KDE Plasma 5.24 Released (kde.org) 38
jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bug fixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6.
This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.
This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.
Steam Deck? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice win for KDE. Really nice. Congratulations.
Somehow, since the early 4.x debacle, KDE has managed to refine itself and avoid those iconoclasts that do so much damage fixing solved problems. It has become the best Linux DE going and it is great to see that rewarded by through adoption by a significant commercial platform.
Re:Honestly (Score:5, Interesting)
I do. For me, KDE is the least laggy/freeze-prone DE when working with heavy-duty interactive tasks such as modelling, animation, VFX/compositing, but still comes out worse than Windows for some reason, no matter if I run nVidia or AMD GPU.
Several others I've talked to have the same problem on Linux, doing heavy interactive tasks frequently cause stutter/lag/freezes, so while Linux reigns in the render farms, outside of some of the big studios, OSX and Windows reign supreme on the workstations. And I know a lot of CAD people have the same complaints: Small projects run fine, but anything sizeable/complex, and you get all these stutters, 2s freezes etc etc.
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Blame Linus Torvalds. He is interested in his baby called Linux, and the only people paying to feed that baby are giant companies deploying it on clouds.
Remember this: http://ck-hack.blogspot.com/20... [blogspot.com]
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To be honest, I think the fault is spread all over the stack, from kernel up to DE and how applications interact with it.
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Yes, but the exact issue of stutter under heavy load is real and precisely because there is no money in Linux on desktop. And because Linus chooses server over desktop, others in the stack take that approach for granted.
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For the record, I do run Gentoo with ck-sources, but I think it's more a case of how the layers are not as well integrated as they could be. So, just opening a directory and scrolling through the thumbnails of the files can be more sluggish than on Windows. Now scroll through a timeline in an editor etc, with thumbnails and previews, and it gets much worse. And we're talking about a Threadripper system with NVME local storage, and network storage is over 2.5Gbit/s ethernet.
My suspicion leans towards the I/O
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Hmm. That is a good point. I think we should have a good benchmarking tool for this.
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I run Gentoo with ck-sources, separate volumes for storage etc etc. And yes, I've been using RAM disks for stuff. But the thing we're talking about is not "batch" style jobs like compiling, or doing a final render. We're talking about issues with heavy interactive workloads. As I said, in render farms, Linux reigns above all. But with interactive workloads beyond just simple tasks, a number of animators, modellers, video editors, drafters etc have run into these stutters, freezes and sluggishness.
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Started to use it again, it is such a joy to use compared to Gnome, and it has become fast again and is very usable, I would say best DE atm.
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Yeah, I tried KDE on weak hardware a few years ago and the responsiveness sucked, and it seemed kind of "weird" . That would have been V4. Tried it again, still on weak hardware (4GB RAM, HDD, early i3 processor) and it was a revelation. Fast, low resource use, stable and intuitive. I've stuck with Mate for six years, and that's great, but KDE has turned my head and will likely be my main DE soon.
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I have an old HP mini netbook with the Microsoft dictated 1GB of RAM and an Atom N270 CPU, I started installing a very light CLI-only Ubuntu and then the KDE framework, it is not a blazing fast computer but once booted it's certainly usable.
I also tried with other light DE's but KDE gives me the best complete experience.
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I had it on an old Chromebook (Acer C720), but the modern internet wants so much freaking RAM, I ended up having to swap for LXDE to eke out everything I could if I wanted to use it for surfing. For a local-use machine, it worked VERY nicely. But loading a browser and then a couple pages would just expand and push everything else to swap constantly.
Re:Honestly (Score:5, Informative)
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I remember a few years ago, there was some project to run KDE plasma on windows (XP era?)... I wish that project had gotten more traction.
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I do. Gnome completely broke their stuff in the transition from v2 to v3, and never seemed to recover. Fedora 14, with Gnome 2, had the best GUI I had ever seen, up to that point. You can imagine my dismay, when I later installed Fedora 16, with Gnome 3.
