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KDE Frameworks 5.3 and Plasma 2.1 – First Impressions
jones_supa writes Ken Vermette has done a write-up on his experience with the new KDE desktop encompassing Frameworks 5.3 and Plasma 2.1. For starters, some patience is still needed for apps to be ported to KF5, and most of them will be KF4-based for now. Many of the widgets you may have used don't exist yet either, but the good news is that the Plasma goodies which do make an appearance are universally improved. The new search widget is shockingly fast and the notifications tray has been reworked. Visual outlook of desktop has been simplified and things don't feel so tightly packed together anymore. The system settings application has been completely regrouped more by goal than underlying mechanics. Unfortunately the desktop stability leaves a lot to desire: there was several crashes and Plasma had at one point managed to forget colour and wallpaper settings. However the developers seem to be knowing what they are doing, and there's a real feeling that this software will reach rock-solid stability very quickly given the state of it as it stands.
KDE has always had great functionality, but the actual *look* of it was always clunky-as-hell. Too many typefaces, too many buttons/widgets, and nothing ever seemed to "fit" correctly. It was just half-assed. Shiny, but half-assed.
This looks good. Maybe KDE will finally have the polished look-and-feel that Gnome (and the spin-offs) have had for 15 years now.
The title is wrong. Its plasma 5.1.1
Visually, kde5 is really nice, but not nice enough or stable enough or feature rich enough to upgrade from 4 at the moment.
Im sure the people who grew up on kde 3 said the same about kde4 when it came out but early adopters like me put up with it because it was shiny and had not realised how powerful kde 3 was.
Did Ken try this on a box that had X or one that had Wayland? What's the state of KDE 5.x on Wayland?
Not quite the typical 3 step list leading to profit, but here it goes:
1. Developer: This is so cluttered and ugly. Nobody needs all these features. Lets get rid of the old and do something new - it will be clean, pretty and well designed.
2. User: But now I can't do xxxxx - this sucks! You are idiots!
3. Developer: Ok, We'll add this back in.
4. User: Ok, better. Can you add yyyyy too?
5. Developer: Sure. And how about feature zzzzz as well?
6. User: Awesome. Its finally usable.
7: New Developer: This is so cluttered and ugly. Nobody needs all these features. Lets get rid of the old and do something new - it will be clean, pretty and well designed.
So sorry if I don't get too excited...
Peter.
I've been using the Kubuntu plasma 5 test recently and I have to say that the translucent app launcher background is one of the worst design decisions I have ever seen. If you have any text behind that window it will be extremely difficult to make out the names of the programs. So far I have been unable to figure out how to change the translucency of that window. I'm beginning to think it is not possible.
The tree widgets on the left are mismatched: some solid lines, some spaces with alphanumeric characters; the alpha characters are black, yet the lines are gray visual noise that creates visual processing and cognitive load for no reason, adding nothing.
The parenthetical text at the top has a title whose margin (left whitespace to other widgets) is significantly different from the text below it; there are spaces between the parentheses and the text, which no text or print style guide in the world endorses because it separates the parenthetical indicators from the parenthetical text, when they should be tightly bound for clarity.
The window title preserves the absurd convention of using both the binary name and a descriptive title together, and separates them with a typographical element (an em-dash) which is inappropriate in a label or design element because it is asynchronous—it indicates a delay in interpretation and pronunciation (as the em-dash just a few words ago in this paragraph does) and thus suggests long-form reading, which is not the intent for at-a-glance window titles (unless you don't want them to be very usable).
The title of the list widget, "Information Modules" is superfluous and redundant; the user starting an "About" dialogue expects to see "information" from the start, and they do not need to know about implementation ("modules").
The resize handle contrasts significantly with the window background, drawing undue attention to this particular area of the window above others (why is it "louder" than the window title, for example? Window controls should be secondary to window content and all at the same visual "volume" for usability).
In short—they still don't get it; they are signaling, in conventional ways that most users process subconsciously, thought habits and forms of attention that are not contributing to efficiency and use, but rather detracting/distracting from it. This is the same old KDE with poor, unprofessional design that leads to cognitive clutter. It's not that KDE has "too much going on" but rather that KDE has "too much going on that isn't actually functional and adds nothing to users ability to get things done).
Yuck.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
KDE4's apps still work under it, too. I'm using it fine, though I'm missing the "IM Presence" widget for kde-telepathy.
I actually haven't been seeing crashes or other serious problems so far since about the last couple of releeases (KF5.4), just missing "KF5-native" features from KDE4.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
"Unfortunately the desktop stability leaves a lot to desire: "
Sounds like the way they have done unstable releases since KDE 1, put me off KDE for good.
What's the rush ?
Are you paid only after a release ?
Go well
I haven't updated yet, but I'm looking to soon if everything seems good enough. You mention KDE 4 programs work under KDE 5. Do they feel and look right in the new KDE 5 environment or not? Is it easy to choose between the KDE 5 and KDE 4 version of an app? And is it safe to upgrade to KDE 5 from KDE 4 or must I reinstall from scratch? Thanks for your help.
