About 4 years ago, I switched from KDE/Kubuntu to OSX. Not because I hated KDE, but because my job needed OSX. It takes divvy, sizeup, apptivate, bartenderapp to do, what I was able to do with KDE out of box. The dual monitor support in OSX is still not in par with KDE.
I have been using Kubuntu/KDE as my main workstation for last couple of months and I love depth of how much is possible with window environment. I think KDE works pretty well for powerusers as well as beginners and I am excited to see its new update!
I was constantly surprised how KDE makes it possible to configure my environment exactly the way I like, while maintaining a bearable level of complexity in the control panel.
You are correct sir. People who prefer OS X to KDE will prefer OS X to KDE, and people who prefer KDE to OS X will prefer KDE to OS X. Funny how it works out that way. :)
You made the point I was trying to make far better than I did. Whether or not it's the poster's intent, the terms superior and inferior imply that there is some objective judgement being made about the thing being discussed that is independent of one's personal preferences.
I honestly think that almost all pointless flamewars in tech forums about the relative merits of various languages/operating systems/editors/desktop environments/whatever stem from confusion among the participants over whether personal preferences or objective qualities are being discussed. It doesn't help that for a lot of people in the larval hacker stage, there is no distinction between objective and subjective judgements- if they happen to prefer vi to emacs, they interpret that as meaning that vi is intrinsically better in some way, and isn't just a better fit for their particular workflow or whatever.
To begin with complete lack of any dual monitor shortcuts or configuration settings at all. With KDE, I can configure certain apps to start on certain screen, send them to one screen on another with a key press.
Is this supposed to illustrate the "beta-ness" of the release? Because it's an atrocious UI. Two different-sized "wrench" icons next to each other? What are those checkboxes for? What does the little blue bar above the wireless symbol supposed to indicate? The blue lock is lost in the wireless icon in the network list (the eye is terrible at distinguishing blue shapes on a noisy background like that). It goes on and on...
It has some minor issues, sure, but I'm completely missing the atrocious part. In fact, I think it's quite nice, hope to use this UI soon. It would be great if you could send an email to the developers with your observations as, you know, it's a beta and some help is always needed.
I wonder why so many design-related critiques sound as if someone comitted a crime against humanity. C'est la vie, I suppose.
> I wonder why so many design-related critiques sound as if someone comitted a crime against humanity. C'est la vie, I suppose.
The comments here were even more virulent with the last beta. I didn't even bother to comment then, what can you say to people who expect multi-million dollar polished U/I out of a beta from one of the last large community-developed open source projects, as if KDE has some sort of hidden pool of paid artists and capital development programs?
Even Firefox on Linux still looks worse than KDE (IMHO) but people (even on HN) don't stop to base their opinion on Firefox based only on that.
As for me, I'm incredibly proud of those who develop the visual design for KDE, especially since they do so with no compensation. KDE has come a very long way since KDE 2 and 3 and that is almost entirely from true volunteer effort; while there is always room for improvement I think KDE looks good. Not even "good for what resources we have", but good per se, and if the screenshot of this beta is any indication KDE's Plasma 5 will look even better.
He, I would like to say it is the price for living with kde. I find it is generally worth it and suggest other people try it if they don't like their current setup and have some time to spare. I changed to ubuntu fo a few years while they used gnome 2 but now I am back on kde for my workstation and have been for a couple of years. (Distroshopping coming up later this month when the various lts-buntus and derivatives have stabilized.)
Yes it beta but if the screenshots immediately raises red flags to you chances are you are a mac us ser and should stay with mac for now.
(I have used mac for years and it annoys me to no end, mostly because it is so close to perfect but still broken to no end for many of my use cases. For me linux shortcuts, linux software, fullscreen working w/multi monitor, "correct" keyboard layout and keyboard shortcuts that makes sense to me is far more worth than visual polish. But then again I am weird, ain't I? ;-)
On a regular day I use Mac OS X (mainly a browser, and iTerm and Emacs in full-screen), Fedora with Gnome, iOS, and Android.
I don't think any of them are perfect, but Apple do a much better job with the cognitive aspects of computing than any open source efforts have been able to muster.
I think it's just supposed to illustrate that this is KDE.
Speaking as a past KDE user (and with zero experience of KDE in the past 7 years or more) I would say that each wrench is for a different purpose. Maybe one leads to Network Settings and the other lets you configure the widget. At least that's how using KDE used to feel back in the days.
Yes, such support is still there. In fact, it's even easier to get to than it was in KDE 3 (where you effectively had to be good at understanding how KDE converted URIs into kioslave requests).
Based on the screenshots it seem KDE devs tone down their interface to simpler visuals (icons, colours, shades and all the blingbling I usually associate KDE with).
