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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."
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.
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.
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/
I'm AC, and so's my wife!
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!
It does, and amarok/digikam are infinitely less shitty than itunes/iphoto.
Those aren't windows, those are desktop widgets. Nice try, though.
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...
It's not either/or, but both/and. Bugs are fixed, usability is improved .. AND work is ongoing at making necessary infrastructural improvements.
If what you got from this article was "new colors! new shapes!" you have somehow misunderstood what you were seeing. The colors and shapes are completely secondary to the work being done to modularize the existing libraries and have support for hardware accelerated rendering for the entire desktop shell. The colors and shapes are parts of a test framework designed to, well, test the underlying framework; they are not a user-facing product.
Perhaps /. isn't the best place for topics that aren't about cosmetics.
Select KDE programs do work. KDE Plasma Desktop does not work. Its kind of sad, but no one really stepped up to do it. KDE3 was working at some point.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
No matter how much I think the plasma desktop is better than the mac alternative, it is clearly a waste of resources to maintain it: if people wanted to run a Linux interface, they would run Linux :)
Sure. Only it should be spoken like "nooooooo..." As in, "noooooo... messing up what was once an *almost* decent UI even more, I'm sure..."
This is stuff that is thrown at the user the first time they log in to KDE. It's like the dev team plays games with me and it reminds of flash pop-ups on mouse over, on certain web pages. I could probably disable that effect - and have either the controls permanently displayed or permanently hidden, for instance.
But I'm a potential new user, willing to give it a try, and I don't know yet where's KDE's control panel or config files. So I close the widgets. Then, the animation on minimize/maximize windows hurt my eyes more than anything else, and the whole experience is too much gray and blue overall, so I log out before spending hours learning the beast.
This has happened to me every time I've had a look at KDE 4 (about once every two years).
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.
This story is about Plasma Workspaces, not KDE Applications. KDE Applications mostly work on Mac, while Plasma Workspaces were never intended to run on OSX.
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.
There have been 10 iterations of KDE 4, and 3 of GNOME3. KDE 4.10 is said to be much improved, and for those who would like a simple Qt based DE, there is Razor-qt. On GNOME 3.6, I don't know how it stands at the moment.
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.
You should get your vision checked out before this affliction ruins the rest of your life.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
i just upgraded to opensuse 12.3 on the laptop. comes with kde 4.10 - definitely an improvement in many areas (since 4.7). ;)
spotted a few minor bugs still, so not as robust as 3.5.10 was
Rich
Akonadi and Nepomuk are not so much modules, they are a central part of the desktop experience.
Of course they had huge problems but thanks to all the bug reports and work by the developers something good came out of it.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
These are currently modular but enabled by default. I think Nepomuk is the main offender here. Akonadi is just a front end agnostic backend for PIM software in much the same way that telepathy is for instant messaging
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.
This is stuff that is thrown at the user the first time they log in to KDE.
No, a vanilla Plasma Desktop has zero widgets on the desktop. Distributors may apply different defaults but the upstream default is a completely blank desktop and only the taskbar on the bottom.
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?
They've been all optional since the beginning. If you use a distribution that has the packages marked mandatory, it's a packaging bug. What you'll miss is birthday and holiday display in the Plasma clock's calendar, file tagging in Dolphin, and so on but the overwhelming majority of features will still work. Dolphin even performs non-indexed searches if Nepomuk's indexer is off or not installed.
In case of Akonadi under openSUSE uninstall the packages akonadi-runtime, kdepimlibs4, and libkdepim4 and let it also remove all dependencies. Disabling Nepomuk altogether or only the file and mail indexers individually is possible via System Settings.
I've never seen someone whooshed so hard, wow.