Slashdot Mirror
KDE Plasma 5.7 Released (neowin.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: Earlier today, the KDE project released KDE Plasma 5.7, its popular Linux desktop environment. The update brings improved workflows, better kiosk support, a new system tray and task manager, and further steps towards Wayland windowing system. New live images of KDE Neon have been spun which feature the all-new Plasma 5.7, and other distributions will get the new software sometime in the future based on their release model. Plasma 5.7 builds on the jump List Actions that were introduced in Plasma 5.6, which allowed users to use certain tasks within the application; now the feature has been extended and those actions are present in Krunner. Another change which improves workflow is the return of the agenda view in the calendar, providing users with a quick and easily accessible overview of upcoming appointments and holidays. The volume control applet in the system tray is now able to control volume on a per-application basis; it even allows the user to move application sound output between devices by just drag and dropping. The Wayland window manager -- which has been kicking around for at least half a decade -- still isn't the default window manager on many Linux distributions, mainly because desktop environment (DE) developers are still making their DE work properly with it. With KDE Plasma 5.7, support for the windowing system is greatly improved, especially when it comes to tear-free and flicker-free rendering, as well as security. The image can be found here via KDE.
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your news letter.
I don't know if it's my age or what but KDE always seems to tout something along the lines of "new workflows" but when I update I use it the same way I always have. Am I missing something?
Ho hum... yet again it's another pointless reinvention of the desktop wheel. Seriously when are the Linux programmers going to stop fucking about with the desktop metaphor (which was perfectly usable back in the Windows 98 days) and write some damned programs ? So that Linux on the desktop might actually be worth using ?
It's all very well continually re writing the system tray, continually re writing a basic file explorer, continually rewriting desktop messaging, support systems etc. etc. etc. but where are the programs to actually get something done ?
KDE was good enough as a desktop design about 10 years ago. Since then it's just been pointless rewrite after pointless rewrite. It's like watching a kid who's made a perfectly good model boat continually smashing it up and rebuilding it just for the hell of it. Fun for the kid, no fun for his brother who just wants to take the damned thing to the local lake and you nkow actually sail it and have some fun !
If the people who work on this stuff spent even 50% of their time actually writing something useful then maybe, just maybe, we can finally get rid of the Windows spyware that infest the majority of home computers.
But no... here's the new KDE/Gnome etc. with yet another new way of doing the SAME OLD SHIT.
I feel as if KDE is the beset Desktop Environment Linux ever produced. with maybe the exception of KDE 2, it has been one of the most methodical, configurable environment there is. It should have been the defacto Environment space for Linux.
You make me want to re-watch that episode now, damn it!
I haven't even looked at the latest stuff, so I'm not commenting on KDE of today. But for many releases (including 3 for sure) see topic, it just looked like someone sneezed out all the widgets into every dialog. I'm all for settings, but I don't just want them thrown at the pages to see what sticks, and have it turn out to be all of them.
GNOME was the clear default choice for years because KDE was a blizzard. But then GNOME went too far in the candy-coated direction and started taking things away...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I resisted the upgrade to plasma 5 as long as possible because I didn't like the changes I saw (particularly the flat design, and the lack of discoverability: I want tabs clearly defined, I don't like a thin blue line under a menu item to show me it's selected, etc ad nauseam).
I just hope this newer version gets to a spot where I love it as much as I loved QT4 version - it was so close to perfect.
And honest question: does anyone, anywhere run KDE on a tablet or a kiosk? Great if so, but honestly, is it used anywhere?
Not so with KDE5. A few programs reopen, placed completely randomly (wrong desktops). Most don't reopen. Konsole won't reopen. It's been buggy like that ever since. So IS IT FIXED NOW ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
There have been concerns about whether KDE will remain open source.
Where's the love for Xfce? It's super-lightweight, does everything you need, installs easily, works perfectly, and you can even get distros like Ubuntu in Xubuntu flavor if you don't want to go through a very easy install. They aren't obsessed with continually "improving" (and, in the process, devolving) what is already a great thing.
Wow, so the smart, funny, beautiful woman I love, the one who refuses to live less than 3,000 miles away or seek help for her crack addiction, just let me know she's expanding her sexual horizons, much to my benefit.
