[HN Gopher] KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being "Fairly ...
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KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being "Fairly Livable"
Author : thepbone
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-06-19 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| jrm4 wrote:
| Weird, I thought Plasma was going to be the _good_ "consume-a-
| lot-of-cpu" desktop, with Gnome being the annoying one.
|
| Either way, I'll stand on -- the _vast_ majority of Linux desktop
| GUI work is an enormous waste of time. Not theoretically based on
| the product, but in principle because it 's mostly a solved
| problem. Openbox with a few doodads could be fine for the vast
| majority of users (I do mean even non-Linux users) because the
| desktop isn't the thing you use, it's the thing you use for a
| little bit before you get to the thing you ACTUALLY use.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Was a diehard gnome fan for years but ever since gnome 3 nothing
| has worked. Have been unironically using plasma now for almost a
| year and really can't complain.
|
| For a while Budgie was the best but now that has fallen into
| shambles seemingly so KDE really is the way to go
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Now make it less ugly and buggy. I firmly believe that if you
| gave a MacOS/Windows user Gnome on Fedora 38 they would be quite
| impressed, whereas I highly doubt I could say the same about KDE.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My experience is that Apple people feel more comfortable with
| Gnome, and Windows people feel more comfortable with KDE.
|
| I'm happy that there is choice, here, personally. I hate almost
| everything about Gnome, but wouldn't want to deprive people who
| like it of having it.
| atq2119 wrote:
| This is an interesting observation but it matches my
| perception of traditional project philosophies: "we know
| what's best for you" (Apple / Gnome) vs. "here are options,
| have at it" (KDE / Windows)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| To me Cinnamon and some configurations of XFCE feel closer to
| a traditional Windows-style desktop than KDE does, but very
| few distros ship either as their flagship DE.
| alexhornby wrote:
| As a MacOS user wanting global menu on linux KDE is definitely
| better at that than GNOME. I agree GNOME looks a bit better in
| default config, but I suppose thats subjective. I use KDE with
| mac-like shortcuts and menu and like it a lot
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| I'm a big KDE fan and wish them well in this update. People
| complain about the papercuts, UI inconsistencies, and feature
| overload you find in KDE but if you follow Nate's blog on
| https://pointieststick.com, you can see that they are continually
| working to address all of these things. That KDE was Valve's
| chosen DE for Linux on the Steam Deck hopefully means yet more
| resources for additional polish and features.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Just give me the ability to drive the ui over multiple desktops
| like it's gnome: via keyboard shortcuts, and I'll be open
| minded. Don't make me touch the mouse. Then, add some nice ui
| transitions: keep transitions, don't make them instant. Slide
| or fade things.
|
| But last time I tried kde/plasma, I couldn't pull it off and
| went back to gnome.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I used Plasma 5 with i3 instead of kwin [1] with 2 monitors
| for a while. Never really need to use the mouse when you
| don't want to. That is the whole reason I use i3 to begin
| with. It was fine. But I went back to normal i3. I just don't
| need all that desktop environment stuff. I don't know if I
| would recommend it, but it was doable.
|
| I don't know about transitions or anything. I don't use
| transitions, so ... no idea. i3 just instantly switches
| between monitors or workspaces etc, though maybe someone has
| implemented transitions like they did with gaps? Again, no
| idea.
|
| [1] https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Man
| age...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Then, add some nice ui transitions
|
| KDE allows for flexibility and choice about such animations.
| I dislike that sort of thing and disable them all, so I don't
| know how well the various options work, but I do know they're
| there.
| vbarrielle wrote:
| I'm using KDE Plasma with multiple desktops and monitors
| using only keyboard shortcuts, it works pretty well. I can
| switch the focus to other monitors, send a window to another
| monitor, using keyboard shortcuts. There's an important
| configuration that needs to be set for this to work, which
| says each monitor has a separate focus.
| jlpcsl wrote:
| I am also a big fan, It was actually KDE Plasma that convinced
| me to switch to GNU/Linux. I was offered distros with other
| desktops at first and all were lacking features and
| customisability. Only when trying out a distro with Plasma have
| I switched and remained. And I find it better then anything
| that is out there, even when counting closed/proprietary
| alternatives.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Do we get the option for ISO dates in kde programs?
| tmtvl wrote:
| Various programs may be basing the time display format on your
| LC_TIME environment variable, according to the Arch wiki*
| setting it to en_DK.UTF-8 will switch to ISO format.
|
| *
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Locale#LC_TIME:_date_and_ti...
