
Plasma 5.18 - mistermatt
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.18.0
======
skriticos2
I just recently switched to kubuntu (KDE) back from fedora (Gnome 3).

On one hand I do like that the desktop does not try to re-define basic muscle
memory things, like changing the shortcut if you try to switch between two
windows of the same application. (Seriously Gnome, WTF?).

On the other hand it crashed left and right after install (less so now that it
settled down a bit) and there are a million QA type problems. I have a 4K 27"
screen and everything is tiny by default, so I put scaling to 1.3 and Kate +
Terminal are full of lines. The computation of the window update is broken.. I
browse the internet and the ticket is open - since two years.

Then there is Wayland, which I got used to on Gnome and think is a great
achievement - not in KDE though, that is still highly experimental and so back
it goes to ancient protocols. Yay!

So yes, we are building fancy new stuff on an eroding foundation is the
message I am getting from KDE nowadays. Compared to Gnome - which is stable
but weird.

Thinking back on the Gnome 2 / compiz / beryl days we have gone downhill so
much it's not funny..

ps. I know I'm complaining too much and that's unfair to an open source
project. And I still perceive Liunx desktops as superior to Windows which has
it's own issues (technical and non-technical). Just wondering what all the
effort was spent on in the last decade or two. I just don't see it.

~~~
jhoechtl
As a die hardcore kde fan I am not of a fanboi enough to admit that Gnome has
the best HiDPI multi-monitor wayland fractional scaling support of any DE I am
aware of.

~~~
dman
Things like dwm / i3 handle this much better since there isnt any UI to scale.
You just set the right font size and you are good to go.

~~~
majewsky
HiDPI support is more than setting a font size for the task bar. The tricky
part is getting application windows to rescale their UI as they're moved
between screens with different scaling factors (e.g. from a notebook screen
with high DPI to a projector with low DPI).

~~~
dman
That was kind of my point - the more starkly minimalist the workflow the
easier it is to make it pixel perfect and look exactly as you intended.

~~~
diffeomorphism
So the parts of the UI that are i3/dwm scale. Everything else like email,
browser, image editing, applications, the stuff that actually matter, doesn't.

Sure, if you only ever need a text editor you don't need to care about scaling
anything but fonts, but that is not the case for most people and unrelated to
which WM or DE you use.

------
haspok
How about proper multi-display support (including mixing HiDPI and low-res
displays)? Every time I connect my FHD laptop to my UHD monitor the windows on
the desktop move around completely randomly. It is better than before, because
they used to move outside the visible area, they fixed at least that.

But hey, at least there is an Emoji Selector now (???).

~~~
jonny383
Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux
(especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary).

KDE honestly seems the best for this, although on the latest version of GNOME
has fractional scaling available behind a flag (although also buggy and very
slow).

~~~
shrikant
> [...] multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so
> anything slightly out of the ordinary).

Testify :(

I'm still struggling to get my (IMHO, extremely vanilla) setup working (Ubuntu
on Thinkpad T430 + 2 external QHD monitors), and I'd appreciate any pointers
to any resources that can help me resolve this.

~~~
toupeira
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI)
has lots of information.

I have a Thinkpad X1C and an external monitor, both with QHD resolution. What
I ended up with is using xrandr scaling to increase the resolution of the
external monitor (probably should have gotten a 4K instead...), and tweaking
font sizes and Firefox's UI scaling until it looks okay on both screens. For
QT apps I also had to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0. Some proprietary apps
are still too small though, so I tend not to use them ;-)

The xrandr scaling is applied through a script and not persistent, so I mapped
it to a keyboard shortcut I can press when I reconnect the monitor.

My script looks like this:

    
    
      xrandr \
        --output eDP-1 --pos 0x0    --scale 0.9999x0.9999 \
        --output DP-2  --pos 2560x0 --scale 1.25x1.25
    

The silly 0.9999x0.9999 scaling on the first screen is to work around a mouse
flickering bug in the modesetting driver:
[https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70)

~~~
shrikant
This looks useful -- thanks! Will try out some of the suggestions mentioned
here.

------
dreary_dugong
Been using KDE for a few years now and I've always been impressed with the
experience. I'm really looking forward to this update, for me night mode is
critical. (I understand there were third party solutions but I often found
them to be buggy or otherwise difficult to use). Here's hoping my distro adds
the update to its repositories soon.

