KDE Plasma 5.9 Released (softpedia.com)

KDE has announced the release and general availability of the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems. While it only took a few months to develop and isn't a long-term supported (LTS) version like KDE Plasma 5.8, the update does have several new features and improving Wayland support. Softpedia reports: Probably the most important one, which will make many KDE users upgrade from KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS or previous versions, is the return of Global Menus, a feature that was available in the KDE 4 series of the desktop environment. Only now, after numerous requests from users, did the KDE developers manage to implement Global Menus again in KDE Plasma 5.9. Quite a multitude of improvements have landed in the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment for those who use the next-generation Wayland display server. These include the ability to take screenshots, support for using the color picker, implementation of borderless maximized windows for full-screen support, and support for dragging apps by clicking on an empty area of the user interface using the Breeze style. KDE Plasma Wayland support allows users to set color schemes for windows, which may come in handy for accessibility, implements auto-hide support for panels, and properly displays the window icon on the panel when using X11 apps. Moreover, there's now a new settings tool for configuring touchpads, which you can see in action in the second video attached below. Wayland users can also set up gestures and relative motions. KDE Plasma 5.9 also adds several cool new tools that promise to enhance your productivity. For example, you'll be able to drag a screenshot taken with the Spectacle utility from the notification pop-up straight into a web browser form, chat window, or email composer. There's also a brand-new drag and drop functionality that lets you add widgets directly to the system tray area, and it's now possible to add widgets directly from the full-screen Application Dashboard launcher. KRunner actions like "Open containing folder" and "Run in Terminal" are now displayed in the application launchers for search results powered by KRunner, of course, and there's now a new applet that lets users group multiple widgets together in a single one. You can read the announcement and download KDE Plasma 5.9 via their website.

Comments

Link to announcement

[colin_faber]

https://www.kde.org/announceme...

Background per desktop?

[colin_faber]

Does anyone know if this feature is back yet? I stopped upgrading KDE because I like having different background images per-desktop and this feature was dropped in favor of the somewhat clunky activities system.

Re:Background per desktop?

[negRo_slim]

Are you kidding me? You're willing tosacrifice your precious VRAM and GPU cycles in such a way?I am flabbergasted!

Re:Background per desktop?

[Gavagai80]

Everything on linux desktops was more configurable 15 years ago than today, unfortunately. It's the apple effect, people believe that to make something user friendly means to eliminate all the choices.

Re:Background per desktop?

[subk]

Everything on linux desktops was more configurable 15 years ago than today

Have you tried Enlightenment? They've been adding features for decades, and it's configurability is quite extreme. If you want to do it, it can probably done with Enlightenment.

Re: Background per desktop?

[corychristison]

If you used IMAP, you could just nuke the client settings folder and reconfigure your mail client, it would then sync your emails back to your computer.

I get that some people don't like to put their email 'in the cloud', but it's certainly useful.

But then again, why didn't you have proper backups?

For the record I used KDE for about a month in the early 2000's while trying out a few different options before landing on XFCE. Haven't looked back since. I've also always used Thunderbird for my email, even back when I used Windows.

Re:Background per desktop?

[BarbaraHudson]

Yep, continuous indexing and swap memory are two things almost nobody needs any more, and yet all OSes default to it.

I'd like the option to buy a cpu that doesn't have the circuitry to swap memory to disk. Hibernation can be completely done in software, same as task swapping (see DOS 5 on pre-386 cpus as an example), but with today's pcs, it's just not necessary unless you're running badly designed and implemented shit like Android Studio.

Re:Background per desktop?

[TheRealMindChild]

I'd like the option to buy a cpu that doesn't have the circuitry to swap memory to disk

That isn't how it works. The processor indicates it wants to access virtual address X and it is up to the OS to manage how that happens. Plenty of OS's have a virtual memory system without physical disk swap.

Hibernation can be completely done in software

Hibernation, by definition, requires the hardware to support that function.

same as task swapping (see DOS 5 on pre-386 cpus as an example)

And the context switching penalty was palpable.

Re:Background per desktop?

[Gavagai80]

I loved E16 back in 1999 (I used it as a window manager for GNOME though which gave me the best of both worlds). Tried E17 maybe 5 years ago and wasn't impressed with it as a standalone desktop. I though probably give it another try though, thanks for the reminder.

Re: Background per desktop?

[subk]

They are at 21/22 now (depending who you ask) and its fucking dope. I simply don't know how else to put it, if you are a power user, Enlightenment blows away everything else.

