

You're probably a lovely person. I bet you nurture little animals back to
health and is a ton of fun socially going out for pints - in another world we
could have been friends. But here - in this setting - with all your wounded
pride leaking out of every sentence and word, with your "I big professional!
You listen!" chest thumping and your make-belief truth you spun out of
overhearing a keynote... you're one of the many things wrong with open source
today.