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I do. Gnome completely broke their stuff in the transition from v2 to v3, and never seemed to recover. Fedora 14, with Gnome 2, had the best GUI I had ever seen, up to that point. You can imagine my dismay, when I later installed Fedora 16, with Gnome 3.
I've always found KDE too blingy, and too hard to configure when it comes to decorations, themes, fonts, icons, date and time formats, and other visual items. I could never get comfortable with it, and I couldn't dial down the eye candy and animations to a comfortable level. I'm not interested in "beautiful", I just want clean, comfortable, intuitive, and configurable.
But GTK3 is a dumpster fire, and GTK4 promises to be worse, so I'll try KDE based on your comment and those of other fans.
Has KDE embraced C
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All the KDE apps I use still have standard titlebars that you can change the appearance of in System Settings -> Appearance -> Window Decorations.
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Absolutely!
It's fast, reliable (yes, I know, not on every possible HW configuration ever conceived) and highly customizable.
I also love how GNOME is progressing and I keep trying new versions on VMs whenever I can.
Two places worth a weekly visit:
https://pointieststick.com/cat... [pointieststick.com]
https://thisweek.gnome.org/ [gnome.org]
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I do. My daily driver laptop is running Plasma on FreeBSD, but I also have a Kubuntu partition to boot to use unusual hardware or Widevine.
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I do. The defaults are better than Gnome, and I can tweak just about anything at all I don't like. It works smoothly and the native apps are great.
I find it hard to consider KDE as a choice (Score:2)
Two things break it for me. It seems so *bloated*, it runs so so much to support itself it feels like it's own distro. No desktop environment should be that heavy handed. Even Windows isn't anywhere near as bad.
That, and the ridiculous 'K' naming scheme is honestly kind of embarrassing.
I prefer more lightweight stuff and after discovering awesome and just how customizable it is I can't imagine ever using anything else, but even if I were to recommend something for other users it would be something like xfce
Re:I find it hard to consider KDE as a choice (Score:5, Informative)
KDE is so "bloated" that it runs great on my 10 year old PC. Unless you only have 500 megabytes of disk space for some odd reason, what's the problem with having more software available that you can use or not at your discretion?
They dropped the K naming scheme years ago (although of course didn't rename all old software). Personally I think it's way more confusing now, I used to be able to know which were KDE apps by the name and I couldn't care less if that offends somebody's sense of naming style when it serves an important practical purpose.
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I spend all day at the other end of a VNC connection over a corporate VPN (thanks covid!). I can select KDE, but the animations do not work nicely with VNC. FVWM2 is the other option - primitive and simple with no dancing Ks.
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Totally! I was surprised to find out (when updating a very old laptop) that Plasma consumes significantly less memory than GNOME. But Plasma is a lot more powerful.
Re:I find it hard to consider KDE as a choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes their are a couple of very light desktops but on relatively modern hardware like my 10 y/o Thinkpad you don't notice a speed advantage, only the lack of options.
About the K-naming, I am from a country where we use the k for k sounding words, only with a few typically Latin/French origin words you'd find a c pronounced as a k.
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LOL, who cares if it runs well, that's not a measure of anything.It's trivial to find software that predates your PC and would run amazingly but is still nonetheless bloated.
Point is I don't need to run an OS to have a desktop - no one does. At that point you may as well just run Windows.
And the K naming scheme serves no purpose - glad to hear they dropped it, it was always foolish.
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I can't argue on the *bloated* part, that's personal taste and whatever.
The 'K' naming scheme being *embarrassing* sounds... childish at best?
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Not sure how you reached the conclusion that calling out the k naming scheme is childish, that's rather absurd. It was childish to have such a naming scheme in the first place though.
Re: I find it hard to consider KDE as a choice (Score:1)
*Claps* (Score:1)
20.04 LTS, 5 years support (Score:2)
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Finally :) ... (Score:2)