Re: Background per desktop?

[Blaskowicz]

The few times I wanted to try it (not in the 1999 days but in recent days), it never worked at all. I did try 'terminology' on its own : terminal emulator that promised cool graphics effects or something but it was corrupted or with meaningless/ugly/broken graphics and options.
Besides, the screenshots don't show a task bar so if this is yet another twm or fvwm clone please admit it.

Re:Background per desktop?

[Frank Burly]

I don't think so. I read a bug/wishlist thread on that issue a while ago and my impression was that it is a wontfix. I started using activities last week and it is less awful than it once was. I still prefer KDE to everything else out there.

Re: Background per desktop?

[subk]

You need a decently up-to-date Linux distribution to start with.. Read: Rolling Release. For that matter, if you're running Linux on a desktop, and you're not using a rolling release distro, you're doing it wrong. All of these things people bitch about like EFI booting, Systemd, FOSS graphics drivers, etc work *so* much better if you're using the freshest versions of everything in the system. The old-style monolithic distros like Debian are great for servers, but are not a good environment for using anything cutting edge.

In my experience on Arch, Enlightenment is as simple as installing the package(s), which are in mainline. It's been a long time since I experienced any difficulty or glitches with anything in the Elementary suite of applications.

Re: Background per desktop?

[epyT-R]

Seriously? There's no fucking excuse for a mail client to do that. It's not like it uses complex data organization, and the standard protocols it uses are well understood (except maybe exchange).

Re: Background per desktop?

[Blaskowicz]

Thanks for the reply - I wanted to add that mine was a bit dickish with the snide remark.
This explains a lot, and I guess using debian sid instead of Ubuntu LTS and Mint would go a long way for some of these things albeit there's likely still a package maintainer in the loop.

These OS/distros I've mentioned that are in the "slow loop" do work well still, many users don't want the rug to be pulled under them :)
I would say most people come from DOS/Windows and in that realm, you got like a base OS you would update every 2/3 years or even less often, yet easily kept applications up to the latest versions for those you cared about.
In Ubuntu there's ppa, great for some things but not always that great it just spares you the ./configure make make install never damn working but still something to keep track and worry about.
Firefox is unusual as it forced itself into rolling relase even in LTS distros, as it's the most major of graphical applications and the most security critical.
Mixed desktop/server installs do exist, I like to say this existed in Windows 95 when you right-click a directory and hit "share".

I don't know how to conclude this. There's been a million flame wars already.

Re:Background per desktop?

[tlhIngan]

I loved E16 back in 1999 (I used it as a window manager for GNOME though which gave me the best of both worlds). Tried E17 maybe 5 years ago and wasn't impressed with it as a standalone desktop. I though probably give it another try though, thanks for the reminder.

Think about it this way - it's so configurable, it became a mobile OS.

(Tizen is heavily based on Enlightenment, apps generally use the Enlightenment Foundation LIbraries).

Re: Background per desktop?

[epyT-R]

obviously

Re:Background per desktop?

[Barsteward]

really? you stopped using because of not having a different background image per desktop? a very very trivial reason.....

Re: Background per desktop?

[Barsteward]

you believe that crap about corrupting emails? why didn't it happen to all of us?

Re:Background per desktop?

[Trax3001BBS]

Everything on linux desktops was more configurable 15 years ago than today, unfortunately. It's the apple effect, people believe that to make something user friendly means to eliminate all the choices.

Linux KDE was my first version, I had to quit as it was so configurable. I'd make 10-15 changes find something now being shown and no clue where to change it at, it was too much for me so switched to Cinnamon

I bought a new system, burned it in just today, and plan on going back to KDE Plasma for the program "KDE Connect" alone. I'll just keep the changes to one at a time...

I lost Win7 over this purchase (too many changes), i7-4790K with dual video cards, a tad bit overkill for Linux :) but Windows has nothing to offer.

Re:Background per desktop?

[unixisc]

It's the customization capabilities and preferences for each user. If you prefer not to use it, you can either use only a single wallpaper, or use something else altogether, like LX/QT

If they supported such a feature in one version, they should have the capability to enable that in all subsequent versions

Re:Background per desktop?

[Grishnakh]

The problem with these proclamations is: where are you going to go?

