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

[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.

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.

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.