KDE Ships First Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace

rohangarg (1966752) writes "KDE announced the beta of its next generation of its plasma workspace today. Built ontop of Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, with this transition, all QML-based UIs — which Plasma is built exclusively with — will make use of a new scenegraph and scripting engine, resulting in huge performance wins as well as architectural benefits, such as being able to render using available graphics hardware." There are experimental packages for some distros, and a Live CD (ISO download) available if you want to try it out.

Comments

KDE 3

[Atomic Fro]

Anyone else remember the awesomeness that was the KDE 3 series?

Re: KDE 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know you can turn unnecessary searches (krunner plugins) off

Looks good

[ichthus]

I've teetered between MATE and KDE for the last couple of years -- they're both great, but I like KDE's interface and look/feel a bit more. Also, Dolphin is, IMHO the best file manager for Linux.

But, the thing that still pisses me off about KDE is the handling of cifs mounting (a la smb://). In MATE (or Cinnamon or Gnome2), if I mount a share with smb:// in the file manager (Nautilus, or the newer ones), I get an actual cifs mount. Now, if I open a file on that mount with a photo viewer, or a media player (like VLC), the file manager throws a locally-mounted and accessible file path to the application.

Not so with KDE. Doing the same thing from Dolphin throws the URL of the file (smb://server/share/file.ext) to the application, and the application usually has no effing idea what to do with this. So, I end up either copying the file to my local hdd and opening it from there, or adding an entry to fstab to get a real mount (which is not practical if mounting a new share on someone else's server.) The gvfs way is better than the KIO way.

Re:All but another GNOME3, please

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no major graphics chip (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) that won't run it on hardware (even dirt cheap/integrated) from at least the past 5 years. All you need is OpenGL 2+ compatibility. Hell, you can pick up a GT610 for like 30 bucks. Kind of disappointed at the level of trolls now at /., I expect so much better.

One question

[fnj]

All I want to know is one thing. Will we FINALLY get a resolution-independent UI? One that you don't have to screw with when the dpi departs far from 96? All the style elements; icon sizes, title height, widgets, etc., should be in % of screen size, not pixels. All you should have to set is ONE variable to scale everything to taste.

I can't believe this is such a difficult thing to implement. There is a crying need for it; to hell with the eye candy crap.

Re:One question

[Phil Urich]

See https://community.kde.org/KDE/High-dpi_issues. In fairness, most (in fact, the overwhelming majority) of elements within KDE are resolution independent (hell, KDE has been using SVG icons since well before the KDE4 days), and basically every element can be changed and tweaked as desired, it's just that it takes a shit ton of annoying manual tweaking.

You're right though, it Isn't There Yet (tm). But it is in fact a focus of much of the development; this is generally on the minds of KDE devs, and is being worked towards for Plasma Next, as well as for specific applications; for example, the Yakuake developer is changing the theming engine specifically with resolution-independence and high-DPI screens in mind. So upcoming versions of KDE will be, at very least, closer to supporting high DPI and resolution independence, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if a version or two into Frameworks 5 we get a nice centralized control for scaling the UI.