This week in KDE: Tons of UI improvements and bugfixes

https://pointieststick.com/2022/07/22/this-week-in-kde-tons-of-ui-improvements-and-bugfixes/

87 70 4 years ago

torginus• 4 years ago

I haven't used KDE since the Plasma transition, when it got buggy, and according to most users' reports, stayed buggy for quite a while.

Allegedly it's much better now, but this string of 'we fixed all the bugs this time - promise!' posts I'm still having my reservations.

paol• 4 years ago

Ah, the curse of open bug tracking. Everyone is fixing bugs all the time[1], it's just that process is visible in open source apps.

[1] If they're not, that's even worse.

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

Everyone is fixing bugs all the time

That's not how it works. Every program that evolves also creates bugs all the time because of bad implementations, bad formulation, bad problem scoping, bad integration. If your project creates more bugs every week than it can possibly fix you can have these weekly bug fixing newsletter forever and at the same time accumulate more bugs than you ever had.

badrabbit2• 4 years ago

I stopped when it became a dependency mess. Kwallet this, avahi that and disabling things broke other things. It became too much of a burden. I love the UI better than any DE but I stick to something like openbox or enlightenment these days.

sph2• 4 years ago

I hated the whole Akonadi thing, where it used to spawn on login an whole MySQL instance to store mail and other metadata. These days with 64 GB of RAM it's not a problem, but I remember it was such a heavy piece of machinery for very little benefit.

dagw• 4 years ago

I haven't used KDE since the Plasma transition, when it got buggy, and according to most users' reports, stayed buggy for quite a while

I also jumped off the kde train after the 3->4 transition/train wreck. However, about a year ago I gave it another try, basically on a whim, and I was really impressed. Impressed enough that I haven't switched back to XFCE since.

minimaul• 4 years ago

I stopped using KDE during the KDE3 -> KDE4 transition. Loved KDE3, really didn't get on with KDE4.

KDE5 has been vastly better for me - especially in the last two years or so.

I don't really hit any bugs day to day.

jraph10• 4 years ago

KDE verions from 4.0 to 4.4 or so were very unstable. KDE 4.5 and later were rock solid.

First versions of KDE 5 were very lacking. It's now back to rock solid and much more visually pleasing and enjoyable to use than KDE 4. The Oxygen theme was very visually "heavy", its grey was quite depressing and overall did not look well. I would just get rid of it and switch to the Fusion theme. KDE 3 with its Plastik theme looked a bit more dated than Oxygen, but was way better. KDE 5's Breeze theme is perfect.

jraph10• 4 years ago

Look closer. Most of the fixes mentioned in this weekly update are small and niche stuff you don't encounter too often.

And nobody is claiming all the bugs are fixed. Quite the contrary. There is a huge effort on fixing bugs, but this desktop is overall quite stable. You can try it by yourself, but don't do this if you are happy with your current setup.

aliswe• 4 years ago

I like! The long-standing open bugs (also in proprietary applications) are often a symptom of risk-aversion, which to me is a smell of some kind of rigidness in the code.

jraph10• 4 years ago

It's above all the lack of available dev time I think. I don't think it says much about KDE's codebase. One needs to be aware of and get interested at one of these issues enough to take some time to look into it, most probably in there free time, and submit a fix.

tifadg13• 4 years ago

I'm very thankful to KDE - everything works, haven't seen regressions in ages. One DE aspect that hasn't kept up with the current trends is config backup/restore. I've got ansible scripts that bring a fresh F35 vm to maybe 90% of my existing golden-config setup, including data, but there are some corners which can't be blunted - mostly around multi-monitor setup. Still the best DE for me by far.

That said, I always remove `kf5-akonadi`, `calligra` and disable baloond (wish it could be removed but it's too deeply integrate).

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

everything works

hyperbole much? how does everything work and at the same time every weekly update corrects tons of bugs?

tifadg13• 4 years ago

everything works for my workflow*.

