KDE Ships First Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace 94
rohangarg (1966752) writes "KDE announced the beta of its next generation of its plasma workspace today. Built ontop of Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, with this transition, all QML-based UIs — which Plasma is built exclusively with — will make use of a new scenegraph and scripting engine, resulting in huge performance wins as well as architectural benefits, such as being able to render using available graphics hardware."
There are experimental packages for some distros, and a Live CD (ISO download) available if you want to try it out.
Re: KDE 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It doesn't look that different (Score:5, Interesting)
Surely, KDE have got this badly wrong.
qt5 is very nice, but doing the whole thing in QML is going to be the major win (made feasible by qt5, naturally). I'd estimate it opens up the potential hacker pool by two orders of magnitude. Expect an explosion in community-driven KDE fixes and enhancements once the distros adopt this version.
I stopped using GNOME back when they caught mono, but between Unity and the direction of KDE, the endgame for heavy DE's on Open Source desktops is looking very clear. The mono thing was just an example of a flawed decision making process on that project, which has extended forward to today, with predictable results.
P.S. Slashdot - you've managed to break Plain Old Text mode after 15 years. I've got a manual BR after the quote above to fix rendering.
Re:KDE 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
I love KDE4. I use it every day. I can, however, see one issue. My biggest fault with KDE4 was that DCOP in KDE3 was a joy to use from a script (bash script, etc). DBUS is a pain in the butt. It's not only much saltier (in terms of syntactical salt) but it also tends to change much more often. Calls that work in one version don't work after an update. DCOP was more simple, had a great interface, and -- most importantly -- the app interfaces tended to stay stable.
I'm really hoping that the Qt5 and QML combo makes up for this, allowing easy scripting and simple use of internals. I used to say that KDE was like the *nix command line, only GUI: a bunch of small apps that exposed a ton of tiny options that you could link together. KDE4 clearly continued that philosophy with DBUS, but I think it was far less successful in that aspect.
Re: KDE 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
I can configure the desktop to be more useful than just being there. For example, I work with a lot of LaTeX documents, in particular folders containing tests and assignments for the classes I teach. So I have a desktop with a set of folder view plasmoids pointing at this folder full of assignments. One view is filtered to show only .tex files, and the other view is filtered to show only .pdfs. Super convenient, better than popping open Konqueror (or Dolphin) and navigating the folder, even more convenient than popping open a terminal. Way nicer than the garbage dump of "maybe I'll need it later" files that desktops usually are.
Similarly I have a desktop full of folder views and other plasmoids that are useful for my research, a desktop full of folder views and plasmoids useful for coding, et cetera.
This is something I can't do with any other desktop environment, and I've looked. (Well, actually there's a couple of proprietary Windows 7 add-ons that give similar functionality, if I felt like forking over the dough. And using Windows 7.) And other than the desktop itself, the auxillary applications (the ones I use, at least) are all at least as good as they were in KDE3.
Also, KRunner (Alt+F2) with nepomuk is awesome. File search and program launching, yeah, every desktop is decent at those nowadays. But there's a lot of useful KRunner plugins too. Calculator, dictionary, spell-check, search wikipedia, mini command-line shell; it even has a task manager so if a process is misbehaving I don't even have to open a terminal and use htop (unless I'm in the mood to use htop.)
Give it a try, man; it's actually pretty great. And as far as eye-candy and bloat go, I do all this on a four year old netbook. I didn't even disable any of the eye-candy. What bloat?
Re:KDE 3 (Score:4, Interesting)