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Already configured. `date` already prints it correctly but
| kde is special
| samsquire wrote:
| I like desktop environments. I actually use LXQT and Windows. I
| have lots of ideas of how they could be more powerful.
|
| * GUIs aren't as flexible as command line or programming
| languages, but I wonder if there's some middle ground to add
| flexibility to GUIs. I think generating complicated data from a
| GUI would be faster than writing it by hand. For example, if AWS
| Console could be dumped to Terraform files. Or Visio to a JSON
| tree data structure.
|
| * Would like the possibility to integrate multiple machines into
| my desktop environment, for example, I could configure a cloud
| credentials and servers in my LAN as part of setup and my desktop
| can coordinate other machines or servers. VNC could be configured
| automatically and Just Works. I would synchronize my files with
| the remote environment and index it ALL WAYS so that file search
| is incredibly fast because searches happen on a different
| machine, without slowing down my current machine with indexing or
| searches.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| ChatGPT is pretty ok at converting data between
| representations, even very different ones. This is the only
| thing I ended up using it for -- aggregating text data into
| JSON structures, converting iptables rules into nftables (or
| even pf/ipfw), translating an XML tree into YAML, etc etc.
| veave wrote:
| [flagged]
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The choice of font itself is fine I think, but the way KDE uses
| font sizes, weights, colors, and padding/margins could use
| work. Other OSes/DEs better use all four cues to denote
| information hierarchy and importance which reduces visual noise
| and makes window content faster and easier to parse.
| veave wrote:
| In that screenshot, the font is too big and improperly
| hinted.
|
| About paddings and margins I didn't say anything because
| that's really old. They haven't got that right since the KDE
| 3 days.
| BearOso wrote:
| Too big and improperly hinted contradict each other. At the
| high DPI this screenshot was taken, hints wouldn't be used
| for normal fonts.
|
| There are certainly still problems with spacing in various
| KDE applications, but this screenshot is not an example of
| that. Rather, I think you're deliberately looking for
| something to complain about.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I want to like the KDE UI, but margins, spacing and balance
| is all over the place.
|
| Panels have massive areas of empty space, with all the UI
| elements huddling together in the corner as if for warmth.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Agreed, whitespace distribution is oddly uneven.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| What is the problem with this image?
| suby wrote:
| What makes a font cheap-looking? I don't have an eye for this
| sort of thing but it looks fine to me.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Noto isn't a cheap-looking font, but it's the wrong choice in
| this context. It's a very wide open font with big counters
| (eg. the middle bits of a and e.). That means it looks bigger
| than other fonts at the same size. It also takes up more
| space for the same amount of words. In the example above the
| text looks slightly too big for the surrounding space which
| makes it look cheap.
|
| Verdana, the font HN uses, was designed to be readable at
| small sizes on lo-res screens, so has very wide counters.
| It's also why it looks ugly in high-res or when printed.
|
| Good interface fonts tend to be more condensed, so you get
| more on a line - think Roboto or Inter. It's also probably
| why Apple moved from Helvetica, a good print font, to San
| Francisco which was specifically designed for UI.
| BearOso wrote:
| The context in the GP post clearly shows a high-dpi screen.
| So I think a font designed for printers or high-dpi is
| appropriate for it.
|
| Verdana is actually undersized relative to most fonts. The
| ascender range is too large, so the baseline is off as
| well. And as you pointed out, the blue zones are similar to
| Noto anyway, so that aspect wouldn't affect readability.
