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KDE GUI Open Source Software Linux

KDE Releases Plasma 5.1 60

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
jrepin notes the release of KDE Plasma 5.1. Quoting the release announcement: KDE Plasma 5.1 sports a wide variety of improvements, leading to greater stability, better performance and new and improved features. Thanks to the feedback of the community, KDE developers were able to package a large number of fixes and enhancements into this release, among which more complete and higher quality artwork following the new-in-5.0 Breeze style, re-addition of popular features such as the Icon Tasks taskswitcher and improved stability and performance.

Those traveling regularly will enjoy better support for time zones in the panel's clock, while those staying at home a revamped clipboard manager, allowing you to easily get at your past clipboard's content. The Breeze widget style is now also available for Qt4-based applications, leading to greater consistency across applications. The work to support Wayland as display server for Plasma is still ongoing, with improved, but not complete support in 5.1. Changes throughout many default components improve accessibility for visually impaired users by adding support for screenreaders and improved keyboard navigation. Aside from the visual improvements and the work on features, the focus of this release lies also on stability and performance improvements, with over 180 bugs resolved since 5.0 in the shell alone."
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KDE Releases Plasma 5.1 More

KDE Releases Plasma 5.1

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  • I'm just curious. I prefer KDE to Gnome, Windows to OSX, and coffee to tea.

    If you prefer Gnome to KDE, why?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by juanfgs ( 922455 )
      After the initial gnome 3 fiasco I moved to kde now I run mate, but I think that gnome 3 is quite acceptable. The problem with KDE is that sometimes it's too distracting, and on other aspects is slow ( at least on my machine the file manager takes a while to load, meanwhile nautilus/caja loads instantly). Some of the functions of the programs offered by KDE don't actually work as intended ( at least in my experience). Some small things are annoying, for example when using the treeview in Kate, sometimes i

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by udippel ( 562132 )

        Some small things are annoying, for example when using the treeview in Kate, sometimes it has happened that I accidentally dragged a folder instead of clicking on it, and the editor loaded all the files inside, crashing in the process. Kate also has refused to open some files in write mode since it considers them to be too large, gEdit/Geany just open it and let me work.

        High time for a bug report, or two. Don't you think so?
        I can't, for these bugs, because I didn't run into them. And I prefer Kate compared to gEdit.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by David C Billen ( 3753981 )
      I want to like KDE. I want to love it. It's good looking. But, for some reason, even though it's like falling off a log to write bug free code with Qt, KDE programs and tools seems riddled with issues. I've had to pitch more KDE apps than I care to think about, (i.e. Amarok, KDevelop). So I end up running gnome applications anyway - I may as well have things consistent. Anyway, I don't need or want much from a desktop other than to get out of my way and give me easy access to things. I just boot OpenBox wi

      • Yes, KDE does certainly have some issues. No matter what I have tried, KATE simply does not seem to work well over SSH (and I've tried every Xwindows system under the sun: OSX, three different Windows X emulators, Ubuntu, et cetera).

        That is an annoying bug that has been part of KDE as long as I can remember, which is too bad, because I love KATE.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Dimwit ( 36756 )

      KDE is too "busy". There's drop shadows everywhere and HUGE icons and constant distracting animations. Plus, it's the only desktop I've ever stat down at and couldn't immediately understand how to use it. What's an "Activity"? Is it a workspace? Without trying, I was able to get myself into a situation where I had zero controls on the screen and no idea how to get out of it. GNOME "just works".

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by udippel ( 562132 )

        Your ID is way too low to play on your alias.

        I *think* you could understand how to use it; though you could not easily understand how to use all its features. Correct me if I am wrong. KDE unfortunately loves to pop in new concepts, or even old ones, with hitherto unknown labels. Activity is one of those, and its further development was kind of abandoned before it was actually ripe to harvest. I for one use it, and curse it for being incomplete. Was it complete, you'd have not 2, 4 or 8 (identical) desktops

      • Re:Does anyone still use Gnome? (Score:5, Informative)

        by devent ( 1627873 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:03PM (#48153425) Homepage

        You can deactivate all animations with 4 clicks. System Settings -> Desktop Effects -> Animation Speed Instant -> Apply
        Huge icons? If the icons are too big click on the tool-bar and set Icon Size [x] Small.
        "understand how to use it" What? KDE 4 is like the desktop in KDE 1.
        ""Activity"? Is it a workspace?" Who cares, don't use it, don't worry about it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fnj ( 64210 )

          Nail, meet hammer's head. Great post. You destroyed all the stupid carping very concisely.

