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KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop Officially Released (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: KDE will celebrate 20 years of activity on October 14, 2016, and they've just released the first LTS (Long Term Support) version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Prominent new features of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS include support for desktop widgets, a new system-wide search functionality that promises to let users easily search their KDE desktops for everything they want, including apps, music, videos, files, folders, etc., a new tool to get hot new stuff for your KDE Plasma desktop, such as wallpapers, widgets, desktop effects, or window styles, and infinite customization possibilities. Moreover, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS comes with a unified look for the default Breeze theme so that, no matter what type of application you're using (Qt4, GTK2, GTK3, or Qt5), it will look the same, mobile phone notifications, along with the ability to use your smartphone as a PC remote, transfer files or mute music during calls, all with the new KDE Connect plasmoid. There's also Right-to-Left (RTL) language support, simplified global shortcuts, improvements to many applets, and much better Wayland support. KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will receive nine point releases until 2018. "Today KDE releases its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma," reads the announcement. "This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess, Plasma is simple by default, powerful when needed."
If KDE was any good it would depend on systemd.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've been out of the Linux loop for a long time, and I wanted to know if the current KDE releases have achieved parity with KDE2 with regard to printing capabilities. Honestly just want to know, I haven't used Linux since KDE 4.1 or so.
Or does the whole thing still crash horrendously when you turn off a display port monitor?
The main goal of KDE was to be a solid WIndows 95 clone. The first time I used it was version 0.6.something. I may have read about it on Chips and Dips. It was awful and development initially stalled. Today it is my favourite IDE. Although I frequently turn to OpenBox and and awesome for brain decompression.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
This should be + 5 insightful. I'm bored to tears by the continual reinvention of the Linux desktops. For the last god know how many years all they do is piss about with shading, docker positions, window borders, colour schemes, spinning fucking widgets etc. Endlessly copying the piss poor crap produced by Microsoft and Apple but doing it badly.
Meanwhile the number of actual useful, professional grade APPLICATIONS that are written for the Linux desktops remains at about 4.
Look as soon as there were icons, a file manager, a way to put shortcuts on the desktop it was pretty much usable. Stop keeping on reinventing the fucking wheel and try making a fucking axle, an engine, a steering wheel, a hammer, a chisel. Something that you can use to do some fucking real work.
TRY WRITING SOMETHING THAT LETS US USERS DO SOME USEFUL WORK.
So what ? There are people who don't wipe their arse properly when they've been to the toilet. Why is this *my* problem ?
Why should a computer cater for these people by default and treat me as if I'm one of them ? If they need them then, sure, write some programs they can install (or have someone install for them) that searches their disorganised junk pile for them. That's a worthwhile thing to do.
But don't make it the default behaviour and don't expect me to use, or want, it.
Wheelchairs are a wonderful invention for people who can't walk but you wouldn't expect everyone to use one all the time.
Baloo has replaced nepomuk and is much better behaved. Akonadi and Telepathy are frequent sources of frustration for me though. Also, the Network Manager can crash all Plasma widgets and window decorations, which is very annoying—I don't know if this is an OpenSuse or KDE bug. As I mentioned a couple months ago (modded +5!), it remains the least annoying DE for me.
For me, desktop environment should just be in the background, waiting to do what you tell it do, fast, efficiently and using as few resources as possible. KDE, Gnome and Unity have decided to take the opposite approach - they are the stars of the show, they may, or may not, allow you to do what you want to do, they are not particularly fast or responsive, and they consume more system resources than just about any other application. Since it is those desktops what the Linux community is pushing to compete against Windows and Mac, I am only too glad that they are not making any significant headway in that undertaking.
This should be + 5 insightful. I'm bored to tears by the continual reinvention of the Linux desktops. For the last god know how many years all they do is piss about with shading, docker positions, window borders, colour schemes, spinning fucking widgets etc. Endlessly copying the piss poor crap produced by Microsoft and Apple but doing it badly. Meanwhile the number of actual useful, professional grade APPLICATIONS that are written for the Linux desktops remains at about 4.
Everyone's free to scratch their own itch so I won't complain, but I mostly agree. I don't think anyone ever said "Okay all my applications run or have great replacements, but the DE looks like crap so I'm going with Windows/Mac". It's nice to have, but if it's not worse than Win95 it will do. If the car doesn't get you from A to B it really doesn't matter if it looks great, then I'll take the rusty beat up clunker that gets the job done. Oh well...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
who still loves KDE and thinks this is great news?
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
I would love baloo if it actually worked right. The thing just fails for me to index anything right.
First thing I have to do after installing KDE is kill the baloo semantic desktop search indexer to stop it from using 100% of the CPU.
