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KDE Plasma 5.3 Released
jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.3, a major new version of the popular, open source desktop environment. The latest release brings much enhanced power management, better support for Bluetooth, and improved Plasma widgets. Also available is a technical preview of Plasma Media Center shell. In addition, Plasma 5.3 represents a big step towards support for the Wayland windowing system. There are also a few other minor tweaks and over 300 bugfixes. Here is the full changelog, and here's the package download wiki page.
I cannot understand the term best GUI. I've switched 2 years ago to Xfce and with a third party file-manager(in my case nemo from Cinnamon IIRC ) it's by far the best DE that I can imagine(especially with the last update).
On the other hand I think that you mean the integration of the OS X GUI and not the responsivness. Take in account that OS X has a very specific audience, people that like the point and click and then click again procedure and that's how far they can get.
DEs that support linux and/or bsd are made by programmers and not by facebookers or chicks on instagram. There is a reason why some things are good and some are bad on those DEs.
KDE and Gnome tried to steer their design the mainstream way and lost many of their users, including myself.
To conclude OS X's gui, I believe, it's nothing special. In fact it's far from optimal for the screen and the user, but, similarly to windows, since there is no other one to compete with it, it is assumed to be the best... kinda what win7's or winXP's gui was back then.
On a single platform, linux, you have numerous fully functional DEs, from KDE to Enlightment, so you'll always have the sense that nothing is completely perfect, because there will be always one that will have one extra feature.
Distilling your comment into non-irate hate, my environment is 3 widescreen displays, side by side. Presently I have 13 terminals, 1 "heavy" text editor, two VNC sesions and chrome. I have similar environments on Gnome at home, and KDE at work (minus chrome).
In terms of objectivity:
- I have more usable screen space for me & my apps than I do in Gnome (no backdoor configuration, but a few mainstream mods), significantly more than KDE (running in those VNC sessions). I never bother with Unity anymore.
- In terms of performance, I can drag windows around and do not wait for redraw once. When I drag a window the contents do not disappear, nor do they stop updating (why should they?), they simply move where my mouse puts them and continue playing video or scrolling text or whatever as they move. Gnome is second best. With 13 terminals open that does happen from time to time, but thanks to the magic of Spectacle I can usually avoid the mouse for simple operations. While I rarely sit at KDE directly, it was the worst performer when I last had it installed on my desktop. It works second best to OS X with VNC however. Gnome is terrible in that regard.
- In terms of memory usage, in OS X it is hard to say for certain but "kernel task" is at 1.8GB, which certainly includes non OS things. No other task at this moment is above 600M. So let's call it 1.8GB. Gnome-shell is using 2.2GB, with only one chrome and one terminal open. The particularly old KDE implementation that comes on the company install of RHEL defeated my ability to gauge memory usage, it would appear to be around 500MB.
- I'm not going to debate the facets of the X windowing system and where you feel the problem is, I don't care. I'm not an X developer and will not ever be. It's a package I install, I don't want to spend more than an hour or two configuring it. I understand that Gnome and KDE encompass a lot more than pixels, again that's not relevant for most users. To most of us it's pixels and if it doesn't work the way we want, we throw it out entirely.
While I am an engineer and spend all day with various X's, write a lot of code, stare at a lot of waveforms, and run a lot of heavyweight processes, I don't understand why any sensible person would not want their window system to be smooth and responsive. First and foremost the machines that I use a windowing system are for me to interact with, I should be the priority. When it comes to heavy processing, I have machines that have absolutely no UI on that do the heavy lifting and parallel processing. If I *do* heavy processing on the machine with my window system, the UI needs to get priority, it is a desktop and interactive first and foremost. I'm not sure, beyond a few users with very specific needs, why anyone would not want that behavior out of the box. I've tried XFCE, and didn't like it. I haven't yet tried Mate/Cinnamon.
I do want a good Linux solution it is my preferred OS and religion, but I find that once Canonical gave up the helm in favor of Unity, that Linux returned to it's native state of infighting and bullshit. It is still superior to Windows by lightyears, but there's no reason why the windowing systems continue to resemble angry squirrels wrestling in a canvas sack. I don't know what level of neck beardery suggests that you would prefer to have a sluggish, unresponsive windowing system, or why that helps you with coding or productivity related tasks, but it interferes with mine and my use case seems to resemble what you describe.
Popular != Best, which is extremely subjective. Lots of distros ship Gnome by default, Unity for Ubuntu. I know many people that load KDE and remove the others, it's a pretty desktop and highly configurable.
One of the biggest reasons I prefer KDE in the business world is the ability to Kiosk since v2.x. Something Gnome has promised since version 2 but has never delivered on, and Unity never tried to my knowledge. I can enforce all kinds of policies through the Kiosk, making things like screen lock with password automagic. Auditors love it!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's just not ready for prime-time.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Personally I'm a Kubuntu man and indeed running this shiny KDE5.3 :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
One thing I've never understood about KDE, since KDE 4, is why it has an artificial separation between Plasma and traditional KDE apps. Why do Plasmoids have to have their own separate visual style? It's very jarring, and it made KDE 4's visual appearance much less configurable than KDE 3's by introducing a Gnome-style system of requiring users to choose from ready-made and unconfigurable Plasma themes (or develop their own).
I understand that Plasmoids are supposed to be easier to write than traditional applications, but I don't understand why that means they have to have ugly themes and stand out like a sore thumb against the "real" apps. I'd like to see a return to a situation where the buttons, scrollbars and other theme elements in desktop widgets and panels conform to the overall widget style that's been selected for traditional applications. It surprises me that none of the developers appear to have identified this lack of consistency as a problem yet.
One of these days, when I've got more time on my hands, and if nobody beats me to it, I'll try to do some work on fixing this problem.