Is that the trend for the next iteration of KDE ? (I like it)
Although in my opinion their work hasn't exactly been a huge improvement so far. It's just a flatter coat of paint with the same issues that already plague KDE: inconsistent padding and spacing, terrible organization (think system settings) and so on.
The redesign is not in this beta and, depending how long it takes, maybe won't make it into the first final release either.
Partially it's even by design. It's not intended that Plasma 5 diverges too much from the current release to ease the transition.
Canonical never contributed much to KDE. Yes, a few bits here and there but overall mostly negligible.
Blue Systems OTOH is a big KDE contributor. Things like KDE Search improved a lot thanks to Blue's involvement.
As for Kubuntu: It appears to me that mostly the same people are involved with it. The only KDE thing mostly specific to Kubuntu is Muon (and that's being ported to Debian as we speak). Everything else by Blue Systems is AFAIK cross-distro.
The Kubuntu guys already announced that Canonical's own display server Mir is not an option. Therefore it remains to be seen how feasible Kubuntu remains with Canonical pushing a Wayland competitor.
Last time I used KUbuntu it was pretty much horrible. (E.g. only 6 month maintained and after that the repo did go offline so my installed system was broken (couldn't even install old pkgs from the DVD because of dependencies)). But the config tools from SuSE where also horrible (convoluted and so slow!), so I use the Fedora KDE spin now.
Having used both zypper and apt-get, I find the latter very lacking, even when coupled with other tools.
Take `zypper se -s`, for example - or if you prefer the long form, `zypper search --detailed`. How do you get that information from any of the apt tools, or even aptitude?
And then there's the openSUSE build system.
But I digress. I will attempt to replace my openSUSE installation with NixOS and if I miss my automatic KF5 builds, I'll try to create Nix packages for them.
That's not me, that's a well known general design principle: "It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."
I did a lot of Linux desktop stuff 10 years ago. Now I feel most of the action takes place inside the browser. KDE's biggest contribution to computing will always be KHTML.
Yes, I read it and I know the settings are being redesigned. The system settings is just one example and perhaps the most egregious. It's also the one that is still a constant annoyance after years of using KDE when trying to find something.
Try a different heavy DE and see if you can even find the settings these days. I hadn't used KDE since back when they first released 4 and have just started using it again. I'm loving it - a heavyweight DE where things are properly integrated (sorry XFCE and similar) and that you can actually personally tune the settings for. The settings can be a little difficult to find... but at least they're there to be found :)
Seriously, it was a rhetorical statement that didn't mean "no-one can literally find the settings", but "you're not allowed to change much these days". Gnome 3.x in particular is horribly bad. KDE allows a lot of tweaking.
I sort of guessed, but decided to answer literally because people can just find a GUI that works for them on Linux can they not?
My understanding of Gnome desktop is that customisation is being offloaded to third party extensions. I admit rapid changes in API for extensions means breakage at present, but I'm hoping for asymptotic stability as the interface matures. When that happens it will be like visual emacs one hopes... hack on your GUI for the things you need.
It is? My girlfriend uses KDE, and I never found difficult to find stuff using the integrated search. On the other hand, if they would recreate print settings, I wouldn't have to explain that typing http://localhost:631/ in a browser is the most intuitive way of managing printers.
That he has someone close to him that uses it that doesn't mind when he jumps on the system, so he does it occasionally? There may or may not have been something implied by stating his/her girlfriend used it, but assuming a negative implication does not lead to useful conversation, IMHO.
Note that the wheeldesigners are just making a new default theme. With minor tweaks all kde 4 series themes are still usable.
Also, the inconsistencies are mostly due to app developers themselves. The difference between plasma and the software compilation can exemplify that - you use two entirely different application stacks if you are developing for one or the other (qt widgets enhanced by kdelibs vs qml enhanced by plasma). And then there are multiple ways to actually develop the app interfaces - you can use anchor based widgets, ui files, or raw custom positioning which I find in reviewing a lot of codebases a bit too common for my liking.
When I have the time I try to fix it, though. The problem right now is that while the Qt world's future is QML based, the KDE applications and libraries were developed for over a decade around widgets. So when I develop something new I'm using QML and it can scale, animate, and orient really well for arbitrary window sizes and devices, but some widgets applications just anchor a toolbar to 50px indents and then it looks like puke on high DPI.
I mean you can still do that in QML, but the anchors and layouts are so easy to use it seems insane to do so.
Their icons are not good. Too glassy and cartoony and too many gradients. They don't look modern, they look like icons for a kids app from 10 years ago.
They are planning to adopt Font Awesome as the default icon theme. Right now they are still using the old Oxygen set.