Yeah, Firefox has been making some questionable decisions lately, but what's the alternative? I don't think PaleMoon is significantly different. There's always Chrome, but that's loaded with Google spyware. And there's the fully open-source Chromium, but (like Chrome) it's terrible at memory management and opens all the tabs in all windows at once, stupidly, whereas Firefox (when you restore a session) waits until you view a tab before it actually loads it. Why Chrom* are too stupid to do this after all this time, I have no idea, but it's a deal-breaker for me as I have lots of tabs open.

Re:Background per desktop?

[Grishnakh]

Damn Slashdot and no ability to edit posts....

Anyway, same goes for KDE. What's the alternative? Gnome and its forks are all even worse in my view, and things like Xcfe are too minimalist.

Re:Background per desktop?

[BarbaraHudson]

Hibernation does NOT require hardware support. All it requires is an OS that can write out a memory image to disk excluding the region of ram that is executing the write-to-disk command, and an OS that upon reboot can read that memory image back, and restore the cpu registers to where they were before the "write-to-disk" command was executed. Same as the software task swapper in DOS 4 or 5 (or other task swappers that weren't cpu-dependent) running on a 286 or even an 8088.

Re:Background per desktop?

[Grishnakh]

Oh yeah, the other huge thing that was missing is session save/restore. Like noone ever logs out? Or reboots? The kde developers seem to think that this isn't a useful feature and don't plan to implement it

WTF?? This is a pretty critical feature for me. What is wrong with these people? If I wanted a Gnome3 clone, I'd just use Gnome3.

Re:Background per desktop?

[thegarbz]

people believe that to make something user friendly means to eliminate all the choices

There's no believing about it. The amount of options presented to a user is inversely proportional to user friendliness. If the user is able to do something in a simple step, giving them the choice of doing it a different way only ads complexity to the interface.

What you're complaining about is that they are only targeting one user group. In which case I agree with you, the fact all major projects are aiming for the mediocrity that is the most common user base is a problem.

Re:Background per desktop?

[agm]

I run KDE 5.29 using Plasma and have a different image per screen (I run a triple head display). I use compiz as a window manager because it has nicer effects than the built in KDE WM.

Re:Background per desktop?

[agm]

I don't see the connection between the desktop environment and your mail client. I stopped using KMail years ago because it's a crappy mail client, and I got rid of all of the indexing crap because it was a hog and I didn't need it. I'm running the latest stable version of KDE (on Gentoo) on an 11 year old computer and it feels very snappy. KDE has given me grief in the past, I think the 4 series was released too soon, and Plasma is a bit flaky.

Re:Background per desktop?

[ChrisMaple]

I like KDE, but I make sure never to enable frippery like akonadi and nepomuk. If you never use superfluous software, it can't do any damage.

Got excited for a second, I thought plasma TVs....

[Proudrooster]

Got excited for a second, I thought plasma TVs were back. I will cry the day my plasma gives up the ghost.

Could we have more plasma TVs pleasee!

Gobal menus?

[BarbaraHudson]

"Global Menus have returned. KDE's pioneering feature to separate the menu bar from the application window allows for new user interface paradigm with either a Plasma Widget showing the menu or neatly tucked away in the window bar,"

You mean stuff that other DEs have had for ages? Same with clicking on an empty area to drag a window - which KDE had back (ISTR) in the days of Mandrake Linux ... must be a lot of work taking stuff out and putting it back in again all the time. They must be taking notes from Microsoft ...

Re:Gobal menus?

[Eluan]

The release announcement is almost entirely comprised of stuff that was standard back in the early 90's. This reimplementation madness, along with slowness to implement basic stuff, is going out of control! Almost all "modern" user interfaces lack basic stuff.

Re:Gobal menus?

[nnull]

The sad part is, a lot of stuff has not even been brought over from KDE 4 yet. A lot of functionality was lost due to the move to KDE 5.x. KDE 4 worked better out of the box than KDE 5.x ever did. KIO is still broken with a lot of stuff and they're at version 5.9 now...

Re:Gobal menus?

[fisted]

Wayland shouldn't know shit about 'empty areas' and only have a very vague notion of a 'click'. Are things worse than I thought? How/why would wayland get a say window movement policy? Inquiring minds want to know...

Re:Gobal menus?

[BarbaraHudson]

No, they had it is X Windows. Long before Wayland. Learn to read, fool. I never once mentioned Wayland.

Re:Gobal menus?

[BarbaraHudson]

Of course I know about Alt+Left Drag and Alt+Right Drag. They were standard under X back in the distro I was referring to - Mandrake Linux 6 and 7 - back in the late '90s. X might have been getting long in the tooth - but Wayland wasn't the solution.

Re:Gobal menus?

