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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!
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 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.
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.
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.
The design is completely different from ICS. Yes, there are resizable widgets on both, but that's where the similarities end.
Instead of a highly modal menu based system, Plasma Active provides an always-available "peek and launch" area by dragging down the top panel which lets you see all your running applications as well as launch new ones. There is an emphasis on avoiding the modal menu labyrinth that pretty much defines the Android interface. This works more or less on phones, but really falls down on other sorts of devices.
At the center of Plasma Active are activities, which lets you switch your device quickly from being focused on, say, a work or school project to planning a social event. There was a recent email on the devel list from a user who uses activities when travelling, for instance; it lets him keep maps, notes, documents and people relevant to the trip together in one place and with a flick of the finger he can switch to this very focused set of information.
ICS makes a tablet a great application launcher and occasional widget viewer. Plasma Active makes a tablet a reflection of your interests and activities.
Try it and you'll quickly see what it is capable of ...
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.
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)
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!