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KDE Open Source Linux

What's Going On In KDE Plasma Workspaces 2? 122

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the smaller-and-better dept.
jrepin writes "While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you'll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture."
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What's Going On In KDE Plasma Workspaces 2? More

What's Going On In KDE Plasma Workspaces 2?

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  • Wayland & Mir (Score:5, Interesting)

    by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @06:25AM (#43211811)
    Will KDE 5 be ported to Wayland? Also, on the Kubuntu side of things, will the Blue Systems folks port KDE to Mir? How much of Qt5 supports Wayland already? What would it take to support Mir?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      KDE is ONLY working on Wayland support, and it will land in KDE 5. It's up to Canonical to make Mir porting, but KDE, or GNOME, aren't putting any resources on Mir ports on their own.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      Will KDE 5 be ported to Wayland?

      What's the point of that? Aren't window decorations going to be client side? So applications decide on their own what they look like, whether they want to obey window manager settings, etc.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by EmperorArthur ( 1113223 )

        Umm, no.

        While the reference implementation currently only supports client side decorations, that's probably more to do with the fact that it's at something closer to Alpha release state than anything else.

        The Wayland specification allows either client side or server side decorations.
        See this post for more details: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/more-rational-approach-to-window-decorations/ [martin-graesslin.com]

      • Will KDE 5 be ported to Wayland?

        What's the point of that? Aren't window decorations going to be client side? So applications decide on their own what they look like, whether they want to obey window manager settings, etc.

        You are aware that there is more to KDE than window decorations, right?

    • Will KDE 5 be ported to Wayland?

      There will be no "KDE 5". Never ever.

      Also, on the Kubuntu side of things, will the Blue Systems folks port KDE to Mir?

      No.

      How much of Qt5 supports Wayland already?

      Plenty.

      What would it take to support Mir?

      A revolution because no one within the KDE community is even remotely interested in supporting Mir.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by captjc ( 453680 )

        There will be no "KDE 5". Never ever.

        So what are you saying, that KDE development is in such a horrible shape that it will fall apart in the near future leaving KDE in some stagnate turmoil just before a major overhaul that would have been designated "KDE 5" or are you saying that the next major overhaul will be rebranded without a numbering scheme, (e.g. "KDE XP").

        Because odds are good that a few years from now, enough developers are going to want to overhaul the code (or reach some arbitrary benchmark) and create a new branch, and last time

        • Responding to this part of the GP's assertion, wouldn't any Qt5 based KDE be numbered KDE 5.x?

          • Responding to this part of the GP's assertion, wouldn't any Qt5 based KDE be numbered KDE 5.x?

            Plasma Workspaces 2 will be based on Qt5-based libraries called KDE Frameworks 5.

            Seriously, can't you guys even read the summary?

        • So what are you saying, that KDE development is in such a horrible shape that it will fall apart in the near future leaving KDE in some stagnate turmoil just before a major overhaul that would have been designated "KDE 5" or are you saying that the next major overhaul will be rebranded without a numbering scheme, (e.g. "KDE XP").

          No, he is being pedantic.

          KDE is the community, not the software. KDE will release Plasma Workspaces 2 and KDE Software Compilation 5.

          Most people will refer to it as "KDE5", though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by armanox ( 826486 )

        Also, KDE wants their software to be portable to other operating systems. X11 is the targeted platform - Wayland is extra. KDE is used on a lot more then just Linux. (Also, did GNOME 3 ever get running on BSD?)

        • I believe that PC-BSD 9.1 does support it. OTOH, GhostBSD, which was the main BSD that had GNOME as its default DE, has stated w/ the release of GhostBSD 3 that this will be the last release that has GNOME 2.32, and that GNOME will be replaced by MATE in future releases. So no GNOME 3 there. Nor Cinnamon either. Although they will be supporting LXDE & Openbox as well.

          I agree - not that the BSD people will be losing much.

        • Also, KDE wants their software to be portable to other operating systems. X11 is the targeted platform - Wayland is extra. KDE is used on a lot more then just Linux. (Also, did GNOME 3 ever get running on BSD?)

