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Plasma 5 Release Candidate Announced
sfcrazy writes: The KDE Community has announced the first release of Plasma 5. It's a release candidate, so it's meant for testing and preview purposes, like the developer preview of Android L. The final release will be announced next week, so this is the last chance for testers and developers to find issues and get them fixed before the release.
Anyone else notice its starting to look more like XFCE?
Which is the active window in the official screenshot:
http://kde.org/announcements/p...
It looks like usability took a back seat to "Apple-like" flat, monochromatic design on this one.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
there's got to be something wrong with that screenshot... or perhaps it's a case of focus follow mouse or something because the active window should have the stupid glow.. but in the picture the window in the background is the one glowing. I think my head hurts trying to figure it out.
Well, I can actually tell quite easily that the 'system settings' window (the one in the back) is the active one. In the taskbar the blue underlining tells you what's active. Plus you can tell since the windows' title is greyed when not active.
Who gives a shit about Android L? Are Slashdotters too dumb to know what a release candidate is now?
....that are not releases. Really wish they would stop that. I went to XFCE with the great "4" announcement. that screwed up everything that I expect a finished window manager to do. Anyway, isn't this a dupe?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
No, focus follow pointer and raise on click is a common and very old UI style that a lot of people prefer.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's configurable though.
Would you have preferred that it looks more like Gnome3 ?!
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And, this being KDE, by the time it's accepted in mainstream, it's going to be configurable, so you can make it paint the title bar of active application in neon pink, if you want.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not to mention ass-loads of wasted space, a KDE specialty. Really? Your fucking selectors need to be 5 times larger than the text inside them? FUCKING IDIOTS.
Odds are your distro will create it's own default theme if this one proves unpopular.
I like to have large areas to point at, thank you very much. If you don't like the size, change it *once* and in the future it will remember the size of the window. If you want to do some deeper hacking you can also change spacing of different kinds with stylesheets.
And another thing: Your point is not strengthened by the type of language that you use. Just saying...
Larger areas present easier targets to hit quickly and accurately. This is important with the mouse as well as touch, because making all your UI elements too small makes everything slower to use while you're trying to hit a tiny target.
See also: Fitts' Law.
"Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954."
I knew something looked buggered about that image, but I couldn't figure out what -- I was too distracted by frustration at the equally user-hostile oversimplified flat outline icons.
What's worse is that it's so awful without even including the planned window decorations, which someone on the team posted to OpenDesktop in April. Imagining the two put together...not pleasant.
reminds me of when I saw Visual Studio 2013 for the first time, physical pain in my eyes (that's what I get for using a bright monitor I suppose...)
Lighten up, Francis.
Tested the ISO and I see more of the same as before.
Kashew turned into a hamburger menu but still it cannot be removed. It's menu appears under windows so it's useless if there is any window close to it.
Option for classic menu launcher removed. Again, forcing settings to users.
Task bar has another hamburger menu that does the same than clicking on the bar with right menu button and selecting "Panel Settings" from pop up menu. Is this really used so often that it needs it's own icon wasting space on the task bar?
The one in the background, titled "System Settings". Two clues:
1) The title of the foreground window is greyed out, while the one in the background is not.
2) There is a blue line above the active window in the task manager.
This screenshot was taken on a system that was configured for focus follows mouse. This means that the active window won't always be in the foreground. Believe me when I say that it makes a lot more sense when you see it in use. Moreover, it looks like the active window cues haven't changed since KDE 4.1 or maybe even 4.0. I guess you're not a regular user of KDE 4?
I guess you don't use KDE 4 much. The active window cues haven't changed since KDE 4.1 or maybe even 4.0.
But of course the huge buttons are needed, as we all use our computers via touchscreens, duh.
It looks like usability took a back seat to "Apple-like" flat, monochromatic design on this one.
IMHO, which is not a bad decision at all. Flat avoids syntactic sugar in form of 3d etc. is usually faster and consumes less resources, how that could be worse?
As is usually whatever gives you more real estate to application windows that you work on. I like very much OS X style of having zero width window borders, which actually shadows underneath windows, but not prevent you grabbing from there. It's just great. Also self-hiding scrollbars are great.
I'm far from being Apple fanboy, and don't like the direction they are heading with closed garden etc. But they have done some great work on GUI, like above, on OS X desktop and it would be good to welcome that on Linux desktops too. Now if we just got as good multigesture capbable touchpads that are on MBP's on PC's I'd propably switch back my primary desktop before I get too frustrated with Apple's drive on subsequent OS X versions not just GUI minimalism, which I like, but actually removing almost all configurabilty and very useful functionality to advanced users underneath too which is real shame :/
If you label something as a release candidate, what you are saying is "we think this has been completely finished. Everybody check it out, and if we haven't screwed up, we'll rename it as the final version". Hence the name - it's a candidate for release. "Release candidate" is not another name for "preview" or "beta".
This is the kind of crap that gave KDE 4 such a bad reputation. Labelling things as done when they are still major works in progress. If you don't think it's finished, don't call it a release candidate. Don't label it as a new major version. If it's not finished, then it's neither of those things.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The problem with the official screenshot is that the presenter has set the active window either "below others" mode or then he has "focus follows mouse" what doesn't raise active window without click -mode.
But normally the active window will pass above others.
Good news! But I think, that KDE >=4.10 design is better than KDE5's one. IMHO, it's too bright and flat.