Plasma 5.18
kde.orgI just recently switched to kubuntu (KDE) back from fedora (Gnome 3).
On one hand I do like that the desktop does not try to re-define basic muscle memory things, like changing the shortcut if you try to switch between two windows of the same application. (Seriously Gnome, WTF?).
On the other hand it crashed left and right after install (less so now that it settled down a bit) and there are a million QA type problems. I have a 4K 27" screen and everything is tiny by default, so I put scaling to 1.3 and Kate + Terminal are full of lines. The computation of the window update is broken.. I browse the internet and the ticket is open - since two years.
Then there is Wayland, which I got used to on Gnome and think is a great achievement - not in KDE though, that is still highly experimental and so back it goes to ancient protocols. Yay!
So yes, we are building fancy new stuff on an eroding foundation is the message I am getting from KDE nowadays. Compared to Gnome - which is stable but weird.
Thinking back on the Gnome 2 / compiz / beryl days we have gone downhill so much it's not funny..
ps. I know I'm complaining too much and that's unfair to an open source project. And I still perceive Liunx desktops as superior to Windows which has it's own issues (technical and non-technical). Just wondering what all the effort was spent on in the last decade or two. I just don't see it.
As a die hardcore kde fan I am not of a fanboi enough to admit that Gnome has the best HiDPI multi-monitor wayland fractional scaling support of any DE I am aware of.
Isn't gnome scaling only by whole numbers? Or did they get the fractional scaling out of experimental status? (Ubuntu 19.04 still had it as an experimental mutter setting)
Things like dwm / i3 handle this much better since there isnt any UI to scale. You just set the right font size and you are good to go.
HiDPI support is more than setting a font size for the task bar. The tricky part is getting application windows to rescale their UI as they're moved between screens with different scaling factors (e.g. from a notebook screen with high DPI to a projector with low DPI).
That was kind of my point - the more starkly minimalist the workflow the easier it is to make it pixel perfect and look exactly as you intended.
So the parts of the UI that are i3/dwm scale. Everything else like email, browser, image editing, applications, the stuff that actually matter, doesn't.
Sure, if you only ever need a text editor you don't need to care about scaling anything but fonts, but that is not the case for most people and unrelated to which WM or DE you use.
Kubuntu is, and always has been really bad, as a KDE distro. Just use the Fedora KDE spin. I've been using it for the past 10 years or so.
> Kubuntu is, and always has been really bad
Not for me. I switched to Kubuntu in 18.04 LTS (after many years of OpenSUSE, so I've got a pretty good idea of how a polished KDE distro looks.) No complaints at all. Kubuntu use to be a poor rendition of KDE but it's working great now.
I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu generally; kernel-hwe is outstanding. With 18.04 LTS you still get updated kernels; it was released with 4.15 but with "hardware enablement" updates it's up to 5.3 now.
This. Kubuntu has been my daily driver at work and home for a good number of years now. Love it.
I tried Kubuntu this week, and it’s the first time I’ve seen a desktop linux distro where everything works, and the experience is not made miserable somehow by poor font rendering or lack of suspend/resume or external display capability. I put lots of this down to Ubuntu but also a lot of it to KDE, so I’d be interested in knowing why Fedora is supposedly an improvement?
Kubuntu has a bad reputation for a reason.
The fractional scaling could use some work, agreed. The foundations seem rock solid, but work on new stuff (e.g. wayland, fractional scaling) could be quicker.
I use kubuntu as my preferred system and love it.
I will say that in my experience initial releases are often kinda glitchy or something, and that it can take awhile for brand new hardware etc to be supported well. But it's usually solved by just waiting a bit for the second version.
Classic flamewar statement here, but I've had fewer headaches overall with kubuntu than gnome flavors of Ubuntu (which Ive had to use for work). Deb+kde is a great combination. Maybe there's a better way to get that but I've always gone back to kubuntu when I've tried something else.
Kubuntu at least boots. I was trying neon first, which refused to do so on my laptop.