          OpenBSD ships GNOME 3 with Fallback Mode (no idea if GNOME Shell is even packaged). KDE is still on 3.5.10 there, last I checked...

    • If Canonical is successful at duping (IMHO) a bunch of companies to buy into their (increasingly crappier, unstable, unreliable, less productive--IMHO) technology, I mean "vision", and Canonical is using Mir, then I hope KDE would start working to support it. There have already been statements, however, that a single-distribution, reduced-functionality package like Mir, will not be supported

      Third question: Will KWin support Mir? No! Mir is currently a one distribution only solution and any adjustments wou

      • As an aside, given that the general consensus let's-all-pretend-to-get-along ego-fest that is FOSS, I can't blame Canonical for increasingly going its own way, given it wants to succeed on the consumer desktop (not business/corporation like the other guys), so I give them props for at least being (if arrogantly) gutsy about hoping to develop all this hyper-complex stuff on their own.

        Mir uses Android GPU drivers and does *not* work with stock Mesa drivers. How is that supposed to be beneficiary to consumer desktops?
        Wayland is backed (among others) by Intel who are the market leader in desktop GPUs. Wayland works with stock Mesa drivers which include Intel's GPU drivers.

        Another Wayland backer (Collabora) ported Wayland to Android which means that even on mobile platforms, where Android driver compatibility is a benefit, so even on mobile platforms I see no rational argument in favor of M

  • Tried Plasma on Mint 13, it's quite pretty. Much prettier than Gnome based desktop for sure. Hopefully it just ends up with incremental improvements rather than complete redesigns and moving from one paradigm to another.

    You know, it's nice to be able to rely on a desktop environment improving but mostly staying the same, so you don't have to bother re-learning all about it over and over with every release.

    I moved away from Ubuntu because of Gnome 3 and of-course Unity, using Mint with Mate for now (not ju

    • Re:It's pretty (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Nerdfest ( 867930 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:38AM (#43212633)

      It's also nice to use a desktop whose designers actually think you should be allowed to configure it to look and act the way that you want.

      • shame the admin doesn't want the same :)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by udippel ( 562132 )

        Is this now an argument in favour of KDE?
        Or is it orthogonal to the question of Desktop Environments?

    • Tried Plasma on Mint 13, it's quite pretty. Much prettier than Gnome based desktop for sure. Hopefully it just ends up with incremental improvements rather than complete redesigns and moving from one paradigm to another.

      New UI paradigms are added as separate Workspace projects. Currently there are Plasma Desktop (traditional), Plasma Netbook (for notebooks with small screens), Plasma Active (for tablets), and -- since today -- Plasma Media Center.
      There is no desire to cramp all possible formfactor use cases into one DE, as GNOME Shell seems to do by default (unless you use extensions to modify the default).

      Plasma Workspaces 2 is mainly a port to newer technology. I'm not aware of any giant usability changes, except refinem

  • Lord, how I miss KDE3. It worked, simply worked. It didn't lock up. When my Linux box was running KDE3, I don't recall ever having to telnet in to restart a frozen machine. It happens all too often with KDE4. And KDE4 ruined, utterly ruined, KMail, once the best email program I ever used. KDE4's efforts at a "semantic desktop" and a "personal information manager" rendered over a dozen years of email archives unsearchable by anything but find and grep. Restarting, clean-up and reinstalling, etc. never worked

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by udippel ( 562132 )

      Come on, get a new life!
      Sure, those Akonadi-Nepomuk failures are a big hassle, and basing a mail client on a non-functional database is plain stupid.
      Done and over.
      Switch off those buggers, learn to live with Thunderbird, and you might find the more recent KDEs quite suitable. At least here, I could not second your opinion of crash-friendliness. Not with 4.5 and onward.
      At least, I am a rather recent KDE convert, since it allows me to configure my desktop as I so desire with a lot of edge events and basically

      • Second for Akonadi-Nepomuk failure. The two are the first thing I completely remove from a new installation.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Teun ( 17872 )
          No more need to remove them, since sometime last year they just work, and it works nicely to have everything indexed.
          I can't comment on KMail, I always found Thunderbird more versatile.