And at that, you can pick your own icon themes anyway. There are Hycons, Numix, Faenza, etc. I do agree defaults matter and the Oxygen icon set is gaudy, but it shouldn't stop an HN user from trying it since you can change them.
Is Xfce mainstream yet? It's pretty popular for a non-default desktop - I can't find the cite, but I have a vague memory of something like 16% of Ubuntu being Xubuntu.
In Linux circles, I'd say yes, it's pretty well known. It used to be my choice of DE, but takes a lot of tinkering and is not as feature complete as KDE is (which is a plus for others, I suspect).
It's mainstream in the sense that the Gnome community fragmented so much in recent years (see Mate and Cinnamon "spin offs") that these days Xfce has roughly the same mind share as Gnome -- if the recent poll on Slashdot it any indication. http://slashdot.org/poll/2751/which-desktop-environment-do-y...
No, XFCE development is very slow. Last I checked, I think they still working on GTK 3 support.
LXDE/Lubuntu is probably closer to that "16%." I can get <200M initial RAM usage pretty easily with LXDE. XFCE is really not that lightweight. They are both pretty lacking compared to current versions of GNOME/KDE.
Debian is currently considering shifting it's default desktop to XFCE, as guh-nome has taken some ridiculous turns for the worse. It'd be a good step for XFCE, as it'd start getting a lot more attention to the areas where the integration is lacking.
The developers intend to adopt Font Awesome as the icon theme, they are just designing all the missing icons in the background right now. Which probably includes the start menu icons.
And remember you can change the icon theme. Numix, Faenza, and Hycons are all popular alternatives available already. Though I'm still using the Oxygen icons on kde4 because all those themes are missing swathes of icons...
I'm enthusiast of KDE. Keep up the good work guys!
BTW I'm using KDevelop to edit PHP. It's come a long way since its introduction, and is now almost on par (feature-wise) with Netbeans, which makes it the second best free PHP IDE for Linux!
This tickles me: "With a substantial new toolkit stack below come exciting new crashes and problems that need time to be shaken out." I think I'll refer to all crashes as "exciting" from now on.
I found it hilarious that the first screenshot links to a thumbnail ending in '-wee.png' and goes to full size when 'wee' removed. I'm easily amused. Are developers Scottish?
I like KDE a lot for its UI/UX. KDE actually has the potential to intuitively replace Windows in many households with shared systems and also in educational institutions. But the only major problem with KDE is that its very heavy and takes a lot of resources.
Does the next generation workspace just change the UI/UX or optimize stuff too? The post doesn't talk much about that.
Actually more optimization is taking place than visual refreshes. Porting the stuff to Qt5 (esp. QtQuick2) should speed everything up on non-ancient PCs.
Visual refreshes are just easier to explain. ;-)
Its not speed I'm bothered about. KDE is more or less very smooth at that. Its the resources it takes! The CPU is always nearly being utilized on a small-medium scale, and nearly 700mb is taken away at boot-time and gathers upto 2gb upon usage. That's too high, at least I think so.
Would KDE actually require so much for all the features it gives or can that actually come down?
It affects the performance of the system! By "smooth", I referred to KDE's UX, which is more or less smooth. But the overall system performance reduces due to less resource when you run some heavyweight tasks.
The CPU thing is either a bug or file indexing is not yet complete (although that should not take more than a few hours).
How much RAM is utilized depends on the components you loaded. "Convenience distros" tend to start more services by default. The KDE Workspace is very modular. You can disable/remove many things, esp. if you compile yourself.
That said, it's not a workspace primarily for low-end computers. If it requires more RAM than your PC has, maybe look at LXQt.
KDE devs are known to live on the bleeding edge. A lot of people complained about it when KDE moved from v1 to v2, v2 to v3 and v3 to v4. But KDE remains targeted to 'relatively recent' desktops.
It might not be that big of a problem this time around, when(ever) we move from v4 to v5, because hardware isn't evolving as fast as it used to. But KDE will remain a behemoth.
Well, on kubuntu you can install kubuntu-low-fat-settings (not sure if they still offer this):
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-low-fat-settings
Basically, it turns off composting and file tagging services. It reduced the memory requirements and the CPU % dropped to something close to GNOME 2.x or XFCE.
Are you sure you are counting that memory usage correctly? Because altought KDE consistently uses 6GB on my machine by some metrics, the total used memory at the same time stays under 1GB.
I switch to KDE 4 when I saw it working smoothly with SVGA X11 driver (not 2d or 3d acceleration). In the same machine with the same driver, Gnome 2 had a horrible lag.
So I don't think that KDE 4 have a performance problem.
