The Road To KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2

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The Road To KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @04:11AM from the greenspun's-tenth-rule dept.

jrepin wrote in with a link to an article about the steps being taken toward a Qt5 based KDE 5 and Plasma Workspaces 2. From the article: "KDE's Next Generation user interfaces will run on top of Qt5. On Linux, they will run atop Wayland or Xorg as display server. The user interfaces move away from widget-based X11 rendering to OpenGL. Monolithic libraries are being split up, inter-dependencies removed, and portability and dependencies cut by stronger modularization. For users, this means higher quality graphics, more organic user interfaces and availability of applications on a wider range of devices. Developers will find an extensive archive of high-quality, libraries and solutions on top of Qt."

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Remote desktop? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-23 04:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

NX is already pretty much unusable with compositing DMs, do they have a solution for remote desktop connections?
1. Re:Remote desktop? by Enderandrew · 2013-01-23 05:22 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  KDE compositing can be turned on/off with a single key.
  
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2. Re:Remote desktop? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-23 06:01 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  LIES!
  It takes three keys: alt, shift and f12, and NOT ONLY THAT BUT YOU HAVE TO PRESS THEM AT THE SAME TIME! This is clearly far too complex a process, and this bug should be given highest priority.
3. Re:Remote desktop? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-23 06:33 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Jobs. Is that you?
4. Re:Remote desktop? by Tough+Love · 2013-01-23 06:49 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  ...it would be easier if KDE and GNOME and Ubuntu Unity had a fallback 2D mode that was friendly for remote viewers...
  A fallback text mode for remote access would be really sweet. How hard could that be? <runs away>
  
  --
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
5. Re:Remote desktop? by NotBorg · 2013-01-23 07:14 · Score: 2
  
  K Desktop Environment. Servers really aren't their primary target. Also what can't you do for your server via a Bash login or other remote management protocol for a minuscule fraction of resources? What really requires a full on GUI desktop environment on your server? There might be some niche need for it, sure, but mostly I tend to think you're doing something wrong.
  
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6. Re:Remote desktop? by AJodock · 2013-01-23 07:34 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The shortcut is assignable...
  Who down modded this? Obviously a joke.
RTFA? by pak9rabid · 2013-01-23 04:37 · Score: 4, Funny

Perhaps everyone is reading the article before commenting? I know...+5 Funny.
Re:Oh no, not again... by Enderandrew · 2013-01-23 05:26 · Score: 4, Insightful

KDE 4.0 was missing a lot of expected 3.5 features, but a lot of the bad reputation it received were from terrible Kubuntu packages. The Kubuntu maintainers admitted they didn't understand the new build process or what they were doing. Canonical pushed it way too early and pushed crappy packages, but KDE took the blame. Early KDE builds on openSUSE, Arch, Fedora, etc. didn't have the same problems.
And honestly, I think only a year later (KDE 4.2) they had a great desktop for everyone.
The shift from KDE 3 to 4 (and Qt 3 to 4) meant a massive rewrite, and having to reinvent most of their core features.
KDE 5 sounds more like an evolution than revolution, so it should be smoother this time around.

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Where are the screenshots? by loufoque · 2013-01-23 05:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

The summary essentially says "KDE is going to look better". Where are the screenshots?
Organic user interfaces? by hawguy · 2013-01-23 06:01 · Score: 2

What does "more organic user interfaces" mean?
If that means that developers are more free to break with conventional UI's and come up with their own "innovative" controls and other UI interfaces, I don't want that - that sounds like when Flash designers started going wild on the web and each Flash web site had its own UI elements and the users had to figure out that flipping a virtual switch on one website was implemented as shooting an arrow into a target on another website and on another website you had to click the virtual LED light that was actually a button (but you don't know it's an active UI element until you discover that it's clickable).
Please don't screw up Kmail by Tough+Love · 2013-01-23 06:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

KDE devs: Please do not screw up Kmail more than it already is. In fact, please put serious thought into restoring the good old filesystem-based folder database and just do away with that horrible Akonadi mistake that is dog slow, when it works at all. Running critical apps on top of a full blown database may look like a good idea on a Presenter slide, but in reality it is just cruel and unusual punishment.
I know this isn't strticly related to Qt5, but just try to keep it in mind ok? Thxbai.