      • I don't use KDE, but I can't help thinking that people who recommend disabling these things - and I've read a lot of similar recommendations - are somewhat missing the point. They're enabled by default because they're supposed to work. The mail client that ships as part of the application suite should not be useless.

        I've had some painful experiences with Evolution on GNOME over the years*. I moaned about it, filed bugs, commented on existing bugs, and sometimes just had to give in and use a web-based fro

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          >They're enabled by default because they're supposed to work.

          They're enabled by default because SEMANTIC DESKTOP GUYS WHAT YOU CAN'T UDNERSTAND HERE WE ALL NEED IT YOU ALL DO NEED IT SUCKERS. One of the worst things I've seen that tried to jump on (any) desktop is this semantic desktop thing. It never works, eats resources and brings exactly one new thing - nothing. Give this shit to enterprise desktops, I heard they like doing things that way.

        • I absolutely agree with the idea that they're supposed to work. But the guy you replied to was saying not to throw the baby out with the bath water and dump the whole KDE DE because of problems with Nepomuk, Akonadi and Kmail. You can disable Nepomuk easily in KDE System Settings, ignore Akonadi and use Thunderbird instead of KMail and still take advantage of KDE.

          Opening bugs is the best thing to do in most cases with Open Source, but I get the feeling that in the case of Nepomuk and Akonadi especially it's

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by udippel ( 562132 )

            Pity you didn't get the mod points that you deserved.
            Because the Akonadi-Nepomuk disaster is well known, and has seen plenty of bug reports over the years.Alas, the KDE-PIM people are block-headed enough to simply ignore them ("works for me").
            Actually, come to think of it, the real culprits are the KMail-people. Because the idea of a semantic desktop is great. Had it worked, we would not have seen the Vista disaster, and had it worked on KDE the great thing would be the complete integration of all 'personal

            • Because the Akonadi-Nepomuk disaster is well known, and has seen plenty of bug reports over the years.Alas, the KDE-PIM people are block-headed enough to simply ignore them ("works for me").

              Akonadi and Nepomuk are not the same thing and not even written by the same people. Nepomuk is a local file search cache, Akonadi is a web service cache.

              It's also simply untrue that the devs ignore bug reports. If they can't reproduce a bug, they can't fix it. Are they supposed to simply guess bug fixes?
              SC 4.10 ships Nepomuk 2.0 which features a repair utility (and a new indexer replacing strigi). Malfunctions caused by a broken database (possibly caused by an ancient strigi indexer if one simply upgraded e

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by udippel ( 562132 )

                Kugelkurt, the information is valuable, thanks.
                On the other hand, it is sufficient to put akonadi nepomuk into Google, and then the first 10 hits are either on what they ought to do (minority of hits) or how to disable them due to simply not working (majority of hits). And when you click on any of the minority hits, you'll find that all of those have a majority of people pointing out that these programs don't work. Effectively, I have yet to meet anyone for whom it does work personally.
                And when you look at

                • it is sufficient to put akonadi nepomuk into Google, and then the first 10 hits are either on what they ought to do (minority of hits) or how to disable them due to simply not working (majority of hits). And when you click on any of the minority hits, you'll find that all of those have a majority of people pointing out that these programs don't work.

                  SC 4.10's Nepomuk is, and I repeat myself, completely rewritten.
                  Complains about Nepomuk 1.x with its strigi indexer simply don't apply any more. It's like bitching about the Win9x kernel after NT-based WinXP became mainstream.

                  Now don't come and tell me that I am just the unlucky one.

                  The unlucky ones are usually the loudest.

                  This debacle has cost KDE a good number of its userbase.

                  I recent poll, linked throughout the most diverse Linux communities, clearly shows that the Plasma Workspaces are the clear favorite among Linux users these days: http://pollator.com/polls/which-linux-desktop-environment-are-you-using [pollator.com]

                  The conclus

                  • Re: (Score:1)

                    by udippel ( 562132 )

                    You should open System Settings before claiming that there is no easy way to disable Nepomuk.
                    Akonadi is disabled by default because it only performs tasks after accounts have been set up. As long as you don't set up any mail accounts in Akonadi, its mail service doesn't start. As long as you don't create address book entries, the Akonadi address service does not start. As song as you don't add any dates into KOrganizer, the Akondai calendar service does not start.

