KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop Officially Released (softpedia.com) 72
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."
F.Ultra sucks LP's cock. (Score:3, Funny)
If KDE was any good it would depend on systemd.
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Sorry, what are you dividing w by?
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Neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD (nor NetBSD) ship or "support" any DE, and frankly I don't think any serious BSD user would even want to use KDE or Gnome or similarily bloated stuff that makes their computer "ready for granny". BSD users aren't granny, and granny doesn't use BSD. It would really be missing the point.
Really really trying not to troll here... (Score:1)
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.
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Huh? There is nothing whatsoever wrong with KDE printing. Troll much?
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Huh? There is nothing whatsoever wrong with KDE printing. Troll much?
What is up with the downmod trolls on this article?
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Hah. Baseless claim about KDE printing (which I know for a fact is fine) is not trolling? You, however, are clearly trolling.
Does multi monitor work now? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think that was fixed in 5.6, although on my laptop I still have issues connecting to and from a docking station with external monitors. I've been using Cinnamon recently and thinking about even going (back to) XFCE. The problems are most likely related to X.org drivers and xrandr support, but the various DEs handle failure cases differently.
I like KDE in general because it supports what I find to be efficient workflows, and the customization is relatively user-friendly and complete. But I've gotten increa
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I remember when... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I remember when... (Score:5, Informative)
KDE was never meant to be a Windows 95 clone. It was originally made to look like the Common Desktop Environment from 1993.
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That's funny, because the first time I messed with KDE -- by the time I got done tweaking and customizing, I'd quite accidentally recreated the Win95 desktop.
I also prefer KDE to the other *NIX desktops, tho I liked 4.x a lot better than 5.previous.
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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
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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...
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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
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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.
Re:KDE=bloated pig with bad lipstick (Score:4, Informative)
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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?
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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
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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: [kde.org]
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 [gnome.org] like [gnome.org] this [gnome.org]
"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 configur
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The problem with KDE (and Gnome, and Unity) (Score:5, Insightful)
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Am I the only one around here... (Score:3, Insightful)
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I just moved from 4 to 5. 5 seems alright now, not seeing any of the glaring bugs I saw in it last year. Not really seeing anything new that's worthwhile either though.
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Please not another new desktop search (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Simple by default (Score:1)
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?
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"another" DE? Like i3 was a DE in the first place? Sheesh.