--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
1. Re:Please don't screw up Kmail by water-and-sewer · 2013-01-23 08:58 · Score: 2
  
  Man, I totally agree with you. I've used Kmail since KDE2 and despite its flaws, I generally liked it better than the alternatives (and I've tried many). It's always annoyed me that while there are several GTK email clients, the KDE desktop really only has kmail, and they royally screwed the pooch with all this akonadi crap.
  I just discovered an alternative. It's like watching a star form in the distance out of clouds and ether. It's Trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/screenshots.html) and it's written by some Czech, mostly by himself. Now the project is picking up steam and is being folded into KDE.
  It's still basic - no address book, and a lot of other stuff missing. But it doesn't require Akonadi or Nepomuk or any of that other stuff, and it is damned fast. Give it a look. I'm having fun experimenting with it and i'd be tempted to kick in some money if it helps the project advance in a way that makes sense.
  
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2. Re:Please don't screw up Kmail by tibit · 2013-01-23 11:16 · Score: 2
  
  I don't think that the database is the problem. The problem is that Akonadi is about as decent, code- and design-wise, as aRts was. Long on promise, short on delivery -- designed and implemented by people who demonstrably don't have enough software engineering experience. College kids may be bright and hard working, but that's no substitute for a certain amount of experience and understanding of the engineering side of things. Just look at this software engineering "recommendation" to give the idea what's wrong with the project. Give me a fucking break, this is supposed to be C++, RAII has been with us pretty much since forever, and those bastards pretend you need to have manual (and thus usually missing) solutions to problems nominally solved by designing for RAII? Seriously?
  
  --
  A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
3. Re:Please don't screw up Kmail by Tough+Love · 2013-01-23 14:10 · Score: 2
  
  I don't think that the database is the problem.
  It's certainly part of the problem. The database may be fast, but it isn't anywhere near as fast as the underlying filesystem. And you are right, the basic design flaws are compounded by very obvious inexperience at designing and developing multitasking applications.
  
  --
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Re:Oh no, not again... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-23 06:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

KDE 4.0 was missing a lot of expected 3.5 features, but a lot of the bad reputation it received were from terrible Kubuntu packages.
KDE 4.10 is still missing a lot of expected 3.5 features. I'm sure it's much closer to feature parity now (I'm assuming you can finally manage your system-level wireless connections in KDE, maybe fonts in KOffice even use decent kerning), but go back to KDE 3.5 and just look at the printing system. Seriously, just look at all of the things you can do to a printed document. Now look at the KDE4 one. Maybe KDE5 will fix this...
Deduplication (is that a word?) by NotBorg · 2013-01-23 08:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

One of the interesting bullet points:

Reduction of duplication with Qt by removing classes and using their Qt alternatives
A lot of classes were rewritten way back in the day when the licensing of Qt was under fire. Once those issues went away there really wasn't much point in continuing the duplication of effort. Bringing the two back together is long overdue. In the long run it could bring greater stability to KDE applications since more developers will be working on improving the same framework instead of two independent but close frameworks. This is good for both Qt and KDE.

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1. Re:Deduplication (is that a word?) by Kjella · 2013-01-23 09:18 · Score: 2
  
  Ummm... this isn't correct. KDE developers never had a problem with the licensing of any of Qt classes.
  Not the Qt licensing per se, but a lot of KDE developers have problems with the Qt contribution agreement. In order to support Qt Commercial etc. you essentially have to sign away all rights to the code, here's perhaps the most relevant part:
  
  Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants, in exchange for good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, to Digia a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Digiaâ(TM)s choosing including any Open Source Software license.
  As a result, a lot of code in the KDE libraries that could ideally could have been enhancements to Qt instead (both being LGPL) have remained outside Qt and will most likely remain so. Reducing the duplication has been a stated goal for ages but in reality not much happens since any non-trivial piece of code most likely has some contributor who won't sign.
  
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Re:Oh no, not again... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-23 08:50 · Score: 4, Informative

You're talking crap. KDE4 has managed wireless well for quite a long time. Not knowing this suggests you haven't used KDE4 in a long time and are just spouting some crap you once heard.
Re:Oh no, not again... by Enderandrew · 2013-01-23 09:42 · Score: 3, Interesting

I love that people are arguing that KDE 4 is missing a "core feature" that was actually a third-party add-on for KDE 3, but at the same time argue that installing a plasmoid means the feature doesn't really exist.
KDE 4 was designed to be extendable, and supports multiple methods of easily installing plasmoids. Installing content from the internet into KDE 4 was a core underlying technology since 2008.
http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Installing_Plasmoids
http://newstuff.kde.org/

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http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.