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KDE Plasma Active: the Mobile Interface That Works
jrepin writes "Bruce Byfield is not a fan of interfaces for mobile devices. At best, he finds them clumsy makeshifts, tolerable only because nothing better is available. The only exception is KDE's Plasma Active, which not only works well on tablets, but, with its recently released version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface he can tolerate on a workstation."
Looking at the video it has some interesting concepts to make it more usable on touch devices, but to some point they still rely in rather small buttons that are hard to touch.
It also seems very slow but it might be a debug version.
The wall-o-text of TFA doesn't even have pics, and I barely noticed the link to the project
Plasma Active
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Can we please quit trying to make a superstar common interface that works with both touchscreens and keyboard/mouse?
The result is always bad interfaces for one or both. There is no way around this, except to have two different interfaces.
Lately I've been trying to find how I can get one of the available tablets to run KDE. After going through all the disruption of the early KDE 4 releases, I'm glad to see things settle out and be usable. For the whole time I've been hearing about Windows 8 and its "do things the same way on the desktop and the laptop", I've been thinking of how well KDE has managed NOT to screw this up--and be in the game much earlier than Microsoft. Now I'm ready to try KDE Plasma Active on a tablet!
Wow! I never saw it that way before!
I'm totally sold. Which box do I deposit my soul into for payment?
Which this is. KDE Plasma Active is not the same as the default desktop KDE. It uses the same libraries and corer, but is a different interface. I don't see a problem with this at all.
Nobody uses them anymore.
This is the post-tablet era, everyone is moving back to laptops.
What about Enlightenment? Post from yesterday, TFA says it can work on mobile too.
What is this? radio? just show us some pictures of it and let us come to our own conclusions instead of telling us what we should think lol.
I watched the video at http://plasma-active.org/#prettyPhoto/0/ and it's not very different then Android (ICS) and its resizable widgets. If I'm wrong, please, point me the differences, or why KDE (which I'm a big fan) on mobile is so better than current alternatives.
because you can enable plasma active on KDE on your desktop PC if you want.
Bruce (the author of the article) tried running it on a desktop system to see what it would be like there. It is not the intended use of the interface, but Bruce was curious and tried it out.
However, we still have a separate desktop UX that, as Shinmera mentioned, shares the same core and libraries but which has a significantly different interaction pattern tailored for the mouse/keyboard/lots of apps method of using a general purpose device (e.g. a full laptop). Plasma Desktop will continue to be supported, developed and recommended for desktop systems (as the name implies) while Plasma Active is aimed at mobile and "appliance" style devices.
Cheers, aseigo.
What's the contradiction? KDE has more than one interface, and the author likes the mobile interface enough that he can stand it on the desktop. However, the mobile interface wasn't intended for use on the desktop; it isn't normally used on the desktop; and you don't have to agree with the author.
You should not care in any way who he is. But instead of making stupid, uninsightful comments on Slashdot, you should go read what he wrote and see if it make sense.
Believing something because of the reputation of the speaker is stupid, faith-based magickal thinking. Get over it.
These statements not approved by the SlashThink hive mind.
Exactly! Keep up the good work! ( and maybe, if you haven't already started, try getting it to run on a nexus 7/10).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
False dichotomy.
Why can't I use Windows, AND eat feces and ghost peppers?
BTW, I think your post should have gotten a "+1, Funny"
You do know that for the last few years Illiad has not actually posted a new comic on a day to day basis?
but the funny may not be what you GET as such.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
WebOS has an elegant interface that in terms of UI/UX puts Android (even Jelly Bean) to shame. Its problems were two-fold: 1) underpowered hardware that didn't showcase the software stack effectively; and 2) lack of developer courtship from Palm and later HP. Hopefully the open-sourcing will rectify these points. In comparison to WebOS and iOS, Android is the ugly, freckly ginger stepchild. I think people willingly overlook its flaws because of the relatively decent hardware it tends to run on.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Because this one is featured on Slashdot, so has clearly passed through the site's stringent editorial checks for quality and veracity.
This really doesn't demonstrate using the same interface transparently across a desktop and a tablet.
Unless it's one of those vertically mounted tablets that normally comes with an attached keyboard and mouse (i.e. a touchscreen PC or laptop), it's really pretty uninteresting as far as the tablet video information goes.
Please provide a video of doing exactly the same things on a standard (non-touchscreen) desktop using a mouse.
Both Plasma Active and to some degree, Android are modal. It's the same user interface with different contextual modes for input. Plasma does this much better from what I've seen.
Doing it exclusively poorly (such as in W8) is much more of a Microsoft innovation than it's endemic to the concept.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've just read TFA and I'd like to bring back the parent's question: Who is this bloke and why does he think that anyone will care about his opinion? He's complaining about ALL other tablet/phone GUIs, and says he prefers a GUI that does not run on any tablets, and that he tested on a workstation.
If you dislike every single mobile OS, then you clearly have quite specialised tastes and needs, so what you think is a good interface will probably not be of any use to the rest of us.
Yes, a few people have, in the last days, installed Plasma Active packages (based off of Kubuntu) onto it, see this photo: https://yfrog.com/esup2ioj
It's much better suited, input wise, than the Unity shell, which, for example, heavily relies on right mouse button actions, and also scrolling seems mostly broken. (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/KnownIssues for a more detailed list). The input problems are being fixed just by the Plasma Active shell and apps, so if they get all the driver-level problems sorted, it will be a nice option and probably a lot closer to "working well" than Unity.
-- sebas
Why don't you check his bio and the previous articles he has written about linux desktop environments and openoffice, then you can find out who he is and if he's worth it.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
What tablets currently support this? I might be willing to give it a shot on the Nexus 10 if it works, and if it's possible to back up the configuration beforehand and restore to factory if I don't like it. Linux is generally terrible at font rendering, but a high-DPI display like on the Nexus 10 might help circumvent this.
Do web browsers under Plasma Active support the same kind of pinch-to-zoom features that are standard on portable devices?
Because, more and more, laptops are being used as workstations. In addition, more and more laptops are being produced with touch screens, if not flat out convertibility to tablets. The line between mobile device and workstation is not as sharply delineated as you want it to be.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They call those RVs.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
If only there were some web site I could visit that would do all that filtering out of not-worth-it tech stories for me, and then just present me with only the stuff that's worth reading!
Read my blog.
It seems you're happy to put up with two different GUIs on two different devices. So am I.
However it seems that Microsoft, in trying to make Windows 8 be the one true GUI of doom to rule them all, have decided that people can't cope with this at all. So either we're odd or there's some other reason. Perhaps an attempt to cut down on development costs?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There aren't any modern-day GUI designers. They've been pushed into the wilderness by the UX creators. These have oversized body piercings, smoke coloured cigarettes and if you ask them about Fitts' Law they think it's a 1970s cop show.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From an app dev's point of view, are they different? I don't really understand the levels of abstraction involved here, since I've only done stuff like Java that deals with it itself, or console apps.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."