~~~
nunodonato
I've been using gnome for more than 15 years, but I have to say I'm feeling
quite an urge to try KDE again

------
rjzzleep
Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of
meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping
the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article.

My first impression is that it looks good. Lots of useful features. But I can
imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest
in KDE they would have closed the page again.

That said I have a question:

It seems that Plasma has tiling WM features. How useful are they?

One thing about tiling WM is that typical it's only part of a package. Another
part is that people are typically looking at a lightweight hotkey driven
workflow and the ability to script where and how windows appear with
occasional non tiling things to fit applications that don't work well for
tiling systems.

The other question I have is that one of the reasons why I go for these
"lightweight" setups. Althouh xfce-settings daemons + tiling wm is what I do
is also because of power usage. How is KDE in terms of power usage?

And yes, I realize that firefox, blink based browser, slack are the biggest
power drains.

~~~
jhoechtl
> Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds
> of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up
> skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article.

I am a dedicated follower of Plasma and to be honest counting features this is
a lame relase.

BUT it's also a LTS release. Some will upgrade specifically for that somehow
quality statement. You do not want a ton of new features without time for
stabilisation in such a release?

~~~
vvillena
It's true this release doesn't bring is as many features as the last ones.
However, the jump between LTS versions wil be impressive. Everything is more
polished, more functional, and more intuitive.

I'll upgrade as soon as I can, so I can check out the quick audio device
switching. Audio routing in Plasma is featureful but not intuitive.

------
eklavya
Just started using KDE neon in a vm on my iMac for office work and it's really
really good and productive. Kudos to the KDE team.

------
bovermyer
I may be in the minority here, but I _really_ like the Emoji Selector. I'm in
the terminal most of the time, and anything that has quick keyboard shortcuts
but adds character makes me happy.

------
markosaric
Looks like a nice update! I also like the fact that they use a PeerTube
embedded video as their official video announcement
[https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/cda402b5-2bcb-4c...](https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/cda402b5-2bcb-4c0c-b232-0fa5a4dacaf5?start=)

------
UI_at_80x24
Every time there is a new KDE announcement/release I give it another try. I
don't like it. I miss the KDE 3.5 days. The DE seemed more cohesive then and
worked very well. Ever since they went down the plasma route it looks like
they focused on making it look pretty. The whitepapers and announcements made
it sound like there was hefty backend improvements but each update was buggy
for me.

I still use KDE apps, I find that a lot of them are perfect; but the DE has
been limping along since the 4.0 re-write.

Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's
tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help, you
are making it worse.

Side note: I really liked the music in that video.

~~~
ognarb
> Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's
> tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help,
> you are making it worse.

The DE "app-store-thing" is a front end to packageKit and packageKit is a
front end to your package manager.

~~~
ohithereyou
On some distros there is an additional software store that connects into
Snap[0], so they're technically not distro supplied packages.

[0] [https://snapcraft.io/](https://snapcraft.io/)

------
useragent86
I don't think this is a good idea:

> There are quite a few new things in Plasma 5.18's System Settings. First and
> foremost is the optional User Feedback settings. These are disabled by
> default to protect your privacy.

> That said, if you do decide to share information about your installation
> with us, none of the options allows the system to send any kind of personal
> information. In fact, the Feedback settings slider lets you decide how much
> you want to share with KDE developers. KDE developers can later use this
> information to improve Plasma further and better adapt it to your needs.

~~~
ryukafalz
Why not? So long as it’s disabled by default and users are therefore
intentionally turning it on, I think it’s fine.

------
elkos
I'm a Debian user that uses KDE (most of the timel, in many cases people
insist on suggesting that the standard KDE experience in Debian is subpar. I'm
am fairly happy with it but is anyone aware of a solution to enhance that
experience to something more close to what the KDE community considers ideal?

~~~
diffeomorphism
KDE on debian is fine. The issue is that debian wants long term releases and
kde only releases those sometimes and not necessarily at a time that fits
debian's schedule.

