KDE Ships First Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

http://dot.kde.org/2014/05/13/plasma-next-beta-ready-testing

by Tsiolkovsky • 12 years ago

60 55 12 years ago

dot.kde.org

mikevm2• 12 years ago

The black font over the grey window. The buttons with the cartoon icons. The hideous tray icons. Sheer ugliness.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop.

KerrickStaley• 12 years ago

Have you tried GNOME 3?

mikevm2• 12 years ago

Not yet. Is it worth it?

asolove• 12 years ago

You forgot to mention the blue shadow on the active window.

scrollaway3• 12 years ago

What about it?

Go in the settings and change it to vermillion-fuchsia with a hint of magenta if you so please. I'd like to know what's wrong with a blue shadow that indicates an active window.

nly• 12 years ago

That's current with KDE 4.1x as well, with the Oxygen theme. Generally KDE looks a lot better with desktop effects enabled. All the gradients and halos make sense with transparency.

samyxp17• 12 years ago

Pretty hard to believe that this is the best that the KDE Visual Design Team - http://vdesign.kde.org/index.html could come up with. Are they even trying hard enough ? This is 2014, the post PC era and they are delivering something that looks like windows 95. UX innovation == O. Boring, lame.

Window 8 was clearly a mess but at least Microsoft is trying something.

Spittie4• 12 years ago

Ignore everything that's not the wallpaper or the taskbar, those are the only items that got touched by the KDE VDT for now. The Windows are still using the old Oxygen theme.

You can see some of the work going on in the widget/decorator theme in some blog posts of the VDT: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/05/monday-report-14-lazy... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-12-amaz... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-11-go-t...

JasonFruit• 12 years ago

Do we need UX innovation? Whenever I hear about something lacking "UX innovation", the specifics just point out where it's ugly. I'd like to know what the problems are that you'd like to have solved; I've been using KDE for the last several months, and my experience as a user has been excellent.

mindcrime• 12 years ago

UX innovation == O. Boring, lame.

That may well be a Good Thing. Not all "innovations" are useful or desirable. Sometimes something that "just works" is all that's needed.

Me, I like KDE just fine the way it is. shrug

rthomas62• 12 years ago

Cinnamon for me. It's a gtk3 desktop, but I can actually figure out how to do things in it.

collyw• 12 years ago

Cinnamon is nice, but it had a habit of chewing up a load of CPU for no apparent reason on my machines. XFCE is fast, easy and stable, and doesn't try to do anything too fancy.

scrollaway3• 12 years ago

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop.

And I can't believe I'm saying this on hacker news but there is a difference between "polished" and "subjectively ugly".

What's wrong with the "cartoon icons"? They look like Windows 7 icons. You know Windows 7, right? A lot of people called it "Microsoft's most polished desktop ever".

jbeja3• 12 years ago

Yeah..those people are not me and probaly anyone i know, so don't even care.

sixothree• 12 years ago

I really do like Unity, but I just can't stand the default choice of colors; and finding a good scheme seems difficult for me.

donniezazen• 12 years ago

KDE is an enormously big project. There is only one theme Oxygen that is feature full. It is a humongous task to make every element of it beautiful and it won't happen without your help.

dscrd• 12 years ago

When in actuality the most polished Linux desktop is the ones that give you a simplicity experience unmatched by the competition. I would look for awesome and i3. If only somebody made one of these things easier to configure, that'd be the sweet spot.

johnwalker• 12 years ago

I like the new look. What is the icon in the bottom-right and top-left for?

qbrass2• 12 years ago

It's probably the options menu for that element. KDE4 used a crescent shaped thing.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png

adrianlmm• 12 years ago

There are so many things wrong in that screenshot, but since is work in progress, I'll hold any critic till the final versión.

truncate2• 12 years ago

I always loved how configurable KDE is and prefer it over others. I somehow always felt more comfortable using KDE than say Unity or Gnome. Its very stable , fluid and fast now as well. However, there are certain problems that just don't seem to be addressed much -

1. Cartoonish or early 2000's looking icons. They simply are not pleasing to eyes any more.

2. Lack of UI widget themes. Although there is plethora of colour schemes and window decorations, which I hardly care about. What I want is complete themes, with different widgets. Its just Oxygen or Windows 98 kinda themes. GTK has really strong community in this case.

3. I don't know how to put this, but most kde apps (except base apps) feel overloaded. This is common complaint too I guess. I'm not asking that they should do what GNOME is doing, but there must be something that can be done. When I use Windows, many apps still have a lot of functions but still manage to look better. I think some of this can be addressed by building a better widget set - (better tabs, toolbars with smaller icons and less whitespace overall)

Overall my complaint is 90% about how it looks.

