KDE Plasma 5.3 Released 53
jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.3, a major new version of the popular, open source desktop environment. The latest release brings much enhanced power management, better support for Bluetooth, and improved Plasma widgets. Also available is a technical preview of Plasma Media Center shell. In addition, Plasma 5.3 represents a big step towards support for the Wayland windowing system. There are also a few other minor tweaks and over 300 bugfixes. Here is the full changelog, and here's the package download wiki page.
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Gnome is also the most unpopular, I gather.
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It's just not ready for prime-time.
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Personally I'm a Kubuntu man and indeed running this shiny KDE5.3 :)
Re:Popularity (Score:4, Informative)
It seems to reflect Gnomes efforts to be very selective about their users.
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Something tells me that they didn't attempt any kind of selection bias, when Slackware outnumbers Fedora by like 5 to 1, and is on par with both Ubuntu and Mint. Also, they take various customizations of Gnome3 and break them out of "Gnome Shell", which makes it look like Gnome Shell has 1/3 of it's actual use.
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KDE tends to be common "at work" if you have compute farms or whatever for design/engineering tools on RHEL/CentOS. Gnome tends to be more common "at home" for running your favorite distribution. Probably most people have Unity and never change it, but I still find it to be highly dysfunctional and intolerable.
They all have their ups and downs, OS X still has the best & most responsive UI on top of a *nix. It's not entirely clear why Linux can't do that better, at the very least make a much less "heavy"
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I cannot understand the term best GUI. I've switched 2 years ago to Xfce and with a third party file-manager(in my case nemo from Cinnamon IIRC ) it's by far the best DE that I can imagine(especially with the last update).
On the other hand I think that you mean the integration of the OS X GUI and not the responsivness. Take in account that OS X has a very specific audience, people that like the point and click and then click again procedure and that's how far they can get.
DEs that support linux and/or bsd a
Re:Popularity (Score:5, Interesting)
Distilling your comment into non-irate hate, my environment is 3 widescreen displays, side by side. Presently I have 13 terminals, 1 "heavy" text editor, two VNC sesions and chrome. I have similar environments on Gnome at home, and KDE at work (minus chrome).
In terms of objectivity:
- I have more usable screen space for me & my apps than I do in Gnome (no backdoor configuration, but a few mainstream mods), significantly more than KDE (running in those VNC sessions). I never bother with Unity anymore.
- In terms of performance, I can drag windows around and do not wait for redraw once. When I drag a window the contents do not disappear, nor do they stop updating (why should they?), they simply move where my mouse puts them and continue playing video or scrolling text or whatever as they move. Gnome is second best. With 13 terminals open that does happen from time to time, but thanks to the magic of Spectacle I can usually avoid the mouse for simple operations. While I rarely sit at KDE directly, it was the worst performer when I last had it installed on my desktop. It works second best to OS X with VNC however. Gnome is terrible in that regard.
- In terms of memory usage, in OS X it is hard to say for certain but "kernel task" is at 1.8GB, which certainly includes non OS things. No other task at this moment is above 600M. So let's call it 1.8GB. Gnome-shell is using 2.2GB, with only one chrome and one terminal open. The particularly old KDE implementation that comes on the company install of RHEL defeated my ability to gauge memory usage, it would appear to be around 500MB.
- I'm not going to debate the facets of the X windowing system and where you feel the problem is, I don't care. I'm not an X developer and will not ever be. It's a package I install, I don't want to spend more than an hour or two configuring it. I understand that Gnome and KDE encompass a lot more than pixels, again that's not relevant for most users. To most of us it's pixels and if it doesn't work the way we want, we throw it out entirely.
While I am an engineer and spend all day with various X's, write a lot of code, stare at a lot of waveforms, and run a lot of heavyweight processes, I don't understand why any sensible person would not want their window system to be smooth and responsive. First and foremost the machines that I use a windowing system are for me to interact with, I should be the priority. When it comes to heavy processing, I have machines that have absolutely no UI on that do the heavy lifting and parallel processing. If I *do* heavy processing on the machine with my window system, the UI needs to get priority, it is a desktop and interactive first and foremost. I'm not sure, beyond a few users with very specific needs, why anyone would not want that behavior out of the box. I've tried XFCE, and didn't like it. I haven't yet tried Mate/Cinnamon.
I do want a good Linux solution it is my preferred OS and religion, but I find that once Canonical gave up the helm in favor of Unity, that Linux returned to it's native state of infighting and bullshit. It is still superior to Windows by lightyears, but there's no reason why the windowing systems continue to resemble angry squirrels wrestling in a canvas sack. I don't know what level of neck beardery suggests that you would prefer to have a sluggish, unresponsive windowing system, or why that helps you with coding or productivity related tasks, but it interferes with mine and my use case seems to resemble what you describe.
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Take in account that OS X has a very specific audience, people that like the point and click and then click again procedure and that's how far they can get.
Oh bullshit. I use terminal on my OSX machine as much as on my Linux boxes, except for compiling from source.
