KDE developer suggests Plasma needs to be simpler by default

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah. I'm not sure they're right about that though.
And I mean, the extra options don't have to be very hidden, it could be just you click on that fuzzy line at the bottom of any given little options page that says "more options", and it sinks down and reveals them. And if you are a serious options person, well, you can have an option to reveal them all by default.

Hey, I'm not sure that they're right either. I mentioned upthread that their policy of turning on all the taps has consequences that can be undesirable. I just mentioned that they're currently wary of the "Advanced Settings" approach. And I'm sure we can all think of examples where "users of great ego will find the basic view insulting even if it meets their needs better than the advanced view."

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KallestofelesMaybe one day, in a perfect world, KDE would finally become stable enough to daily drive it. But I guess that's besides the point.

Running it daily for many, many years.
Don't know what you're talking about.

They break stuff on a regular base. I am using it as a daily driver too since 1998 (1 year break using Budgie though), and have been contributing to KDE for some years (I do not any longer).

KDE is more complex than necessary, especially because of the reason that you can customize so much.

The ony thing which I find really stable is KWin, and it's certainly better than mutter.

Everything else breaks every here and there, KIO in Dolphin, GetNewStuff, Settings crashing applying a global theme (as in the cuttent version), shell "hangs" because some effect ticks out, panel crashing, dual screen not working properly (not saving settings, not setting wallpaler, can't interact with one screen, not enumerating devices properly, having issues having two identical monitors to identify them properly), Dolphin can't display Android Storage any longer (complaining you should use MTP while you do already), audio devices disappearing and never showing up again...

And thats just a few of those I experienced in the past 6 Month only using stable releases.

They break a lot, often in the name of fixing something breaking some other stuff. The beast is so complex it's almost impossible to test.

Sane defaults is fine, but don't force the design paradigms of Windows 11 or OSX on us and don't remove any features for the sake of simplicity. Now that Microsoft is trying to be Apple, KDE should try to be Microsoft when it still cared about productivity - ie classic taskbar, powerful window management, competent file management, etc.

Quoting: GuestHe's right. An abundance of customisation options are great for tinkers, but tinkerers are a minority of technology users, and that abundance of customisation options that is so great for tinkers increases the likelihood of user caused instabilities.

i once customized my theme A LOT, then i realized something obvious: im not an designer.
i wanted an pretty system but didnt knew how to do that, so outsourcing was the best option.
not to mention that most of my design choices where... too distracting to actually work on my computer.

I really wished they did a review to check which options belong where.
On KDE, i regularly find options that belong in the preferences in some context menus or the application menu. Or vice versa. Or options that belong in the application can only be changed in the global kde settings.
In the end, the application menus and context menus are cluttered and it's hard to find the things you want to do. If KDE would improve here, i think the usability would already be very very high without the need to remove any features.


Last edited by const on 1 December 2021 at 7:14 am UTC

@ The People saying Plasma is unstable, you are probably running Ubuntu?
Thing is, as far as I'm aware, kde has no lts branch, so if you want the latest bugfixes you need the latest version, but ubuntu is stuck to whatever version was the one on release, so 20.04 is lacking behind in bugfixes over 1 and a half year now. 18.03 3 and a half year.
Extra points if by change the version on release was one with a lot of new not throughly tested features.

Quoting: Matombo@ The People saying Plasma is unstable, you are probably running Ubuntu?
Thing is, as far as I'm aware, kde has no lts branch, so if you want the latest bugfixes you need the latest version, but ubuntu is stuck to whatever version was the one on release, so 20.04 is lacking behind in bugfixes over 1 and a half year now. 18.03 3 and a half year.
Extra points if by change the version on release was one with a lot of new not throughly tested features.

I was running on Arch Linux. Dolphin was the worst offender. Sometimes it didn't refresh the contents of the directory. like when extracting a zip/rar or whatever archive, it didn't update its contents automatically. It also crashed from time to time. The list view of files didn't auto-resize its columns according to the window size, so i had the horizontal scrollbar to see the file creation dates for example on smaller window. Panel settings were a finnicky. Sometimes changing something messed all up and panel resized itself weirdly. Main menu just straight up segfaulted several times without loading at all, had to use legacy main menu (or launcher was it called iirc). Kwin, while it worked mostly without issues, there were times when everything froze on the screen, mouse input and all worked, but playing videos or the window refreshes didn't update, had to disable/enable compositing to make it work again. Also for whatever reason kwin compositor didn't turn off when launching games in proton for whatever reason, had to manually turn it off. Worked fine with native games. plasmashell was eating RAM like no tomorrow after several days of uptime.. it creeped up to 3.5GB at times for this process alone.

Just to name few issues i had during my 5-6 month of using it.

edit: i used 5.21, 5.22 and 5.23 iirc


Last edited by Xpander on 1 December 2021 at 8:01 am UTC

I'm a long, long time user of KDE; I've kept defaults, I changed everything, I left only the bare k-tools, I added them all, I themed every desktop/activity, and fiddled with per-window and per-app settings.

I don't care how much (or little) customizability KDE gives me. Usually it's plenty.

I care about one thing, and one thing only.

A simple, one click, RELIABLE, system-wide, PORTABLE, forever-supported way of doing two tasks:

1. Save all the settings, geometries, fonts, menu items and orders, colors, thicknesses, EVERYTHING for all K/Qt apps, in a text file called "${HOME}/all_my_kde_settings.cfg"

2. Restore all the settings, geometries, fonts, menu items and orders, colors, thicknesses, EVERYTHING for all K/Qt apps, from a text file called "${HOME}/all_my_kde_settings.cfg"

So I won't want to rip my soul yet again if I have to prime another machine like my ultra-customized main rig.

Quoting: ssj17vegeta

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KallestofelesMaybe one day, in a perfect world, KDE would finally become stable enough to daily drive it. But I guess that's besides the point.

Running it daily for many, many years.
Don't know what you're talking about.

Although I too have used KDE for like five years now without looking back, it is far more unstable than other DEs. I have installed it on three different machines (Kubuntu), and I still get frequent crashes with Dolphin, the plasma dashboards or even sometimes software I didn't even know were running (like the Bluetooth applet which I since deactivated). I never had such issues with Mateo or LXDE.

I'm not complaining though, the overall experience is really good and KDE really suits my tastes ! But still, yes, I wouldn't call it "perfectly stable". Or is it my distro (Kubuntu) ?

Kubuntu is not a good example of KDE integration. Try KDE Neon if you want a Ubuntu based distro with a stable KDE.

[quote=CatKiller]part of KDE's UI guidelines.. is that an option is only worth having if it's worth having on by default. /quote]

I'm sure that's absolutely not a KDE guideline. That sounds like GNOME. I've never heard that saying for the ~3 years I've been following KDE.

The opposite philosophy is truer. "Simple by default, powerful when needed." Now, do all KDE apps follow that mantra? Not really.
That's part of trying to enforce a vision with an OSS suite. Only so much you can do if you're not the maintainer.

For example, Kate is a mess of buttons by default. They're all opt-out, but they should be opt-in. There's a great notepad program in there, but it's overwhelmed by unnecessary options upon install.
Kate was just replaced with Kwrite as the default notepad app. Coincidence? Absolutely not.

Robust programs can be streamlined. Streamlined programs can't be robust.

KDE is the only DE right now trying to make something modernized and pretty, without neutering customization and functionality. There are more edge-cases, but it's the only way to get something truly worthy of a daily driver for anyone, imo.