Yes. An easy way for someone not familiar with dbus: Use d-feet (should be in your repos) to find the running Konsole and the relevant interface, activate it and play around with it inside d-feet, and then activate it on the command line with dbus-send (you'll need to read dbus-send(1) to get the syntax). Or you could try: https://code.google.com/p/dbus-tools/wiki/DBusCli or http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/609
Thanks. qdbusviewer shows some available interfaces.
Looks like a bunch of konsole stuff never got implemented as dbus interfaces in KDE4. This specific use case seems to be covered by the konsoleprofile command (I wonder why the devs chose that route instead of exposing a dbus interface).
Kickstart me some decent icons already, geez. I think it's the number one complain every single time somebody opens a KDE thread.
Anyway, I don't use KDE but I think it does a lot of good things and I wish them luck. Using XFCE right now and couldn't be happier.
Also: they could take a very clean approach, like really minimal design and leverage their customization options (that they are famous for) to a few themes and let the community do the rest. Like "sane defaults" that don't scare newbies. I know it's not easy.
I think what strikes me about DE upgrades like this is that they don't appear to add anything fundamentally new or promise to provide me with a meaningfully improved or more efficient experience.
For my part - ever since switching to i3, I can't really see myself using any other WM. Once I got used to not touching the mouse, I lost all desire to use a traditional mouse centric GUI.
I use KDE at work and rarely touch the mouse to switch between windows. I have two monitors, and a couple of keyboard shortcuts, but power-usage comes with a price. I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too.
IIRC, the only real tinkering I did was to re-jig the navigation shortcuts to resemble VIM bindings. From a user's perspective i3 is comparable to xmonad, but configuration wise it's an order of magnitude simpler.
i3 does, however, come at a price. Not being inside a fully functional DE means a lot of normally trivial tasks require active thought and engagement, at least at first, since they will have to either be handled via the command line or by seeking out the correct application (e.g. managing wi-fi connections, handling dual-monitors & monitor rotation, etc.)
The focus for Plasma 5.0 is -- for the most part -- the port to Qt 5, not adding many new features (although there are a few new ones). Most new features will appear in subsequent Plasma releases.
Can I press super/win-key, type [name of application], press enter and it brings up the [application]? It didn't when I last tried, and I don't want a window manager that doesn't behave in that way. Windows, Gnome shell and Unity does it - it's not hard.
Nice. I don't get why they can't just use the super key by default like everyone else, but it's not a very big problem. Is it a fuzzy search? How does it handle "term" and "temrinal"?
They can use the key. They just don't change default keyboard shortcuts during a release cycle (first generation Plasma precedes both Unity and Gnome Shell).
For God's sake. I don't care a dime about fancy UIs. I mean, I really, really, really don't care. I want a robust and reliable system that doesn't change all the time for no good reason. I want a worthy Outlook alternative. Outlook is much more than just an email client. Kontact, Evolution and Thunderbird+Lightning just aren't good enough (they're simply full of bugs and I've tried all 3 of them). Why waste all those manhours in useless ice candy and not improve those instead?
Neither do I. I love the fact that, after years of wasting pixels on 3D effects and shadows, we're moving beyond that. This release of KDE seems to be a step in that direction.
KDE is slowly losing ground. It used to be my desktop of choice but that was in the knoppix days. Now there is of course Kubuntu but I switched (more or less by accident rather than by design) a while ago and I don't think I'll be switching back. My desktop is practically invisible to me anyway, all I run on a normal workday is firefox, a terminal window and thunderbird.
The one piece of software from the KDE distro that I really love is Konsole.
Guake in GNOME3 was pretty broken the last time I used it (a lot of time ago, it was the thing that made me switch to a tiling WM).
Something changed lately?
I don't use KDE anymore (switched to XMonad a few years ago), but I still use Dolphin for its DAV/SMB capabilities, and occasionally gwenview. But why do you think KDE is "losing ground"?
And Konsole is pretty good, but doesn't handle resizing well in XMonad, so it's urxvt for me.
Normal people don't think "how many CPU cycles does this DE use?". They look for familiar, frictionless, easy to use and pleasant to the eye interfaces. If you're happy with dwm, good for you. I'm happy with xmonad. DE are made for the majority of people, not for nerd.
Also "lightweight" gets too much play in Linux UI circles. What people actually mean, I think, is "not janky and broken".
Heck, why is Linux Mint exciting? Because it's explicitely not trying to revolutionize anything, they're just trying to make the basic idea work as well as possible.
I have been using Kubuntu/KDE as my main workstation for last couple of months and I love depth of how much is possible with window environment. I think KDE works pretty well for powerusers as well as beginners and I am excited to see its new update!