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.
Episode: TOS #73, The Lights of Zetar
In a Nutshell: The minds of the last 100 inhabitants of the planet Zetar exist as lights in space looking for a body to inhabit. They attack the Enterprise and start taking over the mind of Lt. Mira Romaine. Then they attack the planet Memory Alpha, leaving no survivors. The lights then return and attack the Enterprise again, fully possessing Romaine. A hyperbaric chamber is used to kill the lights while leaving Romaine alive.
The Good:
1) The basic premise of aliens taking over a person's mind is solid enough to build a good story around.
2) There are some genuinely creepy scenes here. Beaming down to Memory Alpha in the darkness, the face of the dying woman on the planet, Lt. Romaine's horror that the lights are returning to the planet, and the visions that Romaine has are all pretty damn freaky. It's obvious this is supposed to be a horror story, and it succeeds at those times.
3) I loved the reuse of the galactic barrier theme from Where No Man Has Gone Before. It perfectly fits the scenes when the lights are attacking the Enterprise.
The Bad:
1) Scotty is supposed to in love with Lt. Romaine. She comes across as just not that into him and Scotty just seems creepy.
2) I know, we're supposed to find Lt. Romaine likeable so we care about her survival. Instead, she is very annoying, especially the scenes in sickbay, arguing with Bones.
3) The lights just don't make sense. They attack the Enterprise, then Memory Alpha, then go off to who knows where before returning to attack again. The behavior isn't explained, though it allows for some of the scarier moments. The initial difficulty in beaming up Lt. Romaine from Memory Alpha adds tension but doesn't quite make sense. I suppose we're to assume the lights were blocking the transporter, but that's not explained.
4) This story has some absurd moments, especially Scotty's frantic call to the bridge that another phaser shot at the lights will kill Romaine. It seems just as ridiculous every time I watch it.
5) The resolution is also absurd, especially because the hyperbaric chamber would also be fatal to Lt. Romaine. Rapidly increasing the pressure to tens of atmospheres is not survivable.
My Take: I definitely enjoy a good horror story, and this has some good moments. The first half of this episode freaks me out in ways The X-Files never could, and that's a really good thing. I really want to like this story for that reason, but it's just too ridiculous. Most of the scary moments are very contrived in that they occur when the lights do things seemingly for no reason at all. I'd probably overlook these issues if the second half of the story was better and if Lt. Romaine wasn't such an annoying character. The creepy moments are as good as anything Star Trek has ever done, and I loved those moments. But the story just doesn't work, and that's a shame. Lousy acting plus the bad writing that was typical of the third season of TOS force me to give this a low score.
Rating: 5 (1 = TNG's Shades Of Gray, 10 = TOS' City On The Edge of Forever, TNG's The Inner Light, DS9's In The Pale Moonlight)
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.
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 ?
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.
There have been concerns about whether KDE will remain open source.
writing is On the
Kdoes kkde kstill kprepend ka kk konto kevery kdamned kthing?
Kits kshit klike kthis kthat knever klet kme ktake klinux kseriously.
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".)
I downloaded one of the live ISO's installed it on a VM on my Mac, played with it for 5 minutes, laughed at the horror of it all and went back to work on my Mac, where all the programs I need actually runs. And worked with a stable Unix system doing development with a proper text editor in a Unix environment just pretty much same as Linux the whole day long. Except I used Illustrator, Word and Photoshop do do some quick fixes on something.
That reminds me, I need to delete the ISO.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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.
.
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?
"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."
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?
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.
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.
The next version of Gnome will be touch screen only. Keyboard and mouse were deemed too confusing for three of its users.
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.