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What's Going On In KDE Plasma Workspaces 2?
jrepin writes "While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you'll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture."
My first ever first post.
Will KDE 5 be ported to Wayland? Also, on the Kubuntu side of things, will the Blue Systems folks port KDE to Mir? How much of Qt5 supports Wayland already? What would it take to support Mir?
Tried Plasma on Mint 13, it's quite pretty. Much prettier than Gnome based desktop for sure. Hopefully it just ends up with incremental improvements rather than complete redesigns and moving from one paradigm to another.
You know, it's nice to be able to rely on a desktop environment improving but mostly staying the same, so you don't have to bother re-learning all about it over and over with every release.
I moved away from Ubuntu because of Gnome 3 and of-course Unity, using Mint with Mate for now (not just for myself, suggest it to the clients), hopefully after a while I can start suggesting Plasma for business. I have to experiment and figure out all the parts needed to lock the desktop environment into a particular scheme, so that it could be easily set up for that scheme and locked enough, so that the user couldn't actually modify it and change what he sees on the desktop himself.
Wonder if there is a way to have a single text config file that could be dropped into a system and be read by some configuration tool to turn the desktop into exactly the desktop that the config file was exported from. Maybe there is a way to do it? Yes, this can be done by installing from an image, but that's a different situation.
You can't handle the truth.
Lord, how I miss KDE3. It worked, simply worked. It didn't lock up. When my Linux box was running KDE3, I don't recall ever having to telnet in to restart a frozen machine. It happens all too often with KDE4. And KDE4 ruined, utterly ruined, KMail, once the best email program I ever used. KDE4's efforts at a "semantic desktop" and a "personal information manager" rendered over a dozen years of email archives unsearchable by anything but find and grep. Restarting, clean-up and reinstalling, etc. never worked. Hello, Thunderbird. You ain't all that great, but at least you let me search old emails. Farewell, KDE. Farewell SUSE. Farewell, Linux. My personal workstation has been Linux since 2000, but it looks like you've driven me back to my first love, the Macintosh.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
So, I glance through the article and notice: [...]so KDE Applications are now less “special” in the Qt world — a good thing for portability.[...]. Without even having to scroll and just 2 paragraphs later I see there is a cool embedded video. Might be interesting. But, I gaze at it.
I'm not going to press play. I just stare.
void main (void) { gl_FragColor = vec4(0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.6); }
I am so glad they are focussing on portability.
The windows resize to accommodate the scrollbar on mouseover, then shrink again on mouseout?
This is best-of-breed Linux-on-the-desktop-2013-for-sure UI design is it?
So disable that effect. It is up to you to tweak the interface to your liking, not up to its creators to provide the software in millions slight variations, exactly as everyone and their dog wants it.
KDE4 and Gnome 3 are unusable, period. Years wasted, usability lost.
Please, keep it simple and release a working desktop manager as XFCE.
Performances and resource usage comes right after usability, and would be nice having something using less / better resources of previous generation dm.
It's such a shame that there is only one desktop / window manager available for X. If only there were some choice in the matter. If only there were many different interfaces which could run atop the generic backend graphics stack. I just wish that they would release different environments which would allow me to choose the look of my UI depending on my preferences. Why hasn't there been any development put into some kind of Lightweight, X11 Desktop Environment? I am so very upset that there is only one desktop environment available for Linux and that I'll have to use it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Mod parent +Informative, please
(just for the fun of it)
A bunch of geeks are reinventing the wheel badly (LOOK !!! new colours ! new shapes !) whilst refusing to fix existing bugs or address usability issues.
News at 11..
It would have been funny, but that there are so many Ubuntu users who don't know better.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Wake me up when it works on Mac
I believe the answer to this headline should be "no".
As Sebastian has noted clearly time and again, the effects shown in the demo are what are used to test the framework. They are not the default effects that will be part of the actually released product. It is not unusual for framework test applications to look odd or even plain out ugly as their job is to push the framework and test the various capabilities.
So, no .. this isn't about wobbling things. It's about having a working hardware accelerated canvas that can be extended in several ways, one of which includes OpenGL shaders...
I don't have mod points, alas.
Please, someone mod this up (and subsequently the others further up down). If only to set a signal, indicating that the discussion further up is - sorry - based on a lack of understanding. Nobody in their sane mind wants anything close to what we can see in the clip. Period. Not even the author. Over.
The alpha software is a demo for widgets, and interaction with shaders. Finished. Done.
It also shows the almost revolutionary aspects of Qt5, probably the only toolkit that allows to 'write once and run anywhere' of interfaces; which must by definition be based on something other than a geometrical construct of frame borders in a pixel-based sense.
To disable an effect, it has to be on by default first. No wobble effect has ever been on by default in KDE land.
Why would they port KDE when they have Unity?
I was thinking of Blue Systems here, not Canonical. Actually, once Canonical switches to Mir, then the other Ubuntus that are there - Lubuntu and Xubuntu - would also have to have Mir support, and one would think that since Canonical still owns them, they'd build in the support for those DEs. Kubuntu is the one variation that Canonical has let go off, so it would be upto Blue Systems to either build support for Mir so that they could build off future versions of Ubuntu, or just fork the OS from the last one that has X11 support. Hence my question.
Of course, just like Kubuntu, Canonical could hand off Lubuntu and Xubuntu as well, and therefore not have to add Mir support for them at all in the first place. In which case, the same question would apply to their inheritors.
Hi,
I'm a great fan of KDE 3.x also. For what it is worth, I find that KDE4.9+ to be as stable as 3.x ever was, and as feature-full... as a DESKTOP.
I also switched away from KDE 4 to gnome in the early days of KDE4, and was rather reluctantly forced away from Gnome by the recent modifications. I tried KDE4.9 that was packaged as part of Fedora 18, and was very pleasantly surprised. KDE has recovered. It is VERY configurable, supports the usual windows paradigms that we're used to and is very very stable.
HOWEVER, the KDE apps are a different story. They are still half-complete, buggy and lose data. Even basic apps that I use regularly are fairly primitive. For example, KDE has a number of image viewers (Gwenview, Kuickshow...) but none of them can hold a candle to the power, elegance and simplicity of an 8-year old GQview or its modern cousin Geeqie. I tried the mail app on an experimental basis and was rewarded by prompt crashes and data corruptions. There is nothing even close to Gimp, Pan or other staples of Gnome.
So I find myself in the weird position of running the KDE desktop, but using mostly gnome apps.
Does that mean that we will finally be able to install KDE without akonadi, nepomuk and such, and they will become optional modules instead of requirements?
Modularity means that, doesn't it?
I believe that PC-BSD 9.1 does support it. OTOH, GhostBSD, which was the main BSD that had GNOME as its default DE, has stated w/ the release of GhostBSD 3 that this will be the last release that has GNOME 2.32, and that GNOME will be replaced by MATE in future releases. So no GNOME 3 there. Nor Cinnamon either. Although they will be supporting LXDE & Openbox as well.
I agree - not that the BSD people will be losing much.
Really?!
The last time I checked there are quite a few of window managers available.
I've never seen someone whooshed so hard, wow.