So you often get "kde as it was two years ago". The horror! After all, we all
remember how using computers two years ago was pure agony until things
radically changed...

------
jhoechtl
No news from the wayland front?

~~~
scrollaway
I use KDE on Wayland. It works pretty well; there's still bugs I hit once in a
while (vscode especially sometimes is missing dialog windows and I have to
restart it).

~~~
jhoechtl
Blurry firefox, blurry thunderbird anybody? Still plasma on wayland related
fixes in the pipeline. But getting close...

~~~
pedrocr
At least for Firefox that probably means it's running with X emulation. But
the Firefox Wayland backend works fine, it just needs to be enabled. But sure,
Wayland still has quite a few corner cases like that.

~~~
jhoechtl
I know about

GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox

That works on Gnome and sway, not on plasma. Intel GPU. Still open bugs on
bugs.kde.org

~~~
pedrocr
I believe the correct variable these days is:

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

This makes firefox a full wayland app. But I only use sway, so maybe there are
KDE specific bugs.

------
shmerl
Still waiting for subsurfaces clipping bug fix on Wayland.

------
AzzieElbab
I am a huge fan of kde and the only feature I really want is better tiling and
snapping

------
yori
I use XFCE. Are there any good reasons to switch to KDE? Honest question.

~~~
niccolove
I think so, but what exactly depends on what you need. Commonly liked features
are:

\- User intuitive widgets that can be easily dragged around in panels with a
third party store directly in Plasma itself, containing useful widgets such as
calendar events sync and todo lists

\- Complete customization but also pretty by default and getting better;
browse third party colorschemes, plasma themes, global themes, panel layouts
(latte), application styles (kvantum), etc etc

\- Powerful notification system that allows you to reply inline to telegram
messages, embed screenshots so you can drag those around
[[https://postimg.cc/q6qLMXK1](https://postimg.cc/q6qLMXK1)], embed files that
you can also drag around + interact with, sticky notifications for ongoing
operations - still having the ability to go with a do not disturb mode for a
custom time and set notification importance in a granular way

\- Powerful integration with phone (see phone battery, see and send messages,
see incoming calls, see/stop/play videos [youtube / vlc] playing on the pc
from the phone, see phone notifications, and so on) and integration with
browsers (native notifications, native downloads [see notifications above],
search and open browser tabs from krunner, etc)

\- Powerful search (krunner) that can check spelling errors, find browser
tabs, convert units, do mathematical operations, search the apps store, run
command line programs, open locations, see recent documents, add task to the
todo list (zanshin), supports third party runners, etc etc etc

\- System tray that only shows relevant widgets so you can keep it minimalist
but without loosing any possibly useful option (system tray elements for usb
drives, night color, display configuration, clipboard, vaults, media playback,
printers, kate sessions, etc etc)

\- Third party stuff like Latte and Kvantum that allows you to customize your
desktop in any way imaginable (quick browse for "Plasma" on r/unixporn will
confirm this)

\- Consistent apps that follow the general theme, some of them also
convergent, e.g. all maui apps (index [files], vvave [music], buho [notes],
pix [images], ...) work exactly the same on desktop and on your Android phone
as well, so you don't have to learn to use different applications on each OS

\- Light and fast. Yeah, I know xfce is very light and fast, but Plasma 5 is
very light as well recently. I have a pinebook, the $100 machine, and it's
usable both with Plasma and xfce (both uses around 340mib of RAM there).

\- Kontact suite with Akonadi integration that allows for various apps all
integrated with each other (todo from one app will appear in the other), with
the generic Kontact app containing all them and being able to show a dashboard
with all recent notes, to-dos, events, mails etc.

\- Support for phones with Plasma mobile and other tech things (e.g.: TVs
afaik and the mycroft thing), with Plasma Mobile using the same underlying
plasma base component, so it's consistent + compatible

\- Any application you could need, there are a lot of those all made by the
KDE community, and those are all following the KDE human interface guidelines
and following the global theme, so that's nice

...I kinda lost track of time, sorry for the essay, I just think that Plasma
is great and this is how I can best explain why

~~~
ryukafalz
> e.g.: TVs afaik

Wait, TVs? Where can I read more about this?

