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.

Comments

Its plasma 5.1.1

[Anonymous Coward]

The title is wrong. Its plasma 5.1.1

Re:X or Wayland?

[NotInHere]

KDE on wayland is not complete yet. There has been work for kwin, but one thing is sure: if you want to use it on wayland, you will need, as usual, systemd. Of course, the author points out that this does not imply you will also need to install a web server and a ntp daemon, and that the dependency is on the API not on the program itself, but then show me an alternative implementation i can use. You know, systemd brings nice new APIs and so on, but then I read about the next thing systemd broke. Its in the man page of the shutdown command that this should work.

Re:Jesus. I'll stick to Win7, thanks.

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

If it's not clear to you, KF5 is the "next generation" stuff, not the current release (which is still KDE4). Also note that KDE Frameworks 5.6 is actually the current one. The improvement since the older 5.3 release in the article has been substantial, in my experience. (Ubuntu always seems to be a few releases behind everything, unless you intentionally install from a more up-to-date 3rd-party PPA.)

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.

Re:About KDE compatibility

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

To be honest, I wouldn't necessarily notice which aplications are KF5-native yet if I hadn't been watching what gets installed and replaced when I upgraded. (Actually, that's a misleading way of writing that -all of the kf5-native applications on my system are the "system" ones that you don't normally explicitly run like krunner, kwallet, the system-settings, some widgets e.g. the "NetworkManager", and so on).

I do have the development branch of kdeconnect installed, which I THINK is the kf5 port - it seems to work fine.

They've split the core system and applications development, so I assume that as KF5-native apps are released, they'll just replace the kf4 versions. I'm assuming most distributions will consider them "testing" or "unstable" versions for a while so you'd have to explicitly ask for them (for the first few versions) instead of having them just pop up without warning.

With the core libraries that they depend on in apparently pretty solid shape as of KF5.6 in my experience, I suspect the kf5-native applications will stabilize pretty quickly once they come out.

Re:KDE 5.3

[jbernardo]

Seems like you're wrong, they added support for systemd dbus calls, but no dependency on systemd libs. It will use it if it's there, but doesn't require it.

This message has a small description of what they did. Too bad other developers don't want to be this conscious and prefer to link with systemd libs, needed or not.