That said I don't use a lot of kde specific apps, rather opt for best-in-class, and terminal for others. Still - the system itself is stable.

viraptor• 4 years ago

At that size of a project everything will have bugs. With the current way we develop software it's unavoidable. If they're not stopping you from doing what you want to, then "everything works" is true.

jraph10• 4 years ago

You'd have a comparable number of bug fixes for any such big DE. It's just that KDE communicates on this. And if you look closer, the stuff being listed is often niche, not blocking or affects relatively new features. There are not a lot of regressions. I blindly update KDE these days, and use a rolling release distro to benefit from the improvements quickly.

eloisius• 4 years ago

Also thankful. For so many years I used Gnome and KDE apps exclusively because I wanted a uniform look. Only now, after many years of tolerating web-based UIs, and switching to i3 am I appreciating the KDE ecosystem. Generally every time I’m comparing apps the KDE one wins out. Dolphin (taken from a suggestion on HN) is the best file explorer that I’ve used. Okular is almost as good as Preview. If they had a signature annotation like Preview, I’d like it better. KTorrrent is great. I can’t believe I spent so long using the overly simplified Gnome apps.

7speter3• 4 years ago

Kate’s syntax support seems unmatched, imo

brnt• 4 years ago

I love KDE and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.

That said, KDE+Wayland have not been stable for me across a variety of distros and hardware configs (responses are anywhere between "impossible" to poiting at another piece of software in the stack). Akonadi self-destructs every other week and is unrecoverable (only on Debian stable has is been 99% stable for me). Kmail devs have taken out a few features (such as letting you configure the reply button to reply to all by default) with neckbearded argumentation. Both these are a pity: I believe KDE PIM software is a hair shy from being the best and most versatile PIM software on Earth.

It's the best DE+apps I have ever used, but completely perfect it is of course not.

Baloo can be configured to not index file contents, which only a bad distro would default it to.

Daunk3• 4 years ago

I've tried to use KDE/Plasma for a very long time, but everything just feels... wrong. I really dislike the layout of all their apps and menus, the sizes of icons and buttons are weird, I dislike the fonts they use, and generally just everything seems "out of place". Having said that, I know you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop that it's been nearly unusable, even after spending weeks on trying to fix things. An easier solution - for me - has been to just use GNOME and install 2 or 3 extensions and use the GNOME Tweaks tool to set things up the way I like them. Recently though, I've switched to Debian and decided to try out the Cinnamon desktop and it's been almost perfect from the start.

tifadg13• 4 years ago

Cinnamon feels like the best alternative to me as well, but it didn't work out of the box with my multi-monitor setup when I tried it a few years back.

Darmody• 4 years ago

You've just described my experience with KDE/Plasma.

irthomasthomas2• 4 years ago

I'm a KDE user for a few years and I feel the exact opposite.

Anyway, do you use the GTK file picker? Or have you swapped it out, somehow? That's my biggest problem with gnome. I'm frustrated every time it pops up. It has a long list of bugs that have been ignored for 5+ years. The biggest issue being that it only offers list view, no thumbnail view. So, doing anything with media files is extremely irritating. But, for some reason, so many projects still use it.

ChuckNorris892• 4 years ago

My biggest pet peeve with Gnome is the attitude of the devs towards bug reports or criticism ("you're holding it wrong")[1] vs the KDE devs that acknowledge the bugs and work to fix them and add features the community is screaming for (after the infamous LTT video, KDE guys fixed the UX issue Linus complained).

And don't get me started on the infamous Gnome filepicker. How are the thumbnails going? To which the response from the community has always been: "this isn't a problem since that's not how Gnome users are supposed to use Gnome" lol. Ok Gnome, you do you, just count me and everyone I know out.

I find it a shame that such a toxic and user hostile project has become the default Linux DE on most distros today, while KDE keeps getting sidelined because people refuse to try it since they had a bad experience with it 10 years ago and seem to hold a grudge.

I'm happy Valve chose KDE for the Steam Deck, though it is the most sane choice for it though.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

sph2• 4 years ago

GTK file picker

After a decade and a half, things might be moving on that front, if you're on GNOME.

With the whole portal system desktop Linux has been adopting, GNOME will eventually use a Nautilus-lite widget, with thumbnails. There's a lot of Nautilus-related changes coming in GNOME 43 but I haven't heard any official news about it yet, so fingers crossed.

smallerfish2• 4 years ago

you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop

Unstable is a strange word here. When you said you "customized", do you mean you installed new themes and/or changed fonts/layout via system settings? Or did you run third party scripts / various rando commands listed on forums?

knewter2• 4 years ago

I'm assuming he means "tried to modify the kde theme at all." I've run various distros (mostly arch now pushes bridge of glasses up nose) and incredibly regularly it's an absolute nightmare to set up. Like just using "get new stuff" to install a few themes and apply them will ask you which specific filename you want (I have no idea, there is nothing to help me know on screen). Then sometimes I have to restart plasma for the changes to take effect. Then compositing breaks and I have to change the compositor backend to make the process restart so my window previews work again.