Ah I was about to suggest neon as it’s been very stable here. There is still that bug with X11 and scaling, but Wayland worked for me so I stuck with it.
I've always had awful luck with Kubuntu. I switched to Manjaro's KDE flavor and haven't looked back.
How about proper multi-display support (including mixing HiDPI and low-res displays)? Every time I connect my FHD laptop to my UHD monitor the windows on the desktop move around completely randomly. It is better than before, because they used to move outside the visible area, they fixed at least that.
But hey, at least there is an Emoji Selector now (???).
Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary).
KDE honestly seems the best for this, although on the latest version of GNOME has fractional scaling available behind a flag (although also buggy and very slow).
System76 added a 'HiDPI daemon' for handling mixed-DPI multimonitor setups in GNOME to their PopOS distro, in my experience it works less badly than the alternatives.
https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-release...
It's open source also, so you could theoretically use it in a different distro.
> [...] multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary).
Testify :(
I'm still struggling to get my (IMHO, extremely vanilla) setup working (Ubuntu on Thinkpad T430 + 2 external QHD monitors), and I'd appreciate any pointers to any resources that can help me resolve this.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI has lots of information.
I have a Thinkpad X1C and an external monitor, both with QHD resolution. What I ended up with is using xrandr scaling to increase the resolution of the external monitor (probably should have gotten a 4K instead...), and tweaking font sizes and Firefox's UI scaling until it looks okay on both screens. For QT apps I also had to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0. Some proprietary apps are still too small though, so I tend not to use them ;-)
The xrandr scaling is applied through a script and not persistent, so I mapped it to a keyboard shortcut I can press when I reconnect the monitor.
My script looks like this:
The silly 0.9999x0.9999 scaling on the first screen is to work around a mouse flickering bug in the modesetting driver: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70xrandr \ --output eDP-1 --pos 0x0 --scale 0.9999x0.9999 \ --output DP-2 --pos 2560x0 --scale 1.25x1.25This looks useful -- thanks! Will try out some of the suggestions mentioned here.
Is that about weird multistream displayport connections? Two times QHD is definitely not vanilla and was unsupported on windows until a while ago as well.
>Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary).
Works fine for me on i3 (X11).
Hopefully, Wayland will improve the situation a bit.
Yep, just need to give it another decade or so I suppose.
My guess: 1 year more for Gnome, 3 more years for KDE.
That assumes non-Nvidia hardware. If you have one of those you are on a potentially very different timeline, that I do not dare to predict.
The future is already there, just not evenly distributed ;)
Duke nukem forever!
Even on my FHD laptop and ultra-wide (yet not HiDPI) monitor, windows NEVER stay put. Every time I let the display go to sleep (like heading out to lunch) I come back to find all windows have moved to my large monitor and are full-screened. So I have to move them all back around.
This is my main problem. Would also like to see rootless X support in SDDM. If those two issues were fixed, I would switch back to KDE.
Bug was opened 6 years ago, and is still open. GDM handles this by default.
Stupid question: What is the point of mixed dpi?
If you have a large UHD monitor, why would you still use the small lowres screen? Conversely, if you are willing to use a large lowres screen, why not simply set the other screen to half resolution to get the same dpi?
I have long come to accept that unless one is at an Hollywood powerhouse, anything graphics related is better done on Windows/macOS.
Been using KDE for a few years now and I've always been impressed with the experience. I'm really looking forward to this update, for me night mode is critical. (I understand there were third party solutions but I often found them to be buggy or otherwise difficult to use). Here's hoping my distro adds the update to its repositories soon.
I've been using gnome for more than 15 years, but I have to say I'm feeling quite an urge to try KDE again
Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article.
My first impression is that it looks good. Lots of useful features. But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again.
That said I have a question:
It seems that Plasma has tiling WM features. How useful are they?