                    I leave out the screenshot of my System Settings, with all three boxes unticked, probably since the installation.
                    I have no memory of having set up mail accounts in Akonadi (how does one?), my only address book entries that I have deliberately created are in Thunderbird, and I have never opened Korganizer, as far as memory serves.

                    For these, I find quite some applications running here. ;)
                    $ ps ax | grep konad
                    2261 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/bin/akonadi_control
                    2263 ? Sl 0:01 akonadiserv

                    • I don't know about your stupid Kubuntu (everybody in his right mind knows that it's the worst KDE distribution) and I don't care about ancient KDE SC releases you use (4.10.1 is the current one!). As I already wrote, and you should finally learn to read, I use openSUSE and disabling Nepomuk is a single checkbox and completely removing Akonadi is achieved under openSUSE by uninstalling akonadi-runtime, kdepimlibs4, libkdepim4, and their dependencies.

                      If you are incapable of clicking a single checkbox and remo

          • The problem actually is that akonadi/neponuk simply can not be disabled without causing many errors (ignorable, but annoying). And if you try to remove the related packages, the package manager (APT, usually) tries to remove the entire KDE with him.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xiando ( 770382 )
        I too used KMail as my e-mail client all through the KDE3 times and I too found it annoying that the Akonadi-Nepomuk crap ruined the whole kdepim suite. And we are at KDE 4.10.1 now and it's 2013 and KMail/KDEPIM is still a buggy mess. I use claws-mail and Xfce4 as desktop now.

    • So, Akonadi and Nepomuk are the reasons you don't use KDE4? Just disable them. I have to admit that I used Linux almost exclusively from 1994 until 2005 and semi-exclusively from 2006-2007 (I needed to dualboot 2005, 2007 because apps I needed were not up-to-scratch in Linux as I changed hobbies and got very much into photography). I kept Linux installed from 2007-2010 but my primary OS was Windows. I couldn't use Linux because I hated Gnome and KDE was a little bit unstable. In 2011 I deleted Linux from my

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by armanox ( 826486 )

      If you can get it to install on your distro (not available for Fedora 18, and the source build instructions aren't very well written), consider giving Trinity Desktop a spin.

    • In my years of using KDE4 I have never once had it lock up, and I have used it on tens of machines all with different hardware configuration. Laptop / Desktop and Intel / AMD 32 bit and 64 bit processors, running multiple VMs, using NVIDIA / ATI / and Intel graphics chipsets as well as wired and wireless NICs that run the gamet as well. I don't know what you are doing, but you are definitely doing it wrong.
    • I read that those things had been fixed in KDE 4.10

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by horza ( 87255 )

      Never liked Kmail, Thunderbird all the way (Claws was like my fav ever, The Bat!, but lacked the polish). The great thing about Thunderbird is that it works on every OS. KDE4 is very good on the desktop, solid for me since 4.2, but this bug [launchpad.net] locks up my netbook so I use XFCE4 on that. With the Unity spyware scandal, KDE has never had a better opportunity to win back market share.

      Phillip.

      • KDE4 is very good on the desktop, solid for me since 4.2, but this bug [launchpad.net] locks up my netbook so I use XFCE4 on that.

        "Philip Mukovac (yofel) wrote on 2012-10-19:
        This is the fault of the opendesktop plugin, once you remove it from the config files page one can be opened fine"

    • Lord, how I miss KDE3. It worked, simply worked. It didn't lock up. When my Linux box was running KDE3, I don't recall ever having to telnet in to restart a frozen machine. It happens all too often with KDE4. And KDE4 ruined, utterly ruined, KMail, once the best email program I ever used.