|
| I think you probably just have a low-res monitor. Noto has
| no bytecode hinting, so it would fall back to an auto
| hinter or remain unhinted and wouldn't present with the
| same sharpness.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't see the problem with it, either, but took the comment
| as a statement of personal taste rather than an objective
| criticism.
| revertmean wrote:
| The default KDE font is Noto Sans, which is a professionally
| designed font commissioned by Google and is used in various
| Google projects, including ChromeOS.
| veave wrote:
| Noto Sans is a "version" of Arial and is inappropriate for a
| user interface.
|
| I have looked at screenshots of ChromeOS and, for obvious
| reasons, they don't seem to be using it - they use Roboto and
| Product Sans just like they do in Android.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I agree it's not a good UI font, but it's absolutely not a
| version of Arial. Arial is a knock-off of Helvetica.
|
| Noto is a variant of Open Sans with a much wider symbol
| set.
|
| A font specifically designed for UI like Inter would be
| better choice as it's a bit more compact and better for
| information density.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Why is Noto Sans inappropriate? Also you can just change
| the font to your own preference.
| Sunspark wrote:
| It is not a version of Arial! Noto sans is derived from
| Droid Sans and Open Sans, all by Steve Mattheson.
|
| That said, I don't use Noto and I replaced it with Tahoma.
| :)
| veave wrote:
| Yes I know it's not a version exactly which is why I
| quoted it.
|
| What I meant is that this style of font is soooo generic
| at this point that it screams cheap
| epgui wrote:
| It's still a very-horrible system UI typeface.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| The negativity in this thread is fascinating and shows just how
| different expectations from users can be. I've been a KDE user
| since installing Fedora on a lark right when KDE4 "left beta"
| which, if the developers were being honest, was much closer to an
| alpha. It was painful, but KDE today is very feature rich and
| relatively low resource.
|
| I use KDE on a very old thinkpad and it is fantastic, I really
| enjoy the experience. KRunner is my primary way of interacting
| with the DE and combined with the recent touchpad gesture support
| is a very clean way of navigating what a DE should provide a
| user. I've been using plasma wayland for the last two years and
| in the last year has become more 'clean' (smoother animations, no
| tearing, stable) than X11 ever was. I get ~9 hours of battery on
| an X1 Nano Gen2 using the most recent Firefox and various
| terminal applications.
|
| Every six months or so I try other DEs, gnome, budgie, the
| plethora of tiling managers, etc et al. None of them are as nice
| to use as KDE. KDE specifics aside, as always, Linux on the
| desktop is more polished than ever. Is it as polished as
| Windows/MacOS? Probably not but I don't really care. Maybe it is
| _finally_ the year of the Linux desktop? Using any of these
| modern GUIs, ZFS, and the impressive new 8+ core CPUs available
| from AMD /Intel with 32Gb+ of RAM and NVME SSD makes it seem like
| local computing has become what I always wanted it to be. I now
| store and process my data in RAM. It's incredible how fast laptop
| compute is.
|
| BTW. Latte dock is very stable now as well, and is a great
| addition to KDE if you haven't tried it. Obligatory scrot...
|
| https://i.imgur.com/RG8ZJ3x.png
|
| PostScript: After the monetization of imgur it's worse than ever.
| What are HN folks using for image hosting now?
| robbintt wrote:
| I use s3 to share with my friends. I wrote a bash script to
| upload to a s3 bucket. The bucket has a policy to auto delete
| after X days.
|
| There is a little buffer, 100GB egress free per month. After
| that, I would be paying $0.09 per GB egress.
|
| With micro costs like these, I wonder if there is a future in
| self-paying hosting costs.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Is it as polished as Windows/MacOS? Probably not
|
| Well, in Linux (fvwm) i can set the width of the window border
| at any size i want. In MS Windows 10, no. In fvwm i can work
| with virtual desktops, in MS Win 10, no (they are unusable). In
| fvwm i can tell to windows to have titlebars, in MS Win 10
| every program messes with the titlebar. etc.