I have worked through all of this and much more and my kde setup is baller now on all of my machines. But I basically always launch gnome, because it is a significantly more polished system.

This carries through to the mobile Linux experience as well.

borplk• 4 years ago

I think it has become better over the years but as long as I can remember KDE has always had the "Designed but programmers that don't care about design" feel to it.

distances• 4 years ago

Years ago, with early KDE5, the KDE Visual Design Group was formed with one guy devoting a year for improving the KDE design with a democratic process. It was amazing to witness how quickly and efficiently the community iterated through ideas and nailed the details. I truly think KDE5 is a super clean, sleek, modern desktop environment mostly because of this effort. I always liked KDE, but the difference now to the previous version 4 is vast.

moondev• 4 years ago

I'm exactly the same. I even force myself every few months to give KDE an honest shot, but i'm so comfortable with gnome+gtk with dashtopanel+popshell anything else is jarring and borderline uncomfortable. I always come back.

davidy123• 4 years ago

Me too. I think there is a lot of deep thought in KDE, but it's too open to customization. I don't mean settings, I mean visual changes, and that leads to it looking like an unpleasant jumbly mess out of the box, and I'm skeptical that further customization will make that better. And they got a lot of important consistency things wrong that Gnome mostly addresses, like selectable text (almost) everywhere.

Linux desktops in general horribly suffer from constantly reproducing desktops from a moment in the 1990s, where you have an anime background and some bright text on a dark background and you post it and everyone goes "ooh" and "ahhh" and "how did you do that." One glaring sign of this is design is called "art" rather than design. And you have a kind of mostly compatible Office suite (like a dog chasing after a car), one month you can do awesome actions in the file manager or have a live background but next month that's broken, and every month a new music player, as if any majority of people use local music and documents anymore. What an embarassing waste of time.

It's sad because great ideas abound, like KDE's semantic desktop (which is basically a decentralized version of what Microsoft is building toward), Unity's 3d desktop (which failed when all that neato stuff meant nothing), scriptable desktops, distributed desktops, all kinds of glorious ideas. However it turns out the infinite monkeys creating desktops get distracted easily.

They should start by deeply adopting ideas like design tokens. Here's another idea: give every widget and pane a unique identifer with version, and link them to the web using Linked Data, so at least the world of confusion support forums could feature some coherence, you could embed support in the widgets themselves. That would be a 2022 desktop.

GekkePrutser6• 4 years ago

I feel the exact opposite. After I dropped macOS (I hate the direction they're going into) KDE was a breath of fresh air. It finally gives me configuration options back and the Breeze theme is already there most of the way. Not overly wasteful in terms of space like macOS and not even close to being as restrictive as that. KDE is amazing <3

In contrast I really hate what gnome is doing. Opinionated software is not something I want on my desktop. The huge (touch first?) window title bars, hamburger menus, limited configuration options etc, they're all wrong for me. I'll never use it.

But this is the great thing about FOSS. There's something for everyone.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Same. I always really like/liked the Windows UX, up through and including Vista/7. MacOS had a lot of nice ideas, but ultimately I just want my computer to feel like "Windows but better". KDE is exactly that for me.

Also, everything in KDE (at least in the Fedora KDE distribution) amazingly "just works".

KDE has been an astounding revelation for me in how good FOSS can be, and I feel like no matter how much I donate, they deserve more than I am giving them.

Daunk3• 4 years ago

I agree on GNOME, but the thing is that while KDE/Plasma allows me to change these things easily, doing so has always caused some issues down the line that have been a major headache. GNOME is a bit stiffer for sure, but using things like the extensions, themes and GNOME Tweak tool; you can fix all of the weird GNOME developer choices and get GNOME acting like a "proper desktop", without any issues down the line. But again, Cinnamon is my choice these days.

7speter3• 4 years ago

I really hate that macos bugs you to sign up for pay services as soon as you turn on the computer the first time.

Jedd2• 4 years ago

How long is 'a very long time'?

I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream. The 4->5 transition involved some frustration, certainly, but it was relatively short-lived. Compared to forays into Unity & Gnome the experience was, even during those dark days, consistently better.

Sizes of icons, buttons, fonts, window borders, etc etc are all customisable, so it's weird that was a sticking point for you.

