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

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Yeah, but I've gotta say, KDE4 is even more awesome. I've looked into other desktops, and nothing, not even Trinity (fork of KDE3,) can do everything that I use daily in KDE4.

Re:KDE 3

[JabberWokky]

I love KDE4. I use it every day. I can, however, see one issue. My biggest fault with KDE4 was that DCOP in KDE3 was a joy to use from a script (bash script, etc). DBUS is a pain in the butt. It's not only much saltier (in terms of syntactical salt) but it also tends to change much more often. Calls that work in one version don't work after an update. DCOP was more simple, had a great interface, and -- most importantly -- the app interfaces tended to stay stable.

I'm really hoping that the Qt5 and QML combo makes up for this, allowing easy scripting and simple use of internals. I used to say that KDE was like the *nix command line, only GUI: a bunch of small apps that exposed a ton of tiny options that you could link together. KDE4 clearly continued that philosophy with DBUS, but I think it was far less successful in that aspect.

Re: KDE 3

[Vyse of Arcadia]

I can configure the desktop to be more useful than just being there. For example, I work with a lot of LaTeX documents, in particular folders containing tests and assignments for the classes I teach. So I have a desktop with a set of folder view plasmoids pointing at this folder full of assignments. One view is filtered to show only .tex files, and the other view is filtered to show only .pdfs. Super convenient, better than popping open Konqueror (or Dolphin) and navigating the folder, even more convenient than popping open a terminal. Way nicer than the garbage dump of "maybe I'll need it later" files that desktops usually are.

Similarly I have a desktop full of folder views and other plasmoids that are useful for my research, a desktop full of folder views and plasmoids useful for coding, et cetera.

This is something I can't do with any other desktop environment, and I've looked. (Well, actually there's a couple of proprietary Windows 7 add-ons that give similar functionality, if I felt like forking over the dough. And using Windows 7.) And other than the desktop itself, the auxillary applications (the ones I use, at least) are all at least as good as they were in KDE3.

Also, KRunner (Alt+F2) with nepomuk is awesome. File search and program launching, yeah, every desktop is decent at those nowadays. But there's a lot of useful KRunner plugins too. Calculator, dictionary, spell-check, search wikipedia, mini command-line shell; it even has a task manager so if a process is misbehaving I don't even have to open a terminal and use htop (unless I'm in the mood to use htop.)

Give it a try, man; it's actually pretty great. And as far as eye-candy and bloat go, I do all this on a four year old netbook. I didn't even disable any of the eye-candy. What bloat?

Re:KDE 3

[flyingfsck]

Yup. I think most people who moan about KDE, never even used it. In my experience, KDE is fast, stable and runs on anything - even little netbooks.

Re:KDE 3

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

No, you're forgetting the beauty of the backend. KDE 4 was all about plasma. In Plasma worskpaces nothing is special. Everything is a plasmoid widget. Nothing is special about the dock, the desktop, or an icon. They all have the same back end object, and can be placed and dealt with in the same way. It was seen as a way to increase the flexibility and configuration of the desktop.

That was job #1, converting everything to plasma. Job #2 was making it pretty, then everything else.

4.0 was poorly explained that it *wasn't* really ready they just called it a .0 to get people to beta test it. I know that makes no sense at all. It was really stupid. KDE was ready for distros and actual end users right around 4.4.

It looks like they've learned their lesson by calling this the beta that it is. Hopefully, distros will be a bit more pragmatic in upgrading this time.

Re: KDE 3

[Anonymous Coward]

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

It doesn't look that different

[Roxoff]

I thought when you updated your Open Source desktop environment project to a new release version, you were supposed to take all the really useful tools, features and usability models that had been refined for years and chuck them all in the bin leaving you with a horrible monstrosity that was near impossible to use (and then have it remain that way for at least four years).

Surely, KDE have got this badly wrong.

Re:It doesn't look that different

[bill_mcgonigle]

Surely, KDE have got this badly wrong.

:) Even KDE developers can learn a lesson?

qt5 is very nice, but doing the whole thing in QML is going to be the major win (made feasible by qt5, naturally). I'd estimate it opens up the potential hacker pool by two orders of magnitude. Expect an explosion in community-driven KDE fixes and enhancements once the distros adopt this version.

I stopped using GNOME back when they caught mono, but between Unity and the direction of KDE, the endgame for heavy DE's on Open Source desktops is looking very clear. The mono thing was just an example of a flawed decision making process on that project, which has extended forward to today, with predictable results.

P.S. Slashdot - you've managed to break Plain Old Text mode after 15 years. I've got a manual BR after the quote above to fix rendering.

Re:It doesn't look that different

[dcooper_db9]

From the press release:

Plasma Next is intended for end users, but will not provide feature parity with the latest 4.x release, which will come in follow-up releases.

Stability is not yet up to the level where the developers want Plasma Next. With a substantial new toolkit stack below come exciting new crashes and problems that need time to be shaken out.

Performance...will be hampered by various shortcomings. These can and will be addressed, however, much is dependent on components like Qt, Mesa and hardware drivers lower in the stack.

Re:It doesn't look that different

[Phil Urich]

But will I ever get Kasbar back?

A lot of the features of Kasbar are built in to the default or alternative taskbars; considering how easy QML is to work with, you might even want to look at hacking away at it yourself.

Personally I'm 100% satisfied with the options currently available, and all the quintessentially awesome KDE stuff I missed during the initial port---Filelight, Yakuake, etc---all made it back in by around 4.4. I honestly never used Kasbar much myself, so I only have dim recollections of it alongside basic descriptions on old websites, but again, people have done some crazy things with Plasma and it's getting easier as things shift towards QML (you can already code mode things in QML in Plasma-Current, AFAIK, but the Plasma-Next development has made this all easier and they've run into the edge cases and lack of features that they've then had to implement to shift towards pure QML themselves, so there should be fewer 'gotchas').

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:Looks good

[StormReaver]

The gvfs way is better than the KIO way.

I started with GNOME way back when, but then switched to KDE at version 1.44.

I have a love/hate relationship with KIO. My biggest complaint is that KIO isn't a virtual file system, but rather is just a file copy mechanism. It works great for many uses, but completely falls flat when trying to perform an open/read/close sequence. It copies the entire file to a temporary location, then opens that temporary copy. This is asinine, and is the single largest failing of the IO Slave mechanism.

Even Windows' UNC handles remote files better in this regard, which is saying something since most of Windows networking is a painful joke.

Re:Looks good

[ichthus]

That's great, if you're only using KDE apps. What about apps that are neither KDE/Qt or Gnome? VLC is the first that comes to mind. xmms2 is another. Or, what if I want to use WinAmp through Wine? All of this just works in MATE/Gnome/Cinnamon with gvfs.

The media playing apps should be file system agnostic -- they shouldn't have to know about URLs or network protocols.

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.