| sgt wrote:
| 2023, the year of the Linux desktop? /s
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It should probably link directly to
| https://pointieststick.com/2023/06/18/on-the-road-to-plasma-...
| jlpcsl wrote:
| That was submited about a day ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36378496
| caligula1989 wrote:
| Oh no, I was finally enjoying Plasma 5
| hulitu wrote:
| > KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being "Fairly Livable"
|
| So it's time for Plasma 7. /s
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Maybe I missed it but what benefits does Plasma 6 bring over
| Plasma 5 to the users? The changes I read seem mainly API
| focused.
| shmerl wrote:
| Qt 5 used by Plasma 5 needs backporting things. Plasma 6 is
| using Qt 6 which gets the current development.
| veqz wrote:
| As such, the user benefits are all indirect.
|
| Plasma needs to be ported to Qt6, and thus Plasma 5 becomes
| Plasma 6. In the process a lot of code is cleaned up, and it is
| easier to find and eliminate bugs, and also to add new
| features.
|
| Several new user facing features and improvements are still
| coming with the release of Plasma 6, and lots more will keep
| coming in subsequent versions.
| drewg123 wrote:
| When will plasma be livable in general?
|
| I used KDE from 2001 through KDE4, and tried to use KDE Plasma5
| for a few years before throwing in the towel and moving to LDXE.
|
| The Plasma versions seemed to embody change-for-change's sake,
| and were flaky in non-reproducible ways. Things like the
| compositor crashing, startup scripts not running in a
| reproducible way, weird behavior around multiple monitors and the
| dock sticking to the wrong edges etc.
|
| I just want something simple, not as fugly as TWM, that lets me
| use focus-follows-mouse and several "weird" personal muscle
| memory shortcuts around mouse buttons and meta keys for window
| management actions. Old school KDE gave me all that until my
| distro (FreeBSD) moved to kde plasma5 several years ago. After
| that it was just horrible. The last vestage of plasma5 on my
| desktop was sddm which flaked out after an update, presenting
| just a blank screen, and leavng me unable to login.
|
| At first, I thought it was just me. Then I thought it was just
| FreeBSD, but every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently)
| has people from many different linux distros complaining about
| the same issues.
| robbintt wrote:
| As with MacOS, I find kde5/plasma5 quite habitable. I try to be
| my own devil's advocate about my opinions and wants, and how
| much those matter to moving the needle on my big goals.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I switched from Gnome to Plasma a little over a year ago after
| using Gnome for over a decade and it's better in every way.
| Reading your comment feels like I'm reading about the original
| KDE 4 release in 2008, not today.
|
| >The Plasma versions seemed to embody change-for-change's sake,
| and were flaky in non-reproducible ways
|
| I haven't noticed any major changes in the last year? Certainly
| nothing that was forced on me, whereas Gnome was always
| removing features I used, and the plugins would break with
| every update.
|
| >I just want something simple, not as fugly as TWM, that lets
| me use focus-follows-mouse and several "weird" personal muscle
| memory shortcuts around mouse buttons and meta keys for window
| management actions
|
| KDE does still let you do focus-follow-mouse and you can
| certainly add shortcuts, as you can in any other DE, in fact
| the dialogs to configure it are the same ones that are used in
| Gnome!
|
| >Things like the compositor crashing, startup scripts not
| running in a reproducible way, weird behavior around multiple
| monitors and the dock sticking to the wrong edges etc.
|
| Are you reporting these bugs? I cannot say that I have
| experienced these problems on any of my KDE machines and my
| friends that use KDE haven't complained about these problems
| either
|
| >At first, I thought it was just me. Then I thought it was just
| FreeBSD, but every problem I've googled for (sddm most
| recently) has people from many different linux distros
| complaining about the same issues.