I'm just over here talking about how thankful I am that 3.5 is still available via TDE.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Eric Raymond wrote a horrifically amusing screed about why open source interfaces suck so bad, back in 2004. It was called "The Luxury of Ignorance", it laid out fairly good guidelines for how to do an interface *well*, and Gnome has ignored *everey single one* of the guidelines. I'm asking about this KDE, did they follow *any* of these guidelines?
= So, if you are out there writing GUI apps for Linux or BSD or whatever, here are some questions you need to be asking yourself:
* What does my software look like to a non-technical user who has never seen it before?
* Is there any screen in my GUI that is a dead end, without giving guidance further into the system?
* The requirement that end-users read documentation is a sign of UI design failure. Is my UI design a failure?
* For technical tasks that do require documentation, do they fail to mention critical defaults?
* Does my project welcome and respond to usability feedback from non-expert users?
* And, most importantly of all...do I allow my users the precious luxury of ignorance?
= Postscript, 26 Feb 2004: I added the new fifth question based on an excellent suggestion in LWN's comments on the story.
= And here are some more design rules, from Nico Kadel-Garcia:
** Can you gracefully and easily duplicate your tools and configuration for a similar installation? Is it documented? (RedHat and CUPS is no help with this, either, most of the print-drivers wend their way from the foomatic and other tools into the CUPS setups without a lot of hint of how it works.) [For cups, the answer is "you can duplicate it easily, but it's a *secret*"! Every configuration should be built and recompiled from the source tarball! What are you, a n00b?]
** Is installing this toolset likely to replace or break something already in place (such as LPD based printing packages)? If so, explain how to gracefully do the transition.
** Are there settings you can do from the command line or hand-editing config files that cannot be done from the GUI? Are they documented anywhere? Does using the GUI erase these settings? (The answer for CUPS is "Yes, you can flush all sorts of hand-edited things this way!". This was an incredible problem for NeXT stations and remains a big freeware GUI problem, although most try harder to address this. Webmin is an excellent example of how to do it right in most cases!)
** Are all your important features mentioned? The automatic flat text->Postscript conversion is one such feature, and despite its presence in the tarball tools and default use the CUPS claim it's not theirs and not their problem.
From the article, it uses hardware acceleration to achieve its look and feel. This is potentially awesome, but I wonder if that takes a toll on gaming, say via steam.
KDE4 may have been too tight on a Retina or other super high DPI screen, but on standard resolutions I find it to be perfect (and certain default settings even too large/wide/tall). From what I've seen I'll be forced to use QtCurve with KF5, if Oxygen doesn't gain an optional compact mode by then.
PS I just tried Kubuntu 15.04 preview in a VM running under VirtualBox on OS X. Had to disable acceleration after installing the guest additions to login to something other than a black screen. That's always been the issue with Project Neon5 too, on 2 AMD-based laptops using the open source Radeon driver ...
Do I get one too?
No, but you did post you very own comment. Yippppppeeeeee for you!!!
IS it here yet?
Like Gnome, the KDE philosophy is "I am the start, it's my way or the highway." It remains bloated, ponderous, intrusive - great, if what you want to do is exactly what its developers want you to do, a burden otherwise.
This is all a good thing in an indirect way. With desktop systems like Gnome and KDE, Linux will never make it in the desktop. Why would it? If I am going to be constrained by my desktop system, I already have Windows and Mac. And it is a good thing because that criminals will carry on focusing their efforts on Windows, which will carry on being used by the most clueless users. My Linux desktop, already being more secure by design, will be, for the most part, left alone. It's great that we have Gnome and KDE.
"leaves a lot to desire: there was several crashes"
"leaves a lot to BE DESIRED: there WERE several crashes".
etc.etc.
Somebody can actually write English! Yippppeeee for you!!!!!!!!
And they ALREADY have expertise.
A computing expert already has decades of highly detailed experience and familiarity with a bunch of paradigms, uses, and conventions.
Experts are the LAST people that want to read manuals for basic things they already have extensive experience with, like desktop environments. Again, they're busy. Being experts.
So, reading the manual on new tech that needs to be implemented in a complex system—great. Reading the manual on a desktop environment? Seriously? That's the last thing an expert wants to be bothered with. "I've used ten different desktop environments over thirty years. Can't you pick one set of conventions I'm already familiar with and use it, so that I can apply my expertise to the actual problems I'm trying to solve? Why reinvent the wheel in such a simple, basic system?"
DEs should leverage existing knowledge and use habits to enable experts to get their real work done quickly. For an expert, using the desktop is NOT the problem at hand requiring a solution. It's not what they're being paid for and not what they care about. Experts love to learn new things—in their area of expertise.
So sure, desktop environment developers probably love to poke around in KDE's front end, code, and docs. But anyone else? People that are not DE specialists are not so excited about the new learning project that is "my desktop," I assure you. The desktop is the last thing they want to be consciously focusing on over the course of the day.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Stable? I doubt it. I've rarely had a (non-design) problem with a KDE desktop in the stable line. (None in the last year. Possibly none last year, but I'd need to check as I was doing some experimentation with other desktops.) The possibly valid arguement is that it is missing features, which I wouldn't know about, as I won't use MSWind due to license issues.
FWIW, xfce, which I have had occasional problems with, is my second choice after KDE. The existence of problems doesn't mean that there isn't a way to work around them. I prefer some of the ways in which it implements feature (from a user perspective, I don't design desktop software).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.