KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/

by Tsiolkovsky • 12 years ago

150 112 12 years ago

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)

veeti2• 12 years ago

Yes, they have a new design project: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/

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.

KAMiKAZOW11• 12 years ago

You link to a blog and yet you apparently don't read it. KDE System Settings is being redisigned as well. Just scroll down a bit: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings-and-n...

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.

leorocky• 12 years ago

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.

zanny3• 12 years ago

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.

pestaa5• 12 years ago

I hope this trend continues. Mainstream desktop environments sort of lost their roots. I never wanted widgets, I just need to organize my windows!

davidgerard• 12 years ago

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.

Touche2• 12 years ago

But they're still using those gaudy start menu icons that looked gaudy 5 years ago.

zanny3• 12 years ago

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...

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

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.

andmarios• 12 years ago

If you love Konsole, give yakuake a try. It is Konsole in quake fashion; you press F12 and a terminal drops down. I can't imagine life without it.

dikei• 12 years ago

I absolutely love yakuake. One of the reason why I'm still using KDE.

ableal• 12 years ago

I liked Konqueror as a web browser. Nice touches such as stopping image animations ...

Zardoz844• 12 years ago

Rekonq it's like a faster and lightweight Chrome

mercurial4• 12 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

But why do you think KDE is "losing ground"?

I used to see it everywhere that linux was being used, 50/50 or so with other desktops, I don't even remember the last time I saw someone use it.

delian66• 12 years ago

I love Konsole too, and really like Klipper (the best clipboard manager for Linux in my opinion).

intull3• 12 years ago

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.

KAMiKAZOW11• 12 years ago

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. ;-)

intull3• 12 years ago

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?

Zardoz844• 12 years ago

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.

oridecon• 12 years ago

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.

gnufied2• 12 years ago

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!

pestaa5• 12 years ago

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.

Really excited to see this visual update.

tenken• 12 years ago

and yet every OSX diehard will think you're on crack and KDE is inferior.

micampe• 12 years ago

Please don’t stir conflict by only reasoning in terms superior and inferior.

Things are different, no need to order them, especially on one single axis.

mwfunk2• 12 years ago

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. :)

baldfat3• 12 years ago

Every Gnome, XFCE and non-KDE Linux user will also tell you the same crack pipe.

Personally I love KDE apps and I have been using i3 tiled WM.

kozhevnikov2• 12 years ago

Same, without Moom transition to Mac was unbearable for me.

diminoten• 12 years ago

I'm surprised you identified dual monitor support as a specific issue in OSX. Can you elaborate on the nature of your troubles?

gnufied2• 12 years ago

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.

jbert2• 12 years ago

Is there an easy way with KDE4/dbus to get functionality similar to KDE3/dcop?

Example task:

1) inspect running konsole task to find exposed interfaces

2) find one related to background colour

3) script up "change background colour to red in current konsole" command

Last time I looked at the KDE+dbus situation (early KDE4) it seemed this was really hard.

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

I hated dbus from the moment it was conceived.

Even if we forget Gnome's track record for infrastructure, it was notoriously command-line-hostile.

So I guess DCOP is bye bye and dbus is no good.

catern• 12 years ago

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

emilsedgh3• 12 years ago

Of course. It's DBUS. You can trigger dbus functions using QDbus. `qdbus org.kde.konsole` shows you available functionality. Browse through it.

jbert2• 12 years ago

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).

jcromartie3• 12 years ago

This screenshot: http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/plasma50b2-netw...

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...

eyko• 12 years ago

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.

Touche2• 12 years ago

The blue bar above the wireless symbol (guessing) indicates that the menu is open. Agree with your other points though.

Yaggo• 12 years ago

KDE versions 1-3 were great piece of software. Remember kioslave's support for ssh/sftp? Awesome stuff. The current state of the project makes me sad.

emilsedgh3• 12 years ago

fish/sftp/ftp/smb, all the KIO Slaves are still here, working fine on KDE4 and are all ported to KF5 as well.

mpyne2• 12 years ago

Remember kioslave's support for ssh/sftp?

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).

freeasinfree• 12 years ago

KDE has always been--and always will be, apparently--an aesthetic nightmare.

emilsedgh3• 12 years ago

Yes,this just shows that this is a beta release. These parts of the UI are under constant change and improvement.

Shamanmuni• 12 years ago

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.

mpyne2• 12 years ago

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.

jcromartie3• 12 years ago

It can mean "of a very poor quality; extremely bad or unpleasant."

Compared to the alternatives, I think it qualified.

reitanqild• 12 years ago

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? ;-)

jcromartie3• 12 years ago

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.

Sharphunter• 12 years ago

The latest update really disappointed. I'd rather re-built the distro myself.

aruggirello• 12 years ago

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!

doktrin2• 12 years ago

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.

pestaa5• 12 years ago

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.

doktrin2• 12 years ago

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.)

KAMiKAZOW11• 12 years ago

I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too.

It needs a lot of tinkering once Wayland is the accepted standard.

KAMiKAZOW11• 12 years ago

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.

tormeh2• 12 years ago

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.

klearvue• 12 years ago

Alt+F2 in KDE to bring up KRunner but you can change it to whatever keys you like

tormeh2• 12 years ago

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"?

Zardoz844• 12 years ago

Correct, but actually you can't setup Krunner (or any other KDE shortcut) to be launched pressing ONLY Super/Windows key.

emidln• 12 years ago

Alt+F2 does this. It's actually done this since at least KDE 2.x, maybe a bit earlier.

noobSemanticist• 12 years ago

I wish we had a way to run KDE on a retina MBP...

gpo2• 12 years ago

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?

edoloughlin• 12 years ago

I don't care a dime about fancy UIs

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.

KAMiKAZOW11• 12 years ago

People who develop desktop themes are NOT the same who program PIM software.

gpo2• 12 years ago

You're right. After all, what we're seeing here is just a small theme revamp.

cmpaul• 12 years ago

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.

madprops• 12 years ago

I see they got rid of that peanut to manage widgets in the panel. I never liked that.

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

I would be so happy if when companies make announcements, they included a link at the top telling you what their product is.

kozhevnikov2• 12 years ago

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?

KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

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