      At least openSUSE still provides both. Using KMail 3.5.10 under Plasma Desktop 4.x is perfectly possible there.
      Personally I'm very happy with KMail 4.10. For me it works more reliable than KDE3-based KMail 1.x.
      Nepomuk Desktop Search is also a smooth ride here after its initial indexing.

      My personal workstation has been Linux since 2000, but it looks like you've driven me back to my first love, the Macintosh.

      OS X's Spotlight search also requires files to be indexed and the initial index also takes its time and hogs the hardware a bit, just as Nepomuk or any other indexed search, including classic GNU findutils.

  • So, I glance through the article and notice: [...]so KDE Applications are now less “special” in the Qt world — a good thing for portability.[...]. Without even having to scroll and just 2 paragraphs later I see there is a cool embedded video. Might be interesting. But, I gaze at it.

    I'm not going to press play. I just stare.

    void main (void) { gl_FragColor = vec4(0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.6); }

    I am so glad they are focussing on portability.

  • KDE 4.9+ is rock stable and better than 3.x (Score:3)

    by Magnus Pym ( 237274 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @01:19PM (#43214777)

    Hi,

    I'm a great fan of KDE 3.x also. For what it is worth, I find that KDE4.9+ to be as stable as 3.x ever was, and as feature-full... as a DESKTOP.

    I also switched away from KDE 4 to gnome in the early days of KDE4, and was rather reluctantly forced away from Gnome by the recent modifications. I tried KDE4.9 that was packaged as part of Fedora 18, and was very pleasantly surprised. KDE has recovered. It is VERY configurable, supports the usual windows paradigms that we're used to and is very very stable.

    HOWEVER, the KDE apps are a different story. They are still half-complete, buggy and lose data. Even basic apps that I use regularly are fairly primitive. For example, KDE has a number of image viewers (Gwenview, Kuickshow...) but none of them can hold a candle to the power, elegance and simplicity of an 8-year old GQview or its modern cousin Geeqie. I tried the mail app on an experimental basis and was rewarded by prompt crashes and data corruptions. There is nothing even close to Gimp, Pan or other staples of Gnome.

    So I find myself in the weird position of running the KDE desktop, but using mostly gnome apps.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Teun ( 17872 )
      As a heavy photo tools user I can say you are off the mark.

      Gwenview is since several years a lot better, faster and more complete than Geeqie, the various thumbnail options alone are a reason to use it.

      Just open a directory containing several thousands of pictures and try to zap through it, Geeqie is painfully slow, Gwenview just shows you the next picture near instantaneous.

      Geeqie has one advantage left, it's build-in duplicate search.
      Gwenview does not offer much for editing but a right click will ope

      • If you want duplicate image search functionality, then you can move up to the heavyweight of the KDE image viewer world - digikam

    • yeah kuickshow has been a dead project for many years now - I am surprised you could find a copy... This kind of dates your reply

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by homm2 ( 729109 )

      I guess I'm a biased KDE user, but I prefer KDE apps in many or most instances. As another commenter noted, Gwenview is stable, fast, and reasonably powerful. As for photo-editing apps, most people may prefer Gimp, but I think Krita can hold a candle and even has a few features that Gimp doesn't (see this [stevenpowerssmp.com] comparison).

      Other examples of (in my opinion) superior KDE apps include Dolphin (vs Nautilus), Kate (vs Gedit), Kile (a LaTeX IDE, Gnome has nothing comparible), Kmail (vs Evolution), Okular (vs Evince), a

    • I'm a great fan of KDE 3.x also. For what it is worth, I find that KDE4.9+ to be as stable as 3.x ever was, and as feature-full... as a DESKTOP.

      I also switched away from KDE 4 to gnome in the early days of KDE4

      Why is it all or nothing with so many of you people? My migration from KDE 3.5.x to Plasma Desktop was step by step. E.g. I used a classic KDesktop/Kicker-based desktop with the 4.0 versions of KWin, Kopete, Okular, and Dolphin. Later I switched to the new Kontact Suite -- 4.1's KMail (backported by SUSE to run under KDE 4.0) at least did not crash then tagging many mails as spam unlike the 3.5 version.

      I completely switched with 4.1 and didn't look back after 4.2.

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