Daunk3• 4 years ago

As I said, I've tried to customize things, so how it looks is not a "sticking point". The issue is that once you start to really customize things, the desktop becomes unstable. For example, remove one application and all of the sudden the desktop might no longer work as it depends on so many things. I also don't feel like I should have to customize and work on the desktop for a few days just to make it usable. GNOME works fine once you use the GNOME Tweak tool, install a custom skin and a few extensions, it's just a few clicks done in 15 minutes. But again, my current desktop of choice is Cinnamon.

7speter3• 4 years ago

Cinnamon is a lot like windows xp’s interface, while kde/neon is more a combination of windows 7/10, at least in my opinion

pdenton• 4 years ago

Having used KDE 2, 3, skipped 4, and now 5, it's the most polished desktop environment I can think of. OSX is too weird and Windows is a hodgepodge of "GUI trend of the day". Not that either of those matter, since they're not FLOSS.

machinekob2• 4 years ago

It is for sure not more polished then OSX or windows but it is best in Linux world if u care about looks not stability.

_ZeD_• 4 years ago

given how horrible OSX is I think KDE (or even gnome or xfce) is better

2Gkashmiri• 4 years ago

LTT has certainly helped to force devs to "think" about the usability of the software with regards to "unwashed masses" to put it bluntly. the workflow that an expert is "expected" to know and easily get used to won't cut it for "normies" and that needs improvement.

stuff like flatpak has helped greatly to achieve that. Remember, earlier one used to have OS specific binaries, many would only offer token .deb and call it a day. otherwise you had to compile stuff...

the steam deck has exposed new people to linux who expect their systems to not break as much...

me personally have been running kde neon since 5.12 i think. once had to reinstall it. otherwise its smooth sailing on my dell latitude E7440 laptop.

minor quirks, like having to "open in konsole" an appimage instead of just double clicking it and expecting it to work has to be improved. or missing package in krdc in wayland session which i found out a few weeks ago. stuff like HP printer does detect on one machine but printer fails to print. "rendering completed" which on scouring the internet tells me to install HPLIP and even then i got nothing.

i think i can get the printer working, maybe. but it would take "time to research and look for fixes", exactly the kind of stuff that could be fixed by usability tests for example.

i dont think the "normies" should have to go and scour the internet for drivers and then spend hours learning HOW TO INSTALL drivers without breaking the system, why can't we have nice things?

take a look at this. Okular supports various document formats. suppose by default, OXPS isnt supported that one has to download its plugin. Instead of auto downloading the package after asking me "you are trying to open this .oxps in okular which needs a plugin, should i download and install it?" it says "no plugin found" or something to that end. correct information but not helpful. what am i supposed to do next?

i am not dissing on any work done by these great people, on the contrary i actively look for bugs and report on all major FOSS software that i daily drive but i have "experience" now, the next person does not.

drivers is a pain point. I installed neon last month on a PC that needed to use those cheap wifi dongles. they do provide a linux installer but apparently that broke the system so i am forced to install windows 7 on that machine because it isn't going to be under my supervision

GekkePrutser6• 4 years ago

LTT has certainly helped to force devs to "think" about the usability of the software with regards to "unwashed masses" to put it bluntly. the workflow that an expert is "expected" to know and easily get used to won't cut it for "normies" and that needs improvement.

What's LTT? I don't think you mean Linus tech tips?

But I don't think every DE should necessarily appeal to everyone. That's the mistake that macOS makes. I like my OS and DE to be technical and configurable.

To pull it a bit more into the extreme end: many people love i3 but it will never be for "normies".

Not a fan of flatpak either by the way but I'm not even using KDE on Linux (I use it on FreeBSD) so I'm not bothered by it.

i dont think the "normies" should have to go and scour the internet for drivers and then spend hours learning HOW TO INSTALL drivers without breaking the system, why can't we have nice things?

Installing drivers has nothing to do with the Desktop Environment :) But the OS underneath.

jraph10• 4 years ago

I think LTT is Linus Tech Tips here. He made a video of him trying Linux for some time and this video was noticed and mentioned at https://pointieststick.com/2021/12/09/what-desktop-linux-nee...