|
| I mean, I just run Ubuntu. Maybe it -is- you? Even if it was
| SDDM, it's not like you have to use SDDM to use KDE -- I don't.
|
| IDK this post just seems like a lot of FUD to me.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Ugh, gnome. I wanted to move from TWM to "something modern"
| in ~2001 when running FreeBSD on a DEC alpha as my desktop. I
| submitted patches to both KDE and Gnome to let their
| configurators accept my shortcuts. KDE took the patch, Gnome
| rejected it because it violated their human interface
| guidelines or some such. So I spent the last 20ish years with
| KDE.
|
| Its not FUD. They took a stable, working desktop environment
| and made it more shiny, and less reliable.
| GTP wrote:
| I've also got a preference for LXDE, but after years of it
| working just fine, a few months ago I run into some weird
| behavior when maximizing/running full screen applications. I
| first tried LXQT but faced similar problems. In the end I
| switched to KDE plasma and it's fine again. Sometimes feel
| bloated, but at the same time it has some things that work out
| of the box or that can he configured easier compared to LXDE.
| Overall I'm ok with it.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| KDE has felt a bit odd to me ever since I think v5 or whenever
| it was that there was a big shift in its UI design.
|
| Some people really love it and that's great but I think many of
| its quirks/unique bits will be lost on general audiences. It
| feels designed for a particular subset of users.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| > When will plasma be livable in general?
|
| It already is, and a lot of other people feel the same way. If
| it doesn't suit your needs, that's fine.
|
| > every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently)
|
| SDDM is not a part of KDE proper, but it sounds like they are
| going to bring it under their umbrella in Plasma 6.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I switched to LXQt for the same reasons. KDE is great on paper
| but Plasma has too many random bugs for me to enjoy
| (specifically Plasma; Kwin is fine.) I just want a basic and
| stable desktop environment with GUI configuration and and
| standard window management... I find that KDE provides some of
| those but sacrifices stability in an effort to be more than
| basic. For instance; configuring panels. In LXQt it's done
| mostly through context menus and setting windows, while in KDE
| it's supposed to be a more dynamic affair of dragging things
| around with your mouse. Well KDE's way of doing it has never
| worked well for me, it always seems to mess up and do something
| unexpected when I try to use it, so a simple adjustment becomes
| an ordeal of trying to fix my panels after messing them up
| accidentally. LXQt's way of doing it may not be as slick and
| modern, but it's utterly reliable.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| You're shadow-banned for some reason. Maybe reach out to HN?
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Probably never. I think KDE is just too complicated at this
| point, with too many components and moving parts. I too very
| much enjoyed KDE 3: it was really performant on low-end
| hardware which I was using at the time, boring, and stable. But
| then KDE 4 happened -- truly the Windows Vista moment of the
| Linux/FreeBSD desktop, and I ended up on a clunky setup built
| from separate smaller components which has been the most stable
| experience across all OSes (pretty much no issues or changes in
| my workflow in ~10 years).
|
| AFAIK they really had to rewrite it -- Qt4 was just too
| different from the old version, and you couldn't simply port
| older applications without almost doing a full rewrite anyway.
| Still sad it had to go, and we haven't seen anything similar
| since.
|
| I am still yet to try the fork, though.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trinity
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| I have TDE 14.1 compiled under Slackware 15.0 running on an
| _old_ Thinkpad X60 core duo. The slackbuild is linked to from
| the Trinity Desktop Environment build instructions on their
| Web site. Seems to run fine and fastish with a TDE base build
| plus tde-powermanager.
|
| I was beginning to see a degree of slowness with xfce4 4.18,
| probably graphics related. I like a full desktop environment
| with all the apps.
|
| (I didn't use KDE back when it was version 3. I found Gnome 2
| good enough)
| drewg123 wrote:
| This looks like exactly what I want. Its too bad its not
| packaged with FreeBSD.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've been use KDE for a very long time, and I'm not a huge fan
| of Plasma, either. But at least it's possible to configure
| things in such a way as to avoid a lot of it.
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