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only some do. i have no use for any of those examples
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Sounds like a great idea, when is your first release?
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I don't know... have you seen all the extra gizmos and gadgets littering the desktop elements? That control-panel that slides out from each window, allowing you to arbitrarily rotate the window in the screen plane? Who the hell needs that?
If you ripped your face off, you would no longer be bothered by other people's choices with regard to the software they make, and I would feel a lot better about the world. It's a true win/win.
KDE4 is still maintained for a long time, very stable and usable. Why not just keep using that?
Because you have to use whatever your chosen distro decides to ship with and maintain. Putting your own DE on a distro isn't that easy usually, and ends up with rough edges. All the distros seem to have finally switched to KDE5 (Mint just now switched, with the recently-released Mint 18 KDE Edition). If I have to go to extra trouble to use KDE4, I might as well just jump ship and use XCFE, since there's distros that feature that instead.
"another" DE? Like i3 was a DE in the first place? Sheesh.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Baloo has replaced nepomuk and is much better behaved. Akonadi and Telepathy are frequent sources of frustration for me though. Also, the Network Manager can crash all Plasma widgets and window decorations, which is very annoying—I don't know if this is an OpenSuse or KDE bug. As I mentioned a couple months ago (modded +5!), it remains the least annoying DE for me.
I disable both baloo and akonadi (I use no KDE PIM apps). I'm running v5.7.4 on Debian Unstable and telepathy is still busted if you need to connect to a skype for business resource, but perhaps that's fixed in 5.8. Also, I have no love for network manager; my requirements are simple so I use wicd-kde. My Plasma 5 desktop uses about 100MB more RAM at idle than my openbox/compton/tint2/pavucontrol/wicd/conky/pcmanfm desktop did, which means it takes about two seconds longer to boot. But - customizable? I have a desktop service menu with my most-frequently used applications (this was really the only thing I missed from *box) and if one was to look in ~/.config there are enough text files in there to keep me entertained for months.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
KDE4 is still maintained for a long time, very stable and usable. Why not just keep using that?
How much i wish what you wrote were true, but i am afraid it isn't:
Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for
2 years.
This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace.
Anyone has a strong reason we should keep doing kde-workspace 4.11.x releases?
Yes, some distributions still offer KDE4, but i am wondering how secure it is when i read things like this
"Many popular KDE applications use QtWebKit, which is old and deprecated. These deprecated versions of WebKit suffer from well over 100 remote code execution vulnerabilities fixed upstream that will probably never be backported. (100 is a lowball estimate; I would be unsurprised if the real number for QtWebKit was much, much higher."
"QtWebKit is still maintained in Qt and is getting some backports, but from a quick check of their git repository it’s obvious that it’s not receiving many security updates. This is hardly unexpected; QtWebKit is now years behind upstream, so providing security updates would be very difficult. There’s not much hope left for QtWebKit; these applications have hundreds of known vulnerabilities that will never be fixed."
I have been a longtime KDE user, and their refusal to continue supporting KDE4 while KDE5 is being developed is precisely what infuriated me to the point of wishing to abandon it and making me actively look into alternatives. Up until KDE3, i was willing to accept some bloatness and features that i never used because of KWin's configurability and internationalization (there was a time when other DEs would lock you out of your session for good if you were using a non-latin keyboard when you locked the screen!). Then i swallowed the fiasco of the transition from KDE3 to KDE4, during which KDE developers abandoned support of KDE3 long before KDE4 was in a usable form (except perhaps on their own laptops?) telling myself that perhaps this was an error in judgment caused by their inexperience (they are not professionals, after all), and that they would learn their lesson... And let's not even get into the semantic desktop crap...
So we finally arrive at KDE5, where KDE developers shove down their users' throats a half-baked product once again by refusing to keep maintaining KDE4. I cannot even remember how many bugs this thing had when i was forced to install it some months ago, many of which have not yet been fixed to this day... Konsole, my workhorse application, crashing with a mysterious combination of key strikes; the screen going black when opening a new window; things like the session manager autostart sometimes working and sometimes not; irritating taskbar bugs too many to mention here; "focus follows mouse" sometimes working and sometimes failing... To compound the misery, KDE settings are no longer saved under ~/.kde5 but are spread all over the place in ~/.config and other directories; possibly to comply to some desktop standard, except KDE is so bug it overwhelms these directories and it's no longer to rename ~/.kde5 to make an easy fresh start when trying to figure out what's wrong...
I reported some of these bugs, but i must confess that at this point i have very little good will vis a vis KDE to be a happy bug reporter! After all, i am not doing it out of my own free will: KDE5 was forced down my throat, and i find myself obliged to spend hours and hours on their project instead of *my* projects, and at a time that was certainly not of my own choos