I would not think he has had such an impact on devs, though. On the KDE side, it's just that they've been caring about usability for a while and this video is relevant.

fareesh• 4 years ago

I prefer KDE to Gnome because it feels snappier and seems to prioritize functionality over aesthetics - and the aesthetics can be tweaked to look a lot nicer than the default.

btw since I use arch I get all the latest updates quite quickly, which is very nice

ropeladder• 4 years ago

I tried the KDE spin of Fedora recently but it was just too buggy:

- Right click menus didn't open in the right place when using a second monitor

- Basic applications like terminal and Dolphin often took more than a second to launch when they should have been instant

- I didn't really like Dolphin and wanted to go back to Nemo. There was a nice setting option to use a different file manager -- great! Except Nemo couldn't launch any programs for some reason. (Double click and then... nothing)

I searched for fixes for all these issues but got nowhere. I posted a bug report for the right click problem and somebody said it was a known problem with qt upstream that was therefore unfixable.

I think KDE has a ton of really cool design decisions and ideas and I love the customizability, but ultimately these bugs were too much and I went to Fedora Cinnamon.

konart4• 4 years ago

As much as I'd like to try KDE again after so many years - I can't really bring myself to.

All UI elements in all tools\popups\etc are all over the place.

KDE is a great engineering project without any thought (sorry, just a personal opinion here) given about visual aesthetics.

jraph10• 4 years ago

I feel like they are doing so many things right, including on the visual side, I can't possibly conceive they don't give any thought on this.

Actually I don't even need to give a feeling, I can just list some links where you can notice how they take care of this aspect:

- https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/design

- https://develop.kde.org/hig (the human interface guidelines)

- https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/design/Breeze

Frankly, read through their guidelines. And that's not even all, regular design decisions are publicly made on the bug tracking system and the mailing lists. A lot of care is given on this aspect. There are hints on it on Nate's blog too.

That's not a matter of personal opinion to be sorry about (?!) at this point. It's just plain wrong.

That these decisions are good at all, or lacking, is another thing, and that you don't like these decisions is also another thing. On this last thing, it's your taste, nobody can argue with this.

Now that everything seems out of place is probably a matter of habits too. But KDE does not "click" for everybody, and it's fine, as much as I would like it to spread more. Specific constructive feedback from the many people like you, for who KDE does not click, might help a lot.

konart4• 4 years ago

Frankly, read through their guidelines.

Frankly, why? I can just launch any of KDE apps and see how it looks.

For example (screenshot is not take by me): https://www.debugpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/KDE-Pl...

How is this any good? The left (sidebar?) part and the right part (content?) are not aligned, the right part has all its controls placed without any concern about the looks. This is literally "okay we need the user to chose color at first, so we are going to put color picker at the top-center because it is hella important and then we a re going to place two rows of buttons at the bottom, because we need this preview window in the middle".

Specific constructive feedback from the many people like you, for who KDE does not click, might help a lot.

I've tried. All I got was "go use macOS or Gnome then". KDE may have great guidelines, but... it's not for me for sure. I loved all those buttons and customisations back when I was 20. Right now I what an opinionated (?) UI, that I don't need to customise but still get what I need (80% of what I need is fine) for less than 1% of my time.

General OS should have a UI that is simple and clean enough for my grandmother to understand and use. Without guidelines.

Gnome, as much as I don't like it's table-like spaced UI, does a better job right now.

tbran• 4 years ago

Tangential, but:

KDE Connect [0] is an awesome app that does not require the KDE desktop. I use it with Xubuntu/Android. You can:

- Share files and links between phone/computer.

- Control music and video with the smartphone app.

- Ring your phone from your computer.

- Use your phone as a trackpad.

- Get notifications from your phone on your computer.

- Control music/videos/youtube on your computer from your phone.

- And more....

Just a great app!! It's so good that I'm planning to try out KDE after using Xubuntu for at least a decade.

[0] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

knewter2• 4 years ago

Indeed. I run a gnome desktop. Pinephone runs valent, which is a gtk4 kde connect client. Flawless.

It's one of the unsung hero bits of software. Needs to be in use by way more people.

malermeister• 4 years ago

There's an official windows/Mac client and an unofficial GNOME one fyi!

tecoholic• 4 years ago

I recently switched, from using Gnome for the most of my life, to KDE when I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04. I think the thing that pushed me to the other side was an article shared here on HN about Gnome File Manager and the broken toilet. It's been wonderful for the most part. I hadn't realised how restrictive Gnome's hamburger menus, full screen app launcher..etc., were until I switched.

As fate may have it, I have the version with an wierd Qt bug that doesn't let me install any extension or theme directly from the desktop. I have to download from the web, unzip into specific location..etc., after trying it a couple of times, I have settled on the default Breeze theme. It seems to work fine.

This week in KDE: Tons of UI improvements and bugfixes

Related Stories