One thing about tiling WM is that typical it's only part of a package. Another part is that people are typically looking at a lightweight hotkey driven workflow and the ability to script where and how windows appear with occasional non tiling things to fit applications that don't work well for tiling systems.
The other question I have is that one of the reasons why I go for these "lightweight" setups. Althouh xfce-settings daemons + tiling wm is what I do is also because of power usage. How is KDE in terms of power usage?
And yes, I realize that firefox, blink based browser, slack are the biggest power drains.
Kwin used to have tiling support builtin. That was removed from core.
There are multiple different Kwin script that add the tiling functionality now. Like this [0] and this [1]
Regarding being lightweight, KDE is very very light these days. In terms of memory usage it rivals XFCE. Not quite sure about power usage, but since Plasma Mobile is being developed and it shares a lot of code with Desktop, I assume it shouldn't be too bad.
I was also wondering why they would have me watch someone's dirty keyboard, sunrise and other apparently meaningless motifs.
The scene with the keyboard with crumbs and hairs tells me that they do not respect their own product enough. A good example on how the effort of hundreds of people that contributed to this awesome release is being ... not appreciated.
It has been my observation that tech people tend to place less emphasis on aesthetics or, god forbid, marketing or sales. This functional fixation is unfortunate - many people do engage in emotions, enjoy looking at pleasant things, tend to appreciate harmony and subconsciously associate themselves with things that bear the same values as they believe themselves to possess.
I don't think a lot of people will find a way to associate with this presentation.
A former KDE user, looking to come back.
I'm not a big fan of "large" DEs, but I take KDE for a spin every other release or so.
The tiling features are all scripts now, they're not part of the base Kwin code anymore. They work pretty well in my experience. (That being said, if you haven't used Kwin in a while, it's worth noting that it also lost window tabbing along the way, so tiling is far less useful than it could be).
In terms of resource use, Plasma 5 is a lot more lightweight and snappier than we've come to expect from KDE in the post-4.0 era :). You can tell it's QML all the way down because the latency is nowhere near as good as in the 3.x days, but it's not too bad, and in terms of resource consumption (RAM, CPU, whatever), it's better than it's ever been in the last 10 years. And it's very good overall.
In terms of power consumption, I can't say I've noticed a difference between KDE and the more lightweight setup that I use. I haven't ran numbers though -- so all I can say is that, if there's a difference, it's small enough that I haven't noticed it. Probably because the biggest power drains account for so much of the power drain that KDE & friends don't account for much anymore :)
> Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article.
I am a dedicated follower of Plasma and to be honest counting features this is a lame relase.
BUT it's also a LTS release. Some will upgrade specifically for that somehow quality statement. You do not want a ton of new features without time for stabilisation in such a release?
It's true this release doesn't bring is as many features as the last ones. However, the jump between LTS versions wil be impressive. Everything is more polished, more functional, and more intuitive.
I'll upgrade as soon as I can, so I can check out the quick audio device switching. Audio routing in Plasma is featureful but not intuitive.
> But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again.
The OMGUbuntu site did a decent write-up:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/kde-plasma-5-18-lts-feat...
Anyway, updating KDE Neon as I'm typing this. Looking forward to new bits of polish :)
The only out of the box tiling feature I'm aware of is the Windows-like hotkeys (meta+arrows) for snapping windows to half or a quarter of the screen.
There are kwin extensions for more extensive tiling support such as: https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant
Doesn't seem to work anymore on youtube though
Just started using KDE neon in a vm on my iMac for office work and it's really really good and productive. Kudos to the KDE team.
I may be in the minority here, but I really like the Emoji Selector. I'm in the terminal most of the time, and anything that has quick keyboard shortcuts but adds character makes me happy.
Looks like a nice update! I also like the fact that they use a PeerTube embedded video as their official video announcement https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/cda402b5-2bcb-4c...
Every time there is a new KDE announcement/release I give it another try. I don't like it. I miss the KDE 3.5 days. The DE seemed more cohesive then and worked very well. Ever since they went down the plasma route it looks like they focused on making it look pretty. The whitepapers and announcements made it sound like there was hefty backend improvements but each update was buggy for me.