That's how I feel when I hear announcements like this, that the OS I've wanted to run since the earliest days of Slackware now includes even more great features but STILL doesn't have a driver for my must-have devices and STILL won't run my must-have software.
(And please don't do the annoying Linux-head thing and lecture me about KDE is not Linux, etc. If you're still making that pointlessly pedantic argument in 2016, you're one of the reasons we'll never see "the year of the Linux desktop".)
Why do these KDE folks still bother? GNOME has won the battle, it is by far the most popular and widely-used desktop environment on GNU/Linux. All these KDE developers should jump ship, and contribute to GNOME. Then perhaps GNU/Linux on the mainstream desktop will actually become a reality.
Actually, Unity is the most used desktop environment in the world. Over 2 million PCs in China are running Ubuntu Kylin, and most web stats show that vanilla Ubuntu is the most used distro.
I've not been so hot about KDE in the past because it's been such a resource hog compared to MATE and Xfce, but I gave 5.7 a try and it's actually really nice. I have a few grumbles (e.g. I'd rather double click in Dolphin to enter a new directory than single click) but overall I'm satisfied. Also with a bit of customization, it looks really sexy on my 4K monitor.
You forgot to mention the part where you masturbated vigorously at the thought of your own trolling.
But how do these stats differentiate between the different flavors of Ubuntu? I've been using Xubuntu for years and recommended it to everyone I know who every complains about Unity. As far as I know Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc will just show up as vanilla Ubuntu in web stats, or am I mistaken?
This. Apple blew the other *nix DE's out of the water, and yet Finder still sucks (like, I shouldn't need to install FUSE to be able to mount sftp as a volume). KDE is still blindingly bad in comparison.
.
One of the nice things about Microsoft Windows (one of the very few nice things) is that when I change the size and/or location of a window on the desktop, the next time I open that window the size and location settings from the prior instance are remembered.
In my last expedition into KDE, I found some window settings that mostly allowed my to accomplish this on a per window basis.
Why can't that setting be made a global one?
Yeah, I just checked my UA and it shows nothing of the DE, nor even the Distro.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
So, citation needed on your "stats", please.
That reminds me, I need to delete the ISO.
Yes, yes, thanks for reminding us how clearly superior to the rest of us you are.
The thing you miss is that most of the Linux users you show clear disdain for happen to have a different set of values to you. This is based in the knowledge of their systems where substance is more valuable than form. Yes it has issues, yes it is frustrating but it is also the communities software and it has never stopped me from getting work done, actually it is far more maleable than macs and allows me productivity your system will not allow - because it's outside the norm.
Seems to me that many Linux users have accepted thier systems will never achieve the popularity of large, vapid, commercial systems, in exchange for substantial power over their environment. Personally I prefer gnome however I'll try other WMs. Frankly the mac interface annoys me as a VM as much as KDE, but I like the BSD system mac is built on. Sure that community has some pretty vocal arguments about how the Linux should be however that's is because the community controls it. Laugh at us if you will however I'll take the useability issues over losing my freedom thanks plus I will have budget for a substantially more powerful spec machine than you can afford as a mac user.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"So you're using Gnome...I use KDE myself. I know these desktop environmets are supposed to be better, but you know what they say about old habits...they die hard."
Ha ha ha. That's German Nazi style. Except he wasn't trolling, just expressing how bad Linux is. For dick-licking zealots like you, that's pure blasphemy!
He's not superior, but his choice of Unix based OS clearly is. Linux desktop environments and assorted APIs are a pure clusterfuck of half-baked shit. Always have been. Only a die-hard "everything must be free and open like Stallman preaches" FOSS zealot has the intestinal fortitude to tolerate it. Community. Ha! A bunch of overweight neckbeards flaming each other on usenet.... and that's why Linux is the way it is.
I would like plasmashell to not crash every time I turn on the screen (there's actually hope for this one), or at random when I open/close windows. If plasmashell/kwin could also refrain from crashing when I run WineTest that would be nice. Though lately WineTest has been crashing the all-open-source Intel graphics driver so hard that using the screen required a reboot (am I glad I'm not using an NVIDIA/AMD graphics card with their proprietary unreliable and impossible to debug drivers). Anyway hard to make sure that plasmashell/kwin survived right now.