Spittie4• 12 years ago

1. I don't really like Oxygen too, I always just install KFaenza. The design team is working on a new icon set for KDE5 too (http://wheeldesign.blogspot.it/2014/02/monday-report-4.html).

2. I agree too, but you have a third and fourth option, QtCurve and Bespin. Personally I'm quite happy with the Aeri theme (http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Aeri+?content=162303). Screen: http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094470.png

The design team is working on a new widget theme too, I think it's going to look kinda similar to Aeri (from what I gather on the forum, at least). There's also Fusion, which is the Qt5 default theme and it's really nice.

3. I agree as well, some applications are just confusing and overwhelming out of the box. You don't even have to look at 3rd party applications, Amarok and Gwenview are a good example and are base applications. Thankfully usually it's possible to hide away most of the stuff (This is how I've configured them, http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094841.png and http://81.4.126.121/i/1400094897.png, I like to think that I've got a "clean" effect).

But, to be honest, I'd rather have applications that have tons of features and shove them in my face than oversimplified applications that have no settings/features.

truncate2• 12 years ago

I use QtCurve. Will give try to others you mentioned. I like Qt5 theme too, however never tried hard enough to see how to enable it as my KDE widget set (don't see it in system settings). Can you tell how?

I'm generally happy with base apps. Its just the other apps like Kopete, Kmail etc. Though its been very long, so there must be good improvement there.

msoad• 12 years ago

I want to switch to Linux as my primary desktop but they are not appealing to me. Specially if you're a OSX user, you need a really good desktop environment to convince yourself.

Why all Linux desktops still look like Windows 98? Is it too hard to remove all those shadows and make the UI a bit lighter?

ohm• 12 years ago

There's Elementaryos http://elementaryos.org/

Crunchbang if you like minimal desktop http://crunchbang.org/

nileshtrivedi• 12 years ago

Why are these entire operating systems instead of simply themes for GNOME/KDE/XFCE/Unity?

Edit: Never mind. I checked the links.

asabjorn• 12 years ago

Have you had a look at Gnome 3? - http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ I find their aesthetic pleasing and minimal, and stuff generally gets out of my way. To me it feel Mac-ish in its simplicity.

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

Why all Linux desktops still look like Windows 98?

Pretty much all Linux desktop choices make it easy to change to some other pre-installed theme. Plus it's usually easy to tweak any theme you select.

randallsquared• 12 years ago

Unity doesn't look like Win98. But there are a lot of UIs that don't work like Windows (KDE) or Mac (Unity or Elementary, sorta). For example, I use i3, which drops the "desktop" abstraction completely in favor of fully tiling the screen with windows.

jbeja3• 12 years ago

I begin to think that people that compare Linux's desktop like Unity, KDE, GNOME, Pantheon, etc with Windows 95, or 98 are just trolling around and shouldn't be taken seriously.

mcosta• 12 years ago

Yeah, looks like windows 98:

http://toastytech.com/guis/win98desk.gif

chadsy_• 12 years ago

Try Linux Mint... The mate, cinnamon, or xfce versions will suit you well.

kolev• 12 years ago

Feels like '95 again.

reaand• 12 years ago

sorry to say, but it still looks ugly. get half of a visual designer guys....

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

Linux needs professional designers as it needs programmers. It remembers me to Enligtenment old themes, a genius programmer but horrible designer, the theme the KDE people are displaying is hideous, not consistence at all. The people that designed this thing has no training in visual arts whatsoever.

I have to agree that Unity looks better than this.

Where is Everaldo when we need him?

johng• 12 years ago

Does anyone else still wish that some of the OS's would look more like BeOS did/does?

qbrass2• 12 years ago

https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/so_i_got_bored_whil...

y0ghur7_xxx• 12 years ago

I'm using KDE 4.13, and I really love it. I think it's the most usable and polished Linux desktop out there. Downloading the beta now.

Thanks KDE Team. I love you.

azinman2• 12 years ago

Oi vey.

I love how the settings has a quit and help, somehow different from the ? and X in the upper right?

And they have a design team now? Has any of their work gone into that screenshot?

I don't mean to be so dismissive of OSS work, but at this point why even bother building such a non-competitive product stuck in time? If you can't do any better, just copy. There are so many talented graphic designers out there that even if the UX blows, at least it could look pretty.

DrinkWater• 12 years ago

I dont know if it is just me, but it looks really outdated.

KDE Ships First Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

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