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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.
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.
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.
To put this into a sysadmin analogy for you:
It's like systemd decided to not support shutdown(8), but rather than actually remove it, they put in a identically-named replacement that fails to implement all of shutdown(8)'s modes of operation.
We're grownups posting in a sysadmin thread. Car analogies are unneeded.