I'd like to be able to sort the songs per artist, album, etc in JuK, and for it to have a working Manage Folder dialog. Adding support for PTP cameras (you know, most of them), that would really be great. Means I would no longer have to connect them to either my GNOME or LXDE laptop to then transfer the photos over the network.
Oh, and icing on the cake, fixing the bugs in the bug reporting applet?
Sorry for being unclear; what I meant was that Ubuntu spinoffs like Mint aren't used as much as "official" Ubuntu. My source for Unity being the most-used DE of Ubuntu is this survey: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/201...
I'm really sorry. You know, about that PCP habit you picked up after Sun went out of business.
I feel as if KDE is the beset Desktop Environment Linux ever produced. with maybe the exception of KDE 2, it has been one of the most methodical, configurable environment there is. It should have been the defacto Environment space for Linux.
KDE has been my preferred desktop until four or five years ago when I discovered #!. I run Debian Sid, and in the past few years have taken *box about as far as I cared to and decided to give Plasma5 a spin - and was pleasantly surprised. I found a service menu on kde-apps that gave me the right-click application menu I missed in *box and I still have to edit .kickoffrc to get it to display the way I want, but my seven or eight most-used applications are just a right-click away now.
Not a fan of the flat theme either (or the fact that the KDE team doesn't love any color but blue) and fixed both of those - here are a couple of screenshots, one clean and one dirty. Linked images are kinda big - 1920x1080.
clean screenshot
dirty screenshot
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
After an hour or so of being logged in, plasmashell eats 100% of a core. I'm not the only one this has happened to: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=289&t=121533
I know, file a bug (maybe one day if I have a few hours to spare debugging and getting a backtrace). It's just annoying that this has been around for a couple years and the best solutions I see are "try disabling [pretty much everything]".
I suggest immediately disabling "akonadi" and "nepomuk". It was apparently somebody's brainstorm to include a desktop search that you can never expunge the history of without damn near taking a class in SQL. You will never need it. Just click the bottom left menu and type each into the search. There are checkboxes to disable and stop.
The troller has a point... although it's buried in his vapid trolling. I like checking out the latest and greatest free desktop release and marvel over how far things have come, and remind myself of the old days when I spent countless, countless hours customizing and tweaking things until it was just right.
But then I need to get some work done. When my life revolved around an editor, an Apache server and a compiler, Linux was all good. Now that it revolves around a word processor, e-mail and a spreadsheet, and sharing everything with all sorts of people, not so much. Linux desktop is desperate for apps for every-day stuff, but even when I was hardcore linux, Konqueror just couldn't slide up to be my go-to browser. There's Firefox, but it's not built for KDE.
KDE seems to hold so much promise. But I just haven't seen anyone build anything with it except an IDE and a Desktop. Everything else in the linux desktop world seems to use GTK, so they look funny in KDE and don't always inter-operate well. Granted LibreOffice is already mature, so I guess there's no interest in KOffice except as a widget demo. Maybe KDE is evolving so quickly that developers don't feel confident building anything in it, in case the next release is going to blow them away.
I would LIKE to be told I'm wrong... but with examples. And not Krita, because I already have that one.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
In keeping with all other KDE releases this release will be konsistent with all other KDE releases as it will kontinue to be komplete krap.
Don't bother, it's shit. Like all trek. Yes, it seems creepy because it IS creepy. Trek is for pedos.
Quote: "When my life revolved around an editor, an Apache server and a compiler, Linux was all good. Now that it revolves around a word processor, e-mail and a spreadsheet, and sharing everything with all sorts of people, not so much."
So you basically went from being a developer to a pencil pushing fuckhead manager?
The next version of Gnome will be touch screen only. Keyboard and mouse were deemed too confusing for three of its users.
Sorry for being unclear; what I meant was that Ubuntu spinoffs like Mint aren't used as much as "official" Ubuntu. My source for Unity being the most-used DE of Ubuntu is this survey: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/201...
Old article from an unknown source.
I think KDE went a *little* too far as you say. But I usually chose it because Gnome was crash-prone in addition to having too few features.
Can I now have a dark theme without needing a high-end GPU?
Because that was an unexpected requirement previously.