[Luthair]

The used to have them, but got rid of them because they're a stupid paradigm. Lets take an integral part of an application and completely separate it from everything else.

Hopefully its optional and we aren't forced into global menus or that dumb dropdown they show in their screenshots.

Flamebait

[puddingebola]

It still can't hold a candle to Gnome 3.

Re:Flamebait

[Scarred Intellect]

It still can't hold a candle to Gnome 3.

This is factually correct.

Re:Flamebait

[btroy]

ROFL - both have their features I like. Gnome 3 is great for focusing on one topic per monitor at a time. Period. (This is my experience using it over the last year periodically and is just my opinion, I'm sure there are solutions, but generically that's what it seems).

KDE is more like a common OS Desktop we all know and offers some nice features like multiple desktop and some eye candy that can be entertaining. I happen to live with KDE mostly. Plasma is following a similar line of the old, but is different enough to run some fanboys away from it --- my opinion.

Re:Flamebait

[snookiex]

FYI, KDE vs GNOME war is over. XFCE won.

KDE Alpha

[wjcofkc]

Does anyone remember when the stated goal of at least the earliest KDE alpha had the stated goal of being a perfect Windows 95 clone? Looking around, this fact seems to have been erased from history.

Re:KDE Alpha

[Trongy]

It's hard to erase something that never existed. The original announcement mentions using windows design features, but not the goal of a perfect clone.

There was another Linux desktop whose name escapes me at that time that had that stated goal, not KDE. Most open source projects in the 90's wanted to avoid being sued by Microsoft.

KDE took ideas from many desktop environments, with a strong influence of Windows. The screenshots of KDE1 show a strong visual similarity. The goal was to make it easy for Windows users to switch. KDE had a start menu and task bar which were the biggest innovations in Windows 95. Even apple eventually copied the taskbar. KDE also had the minimise/maximise/close widgets in the same place as MS Windows, and unlike most other graphical environments at that time. However KDE was never limited to copying Windows and even those early versions had features that were better than Windows 95.

Re: Excellent news

[Zero__Kelvin]

What are you talking about? I run KDE / Plasms 5.x and it is blazingly fast. It is also highly configurable and there is simply no other environment I have found (incl. but not limited to e16, e17, fluxbox, fvwm2, LXDE, Gnome et. Al) that accommodates my workflow(s) so well.

Yawn

[subk]

Enlightenment users like myself have been alt-clicking *anywhere* in a window to move them since the mid 90's. I'm still baffled by the fact that the most feature-rich WM/DE is also just about the least popular. I guess not everybody can be a smart user.

Re:Yawn

[subk]

It does not say that in TFS. It says it is enabled if you use the Breeze style (how limiting?). It THEN talks about Wayland enhancements. You should learn to read.

Re:Yawn

[kayoshiii]

Yeah that's pretty much a standard feature across most X11 desktops including KDE. The good ones allow you to move those bindings from 'alt' to 'meta' for aplications that use alt.

Re:Yawn

[BarbaraHudson]

The point is that Wayland and KDE are only now catching up (sort of) to where X and KDE were 20 years ago. Takes real courage to boast about that.

Re: Got excited for a second, I thought plasma TVs

[Proudrooster]

If I switch everything over to LED and bike to work, can I earn enough carbon offset credits to keep my plasma TV?

Calendar with public holidays

[robvdl]

I've recently switched from Kubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 and KDE 5 took a while to get used to. I don't care one bit for the global menus as that seems too Mac-like and doesn't appeal to me coming from a PC background. However the biggest thing I am missing is the lack of public holidays in the calendar widget when you click on the clock, I used that a lot in KDE 4.

How does KDE compare to Cinnamon?

[Bonker]

After years of threats, I finally managed to eliminate all the apps that were tying me to a Windows 7 desktop or a Macbook workstation. I've used Linux heavily for years, but never as my desktop OS. It was always my app, web, or build server, and I'd interact with the machine via bash over SSH.

Now that I'm on a Linux desktop, I'm fairly comfortable with Mint's 'Cinnamon' UI, which I understand is a forked version of Gnome 2.

Normally, if I wanted to experiment with a new UI, I'd just dive in, but I'm still in the phase of building my expectations and lists of needs. (Do I really need Sublime or will Gedit suffice? How do I change that default icon for Firefox to one I'm more likely to recognize?)

Does KDE offer me any great advantages over Cinnamon or Gnome? Any of you more experienced desktop aficionados have an opinion you'd care to share with a relative novice?