I still use KDE apps, I find that a lot of them are perfect; but the DE has been limping along since the 4.0 re-write.
Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help, you are making it worse.
Side note: I really liked the music in that video.
> Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help, you are making it worse.
The DE "app-store-thing" is a front end to packageKit and packageKit is a front end to your package manager.
On some distros there is an additional software store that connects into Snap[0], so they're technically not distro supplied packages.
> Rant: Why the fuck would I ever use a DE "app-store-thing"?! I use my OS's tools for installing/upgrading/uninstalling programs. Stop trying to help, you are making it worse.
They're sure as hell not making it worse for regular people that manage software using graphical interfaces. The world doesn't revolve around power users.
Even then - I consider myself a power user, and I enjoy using Gnome's equivalent from time to time. I might be a power user, but I like pictures and discoverability. This might be a shock to some, I'm sorry.
Have you tried Trinity Desktop Environment[0], a continuation of KDE 3.5?
No I haven't! Thanks for the link.
Yeah, mee too. With KDE 3.x there where many people which were eager in improving abilities and workflows of KDE. With KDE this somehow changed, the focus switched to other things, many people seems to have left and today there seems to be a different spirit remaining in the project. Even today, a decade later I don't get the impression that KDE ever moved beyond what it once was and promised. Kind of a shame as there are still many people doing good work there.
It is not a DE "app-store-thing" it is just a pretty GUI for your OS's tools.
I don't think this is a good idea:
> There are quite a few new things in Plasma 5.18's System Settings. First and foremost is the optional User Feedback settings. These are disabled by default to protect your privacy.
> That said, if you do decide to share information about your installation with us, none of the options allows the system to send any kind of personal information. In fact, the Feedback settings slider lets you decide how much you want to share with KDE developers. KDE developers can later use this information to improve Plasma further and better adapt it to your needs.
Why not? So long as it’s disabled by default and users are therefore intentionally turning it on, I think it’s fine.
As someone who wants to share as much information on bugs as possible, it seems great!
I'm a Debian user that uses KDE (most of the timel, in many cases people insist on suggesting that the standard KDE experience in Debian is subpar. I'm am fairly happy with it but is anyone aware of a solution to enhance that experience to something more close to what the KDE community considers ideal?
KDE on debian is fine. The issue is that debian wants long term releases and kde only releases those sometimes and not necessarily at a time that fits debian's schedule.
So you often get "kde as it was two years ago". The horror! After all, we all remember how using computers two years ago was pure agony until things radically changed...
I use Debian testing for desktop. The problem is that KDE maintainers in Debian are understaffed, and also some transitions take very long:
No news from the wayland front?
For this release, just the usual bug fixes, and small features. But hopefully, for next release pen support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGx0TlNJlzs
Oh shit! Have my cries of pain finally been heard? Can you tell me more about this? My last knowledge was that KWin doesn't have pen support because QtWayland doesn't have it and there'd be a GSoC application for adding it.
I use KDE on Wayland. It works pretty well; there's still bugs I hit once in a while (vscode especially sometimes is missing dialog windows and I have to restart it).
It works quite well, but it's very crashy.
I tried yesterday (5.17.3 IIRC, mind you): plasmashell crashed, then followed by systemsettings5, and konsole. Drkonqui popped up for the bug report, but crashed halfway. Then popped up again with a link for manual bug reporting. Clicked it, it crashed again.
Sometimes QML applets crash (there was a bug with the CUPS one recently, if there were duplicated job IDs), and bring down plasmashell with them. But that also happens on X11, which can leave the environment quite empty, and hard to debug for my non-techie family.
On Wayland, I miss primary clipboard buffer (selection), which works on sway. Also, default popup placement is wrong. Besides that, not much.