          But I have an objection that is genuine, and it is a showstopper.

          There is only one thing that prevents me from using KDE. I have tried, oh how I have tried, and I love everything about KDE except this this one thing. Tthe icons in the goddam taskbar won't stay put! You can't keep track of the ordering to find them because the layout keeps changing! Annoying as hell and more, because I absolutely can't use it like that.

          • Tthe icons in the goddam taskbar won't stay put! You can't keep track of the ordering to find them because the layout keeps changing! Annoying as hell and more, because I absolutely can't use it like that. And they refuse to fix it! All they have to do is make it work dead simply, like Gnome 2 always worked; like Mate works. But they have this fucking oh-so-intelligent sorting algorithm that keeps flipping around the layout. Ugh, just ugh.

            Undone by the simple refusal to fix one critical misfeature.

            Have you tried the icon only task bar? It doesn't swap icons around for me.

          • Are you talking about the open application window list? If so, just go to the taskbar settings and set it to "do not sort", in Debian at least it is set to sort "alphabetically" by default.

            Other than that particular way, and it behaves as soon as you apply the settings, I haven't noticed any movement on the taskbar.

        • This doesn't deactivate the slider animation in the K menu or the slow opening of the top-right corner plasma widget.
    • I installed MATE 1.8 last night a System76 Pangolin Performance laptop last night, and everything just felt right. Since I had used GNOME 2.x for a long time, using MATE felt like slipping into an old pair of boots.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • PHP (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    https://www.kde.org/announceme... [kde.org]

    Is that PHP code in the lower right Clipboard thing supposed to be there?

    • It's displaying clipboard history. Why not? Looks like the user has been copy/pasting a bit of code. Pretty common.

  • Convergence...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by taiwanjohn ( 103839 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @11:36AM (#48151145)

    Are the KDE/Gnome wars winding down yet? It seems like both have made a lot of progress in recent years, to the point where both are pretty solid and flexible. Is there really a "difference" anymore for the average user?

    • The Linux desktop wars mattered when Linux was the future of the desktop.

      Now that the desktop has a much smaller future, and Linux clearly doesn't play much of a role even in this drastically reduced future, it's just that KDE and GNOME really don't matter much.

      Desktop Linux is a niche product, and it behaves like one—adoption is vendor-driven, and clients use whatever the vendor supplies.

      For individual Linux users, things haven't moved in half a decade or more. Linux is still a mostly complete operat

    • Dell released boxes running Ubuntu a while back. Ubuntu uses Gnome, as far as I know. So for many, Gnome was the first desktop experience for many new Linux users.

  • Performance improvements (Score:3, Funny)

    by gTsiros ( 205624 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @11:39AM (#48151183)

    someone explain to me why each newer version is progressively slower on the same hardware as time goes by? If we were to believe the continuous performance improvements, this thing would hit 120 fps on a 286 by now.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )

      I know! It's terrible that I can't run the newest software on my 90 MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM. I mean, Firefox 2.0 takes /35 seconds/ to start on the poor old thing, that's just unacceptable.

    • Due to the vast amount of different hardware and software configurations out there, performance improvements won't necessarily apply to everyone, and may even be regressions for some.

  • KDE3 was my favorite DE. KDE4 got me to drop KDE altogether. I know there was an attempt to fork 3, but it seems to have died. It's too bad.

    • Re:Bring back KDE3 (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheCycoONE ( 913189 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @12:04PM (#48151501)

      Trinity Desktop Environment isn't dead: when I wrote this the last git update was 5 minutes ago (https://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/). It's just very very niche, so don't expect much help from your distro.

      It's probably easiest to try out on Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind... [archlinux.org]

      • One option left is to defect to North Korea and learn the language, where they still use KDE 3!
        The young and intrepid dear leader made a Mac OS clone out of it, using his outstanding mind and will. So you'll have to like it. On the plus side there is really no option of not liking it. There's an actual benevolent dictator for life.
        If Red Star OS 4.0 doesn't switch to systemd, it will really be time to pack and leave.

    • I felt the same way... at least for 4.1/4.2/and early 4.3. Then I installed trinity after using KDE4.x for a while and my eyes wanted to bleed from the old jagged rendering and ugly aged looking icons. Felt great, just like an old friend, but it was fugly as hell.

      Thankfully KDE4.x started to improve along the way and is just as comfortable now as 3.x was back in the day. You should check it out once again... just use the "desktop with icons" activity from the activity switcher if your distro doesn't have t

    • serves you right for installing development versions of desktop software

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