OSX is indeed the shiniest version of Unix, and I use it just like my Linux machines. Just because gramma can use an OS X machine doesn't mean it isn't every bit as capable as any other computer out there.
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Absolutely untrue. For a fresh Windows 7 install, generally I would agree. But for anyhting over a month old the UI performs miserably, redraws poorly and is generally as bad as Gnome 2.0. And that's just UI performance. It still lacks a proper shell environment without installing 3rd party hacks, is a total memory whore and doesn't scale well with load.
Re: Popularity (Score:3, Informative)
Xfce and KDE are popular among powerusers who need to get the most out of their systems. Those two desktop environments are the most technologically superior ones.
GNOME 2 and its derivatives are still used by some powerusers, too. But most have migrated to Xfce or KDE, since GNOME 2 is getting outdated in many ways.
GNOME 3 sees some use, but typically only by new and casual users who don't know that they're suffering an inferior experience.
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Have we inherited this "power users" term from Windows or something? I remember those guys, always tweaking the GUI to optimise their workflow. Looks like some things never change.
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Popular != Best, which is extremely subjective. Lots of distros ship Gnome by default, Unity for Ubuntu. I know many people that load KDE and remove the others, it's a pretty desktop and highly configurable.
One of the biggest reasons I prefer KDE in the business world is the ability to Kiosk since v2.x. Something Gnome has promised since version 2 but has never delivered on, and Unity never tried to my knowledge. I can enforce all kinds of policies through the Kiosk, making things like screen lock with
Re: Still ugly (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE has great aesthetics. Its UI is very usable, unlike the hipster monstrosities known as GNOME 3 and Unity. The KDE devs are smart, and know that throwing away decades of acquired knowledge and experience is a dumb idea. They don't change the KDE UI in stupid ways every week just to be trendy or to try to support every single possible screen size and form factor with just a single UI. The best software UIs are always the ones with the fewest, or even no, hipsters involved. These UIs are actually sensible
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FINALLY! - A touchpad configuration module (Score:2)
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Looks like Lollypop (Score:2)
Is it only me, or it looks like Android Lollipop?
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I hate "modern" crap that's "modern" for the sake of it, but just from screenshots I believe it looks a lot better than KDE 4.
I also suppose you can run it without OpenGL, with disabled animations etc. so it should be usable.
Doesn't mean I'll switch to it, as it is a pain to get whole new set of applications (file manager, pdf reader, terminal etc.)
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Try it out, one really good thing about KDE is that you can set just about anything to be the default program quite easily through systemsettings, the KDE "control center".
For example; if you like Firefox, Thunar, and Gnome terminal you can easily set all of them to be the default programs used for internet / file browsing / and terminal emulators. Same for PDF readers ETC.
That said Dolphin / Konqueror, and Konsole are really quite full featured programs. Especially the file browsers, using KIOSlaves for i
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I see, there's the "Preferred Applications" applet under Mate (and maybe Cinnamon) that allows about the same and it is a godsend.
You can set the default program for sound files and default program for video, separate (if I want the playlist-based music player, I open it separately with one click). Nice, quick and gets rid of the totem video player.
I believe that's about the one feature Mate gained over old Gnome 2, along with a "control center" that sums up the stuff in "Preferences" and "Administration" m
Grey text on grey bg. Missing/inconsistent chrome (Score:2)
I really appreciate how the designers have gone out of their way to make me hate it on sight. With just a few choice usability bloopers on the first screenshot I see, they've ensured that I will never, ever consider it for anything. I am spared any ambivalence, spared from wasting any time trying it out or even reading reviews.
Thank you, KDE designers! I am in your debt!
New thing released? (Score:2)
Why the split personality? (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I've never understood about KDE, since KDE 4, is why it has an artificial separation between Plasma and traditional KDE apps. Why do Plasmoids have to have their own separate visual style? It's very jarring, and it made KDE 4's visual appearance much less configurable than KDE 3's by introducing a Gnome-style system of requiring users to choose from ready-made and unconfigurable Plasma themes (or develop their own).
I understand that Plasmoids are supposed to be easier to write than traditional applications, but I don't understand why that means they have to have ugly themes and stand out like a sore thumb against the "real" apps. I'd like to see a return to a situation where the buttons, scrollbars and other theme elements in desktop widgets and panels conform to the overall widget style that's been selected for traditional applications. It surprises me that none of the developers appear to have identified this lack of consistency as a problem yet.
One of these days, when I've got more time on my hands, and if nobody beats me to it, I'll try to do some work on fixing this problem.
Ugly but improving window manager (Score:2)
I've been saying for years that plasmoids (with their rounded corners and translucency and other cool effects) look neat, but the window manager looks terrible, because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the theme. It looks like they've been improving it a bit. It's still not totally seamless, but it's way better than it was a few years ago.
So, I have a question: KDE seems like a more technlogically advanced desktop system and it's more pleasant to look at than GNOME. What is the appeal of sticking to G