I really like KDE plasma, but started using sway for Wayland, and stayed for the tiling. I might think about writing a kwin module to ingest my sway config, and only that... :)
Blurry firefox, blurry thunderbird anybody? Still plasma on wayland related fixes in the pipeline. But getting close...
At least for Firefox that probably means it's running with X emulation. But the Firefox Wayland backend works fine, it just needs to be enabled. But sure, Wayland still has quite a few corner cases like that.
I know about
GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox
That works on Gnome and sway, not on plasma. Intel GPU. Still open bugs on bugs.kde.org
I believe the correct variable these days is:
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox
This makes firefox a full wayland app. But I only use sway, so maybe there are KDE specific bugs.
Still waiting for subsurfaces clipping bug fix on Wayland.
I am a huge fan of kde and the only feature I really want is better tiling and snapping
I use XFCE. Are there any good reasons to switch to KDE? Honest question.
A friend of mine just made this switch. His biggest reason was Latte Tasks, which he says is much better than any of the similar docks available for XFCE.
I'm making assumptions here about your use case, but probably not. XFCE users are typically closer to the terminal than, say, Gnome or Plasma users. You'd be better served by i3, I imagine.
I have XFCE on my laptop and KDE and i3 on my desktop. Two things I like about KDE over XFCE are the system settings app and I just prefer the look of Qt widgets.
I think so, but what exactly depends on what you need. Commonly liked features are:
- User intuitive widgets that can be easily dragged around in panels with a third party store directly in Plasma itself, containing useful widgets such as calendar events sync and todo lists
- Complete customization but also pretty by default and getting better; browse third party colorschemes, plasma themes, global themes, panel layouts (latte), application styles (kvantum), etc etc
- Powerful notification system that allows you to reply inline to telegram messages, embed screenshots so you can drag those around [https://postimg.cc/q6qLMXK1], embed files that you can also drag around + interact with, sticky notifications for ongoing operations - still having the ability to go with a do not disturb mode for a custom time and set notification importance in a granular way
- Powerful integration with phone (see phone battery, see and send messages, see incoming calls, see/stop/play videos [youtube / vlc] playing on the pc from the phone, see phone notifications, and so on) and integration with browsers (native notifications, native downloads [see notifications above], search and open browser tabs from krunner, etc)
- Powerful search (krunner) that can check spelling errors, find browser tabs, convert units, do mathematical operations, search the apps store, run command line programs, open locations, see recent documents, add task to the todo list (zanshin), supports third party runners, etc etc etc
- System tray that only shows relevant widgets so you can keep it minimalist but without loosing any possibly useful option (system tray elements for usb drives, night color, display configuration, clipboard, vaults, media playback, printers, kate sessions, etc etc)
- Third party stuff like Latte and Kvantum that allows you to customize your desktop in any way imaginable (quick browse for "Plasma" on r/unixporn will confirm this)
- Consistent apps that follow the general theme, some of them also convergent, e.g. all maui apps (index [files], vvave [music], buho [notes], pix [images], ...) work exactly the same on desktop and on your Android phone as well, so you don't have to learn to use different applications on each OS
- Light and fast. Yeah, I know xfce is very light and fast, but Plasma 5 is very light as well recently. I have a pinebook, the $100 machine, and it's usable both with Plasma and xfce (both uses around 340mib of RAM there).
- Kontact suite with Akonadi integration that allows for various apps all integrated with each other (todo from one app will appear in the other), with the generic Kontact app containing all them and being able to show a dashboard with all recent notes, to-dos, events, mails etc.
- Support for phones with Plasma mobile and other tech things (e.g.: TVs afaik and the mycroft thing), with Plasma Mobile using the same underlying plasma base component, so it's consistent + compatible
- Any application you could need, there are a lot of those all made by the KDE community, and those are all following the KDE human interface guidelines and following the global theme, so that's nice
...I kinda lost track of time, sorry for the essay, I just think that Plasma is great and this is how I can best explain why
> e.g.: TVs afaik
Wait, TVs? Where can I read more about this?