KDE Releases Plasma Active Two 49
jrepin writes with a snippet from the release announcement of Plasma Active Two: "Mobile devices that adapt to who you are, reflecting what you are doing when you are doing it. This concept is at the heart of the Plasma Active user experience. Plasma Active One was released in October 2011, providing early adopters the first opportunity to experience Activities on a tablet. Since then, the design and development team behind this open source touch interface has been hard at work on an update. ... information about real-world usage enabled the team to improve the end-user experience significantly over the past two months."
First post (Score:2)
Plasma Active First Post, ENGAGE!
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No I think you missed the point. No word of it needing your real name at all or transmitting any information.
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So, you didn't read TFA or TFS, you missed the point by so much that your post doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, and you replied to a completely irrelevant post just to get your inane comment at the top of the page. Congratulations, you're the reason slashdot sucks now.
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The AC GP to this post is right. You're a paranoid freak who reads what isn't there.
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Go go gadget Plasma Active First Post, ENGAGE!
FTFY
Curious (Score:2, Interesting)
What tablets are people running this on? I'd like to try it out; I don't have a tablet right now though.
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I would also like more information on this. But seeing as you can run Ubuntu in a card on a touchpad, that seems like a likely candidate.
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Most developers seem to be running this from a WeTab, so that would probably the tablet of choice. There is about a dozen devices which are able to run Plasma Active quite decently though; they can be found by a small search through their website.
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This is a good start:
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Installation [kde.org]
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Clippy (Score:5, Funny)
So that's where Clippy went off to.
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Sounds more like BonziBuddy to me.
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Or emacs modes.
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Where KDE should have been 5 years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
The screenshots from the site are beautiful. I really like how they are *finally* taking focus on performance for lower end systems, and I hope it translates to better performance on lower end laptops as well.
But I also wish they had taken this focus more than 5 years ago. It would have made a huge difference for me, and other people who have since migrated away from KDE because of performance issues.
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seriously? apart from 4.0 and 4.1 speed has REALLY been a non issue.
i use (and only use ) 6 year old Dells, with integrated graphics and a 100MB net home folder. all graphics on. NOBODY has ever
said it's slow.
what do you find slow?
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The work with the OpenGL when they started working towards a target of OpenGL-ES really made it great IMO.
That was pre-work for the tabletty stuff.
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KDE should have called 4.0 for 4.0 alpha, and focused all their energy on making it stable across platforms. The 3.5xx versions were power hungry, but innovated in so many other aspects.
Their focus seems to be diffused. They spread themselves too thin even though the GNOME 3 issues people are having is the greatest opportunity they've had in years. Bad management I say, that's all.
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I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet that KDE has resource limitations that prevent them from getting things done faster; in short, they don't have enough active contributors. This is an open-source project, after all, but more than that, it's in competition with several other projects (Gnome, Unity, and several other DEs), so they only get a fraction of the total number of people willing to do open-source DE development. Worse than that, they haven't gotten the corporate support that Gnome has gotten, fo
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I agree, I just have a different point of view, in that the 4.0 debacle could have been avoided by, well, not releasing it before it was ready. Early on in KDE, the focus was on features over documentation, stability, or speed. Well before 4.0, I had submitted bugs to kde devs, only to have them acrimoniously closed or denied, subsequently opened up again by others filing the same reports, watching those get closed, and then opened up again when a dev was forced to fix it because it finally stopped the sh
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I just have a different point of view, in that the 4.0 debacle could have been avoided by, well, not releasing it before it was ready.
I don't disagree with that either, sorry if it seemed like I did. But even if they had made the same mistake of wanting to push 4.0 out early (as they probably only had limited testing from people using 3.95, as most people just don't want to bother testing out alpha-ware and would rather wait until it's ready for production use), if they had double the number of developers,
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What are the "lower-end" systems you are talking about? Because KDE4 runs perfectly good on my "lower-end" systems, like my Atom netbook, my Atom desktop and my small laptop. In fact I don't see any difference between KDE4 and Xfce.
Or you talking about old systems and not "lower-end" systems? If you are really talking about your old PIII that can't handle KDE4 any more, that's not a problem at all.
Gnome and Canonical devs; take note: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only suggestion
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Agreed - this is one of the reasons I went to KDE after Ubuntu went to Unity. The other being that it is currently more customizable than Gnome 3 and Unity, while still having a fair bit of eye candy.
Looking @ it it looks like it could do a good job giving any challenger to Android or iOS a run for their money, should anyone want a tablet platform w/ a differentiating but competitive interface. There is no way I'd have used such an interface for my desktop, but I can certainly see myself using it on a tablet.
There's also a version of Kubuntu targeted at mobile devices (i.e. phones) in the works. I imagine that's one of the things prompting the work on Plasma Active.
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Only suggestion to KDE - for a tablet interface, try giving those apps generic names like Music Player or OCR instead of Bangarang or Okular.
Your suggestion is default, and like everything in KDE the name presented to the user is fully customizable, not just per application but desktop wide.
Posted from: "Web Browser (Konqueror)"
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Ever try using Windows 7 with a touchscreen? It's an absolute nightmare.
Conversely, ever try Metro on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard? It is similarly a nightmare of unusability. Yet Microsoft seems to insist on their quest for the interface Holy Grail of one interface for everything. They will learn, eventually.
BTW, I am betting that Metro will be the only interface available on consumer versions of Windows and if you want a traditional desktop, you're going to have to either shell out 400 bux for
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Probably patents. A lot of companies are using screw-zoom to work around it. Thanks Apple! Nobody would have MINORITY REPORT thought of that if not for your brilliant innovation!
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I don't want to be treated like an idiot by my GUI, even when I'm using a tablet. I don't want to waste my power consumption for shiny buttons and computers that think that they are smarter than me. I want to be in the driver's seat, and I want to tell the computer what it should do next. And not the other way around.
There is already business for Ipad and Windows 8, and KDE will never be as good as it as Apple or Microsoft. KDE used to be a better alternative, as long as it tried to be unique itself, and no
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Did you watch the video or look at the screen shots? not a copy of Windows at all.
Plasma is what lets them keep three targets maintained (Tablet, Netbook, Desktop). The Desktop version is quite similar to Windows, but hardly a copy, it is an attempt to take the taskbar + start button concept of interacting, and build on it. For example, arbitrary and multiple folders on the "desktop", activities that group these "desktop folders" with the applications opened that you want.