Ready for even more improvements to come to the KDE Plasma desktop? I know I am and Plasma 5.25 Beta is now available.
This is readying up for a full release for everyone on June 14th, and they will also be holding a special "beta review day" of May 26th where anyone can join in for a day of "bug-hunting, triaging and solving alongside the Plasma devs".
Some of the improvements coming sound pretty great, a lot of it just fine-tuning the whole Plasma desktop to react better to certain situations and just give it a bit more spit and polish. I especially like some of the updates coming to the Discover software installer like an overhaul to the app page and showing permissions for Flatpak applications.
It's also good news for Wayland fans, as there appears to be quite a lot of bug fixes and overall improvements there too, over 200 in fact and that includes fixes and improvements for Xwayland too.
Also plenty of adjustments to the look and feel of Plasma with a nice rejection animation on lock screens / login for a wrong password, you can apply the accent colours of UI to match a wallpaper, tint the whole colour scheme with an accent colour, an optional floating panel for Plasma themes and more.
If you want to try it live, it looks like KDE neon might be a good one with their regular unstable iso downloads.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments
CyborgZeta May 19, 2022
Showing permissions for Flatpak programs in Discover sounds like a good addition. I don't use Discover, but I think it would be handy for those that do.
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This guy (Nate Graham) does a great blog (syndicated to Planet KDE outlining the week-by-week changes and improvements to KDE overall.
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Always been and xfce fan, but I recently moved to endeavour from manjaro and tried kde.
KDE feels more modern, faster and user friendlyer then windows.
Even got wallpaper engine working, seeing bug fixes and more spit and polish gets me excited :).
KDE feels more modern, faster and user friendlyer then windows.
Even got wallpaper engine working, seeing bug fixes and more spit and polish gets me excited :).
1 Likes, Who?
I am also a KDE user now, after years of avoiding it because of a very bad experience in the past (mid 2000s).
I am even trying Wayland right now, and it runs quite well.
There is no way around it, KDE is probably the best DE in terms of functionality etc., though it still has many many flaws.
So I am happy that they keep fixing it, though it goes very slowly.
I would really wish that more developers could unite to create a really great DE, but that will probably never happen, so I have to stick with KDE and hope that at some point they will fix the flaws
.
Some of these flaws are quite heavy and point to structural problems, for example this bug:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342056
I am even trying Wayland right now, and it runs quite well.
There is no way around it, KDE is probably the best DE in terms of functionality etc., though it still has many many flaws.
So I am happy that they keep fixing it, though it goes very slowly.
I would really wish that more developers could unite to create a really great DE, but that will probably never happen, so I have to stick with KDE and hope that at some point they will fix the flaws
.Some of these flaws are quite heavy and point to structural problems, for example this bug:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342056
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Some of these flaws are quite heavy and point to structural problems, for example this bug:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342056
I'd like certain stuff to be a bit faster, but I wouldn't call that a structural flaw - even the original reporter of that bug noted that his use case (that of millions of small files in tens of thousands of directories) is an edge case. Nice to see Nate Graham commenting on it though.
I'd honestly rather Nate & Co keep doing what they're doing by focussing on the small things that put people off in KDE. Canonical did a similar thing with Ubuntu - it was called the 100 papercuts project. Now they're replicating that effort in KDE (15 Minute Bugs) which is great to see.
Theming could use a tidy-up too, although it's admittedly so powerful, that would be a fairly big challenge.
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I switched to Gnome after 24 years of KDE for it's simply more polished in Fedora, while the KDE spin is good, I like the Gnome Workstation better. Though, Gnome without extensions is pretty much unusable for me, while KDE ships most of that out of the box (tray icons, audio device handling, or in general audio handling).
KDE has long standing bugs especially in display handling which put me off in the end. They are either in the 15 minute bugs or even higher priorized, and if I saw it correctly the one which annoyed me most got fixed in this release (had this issue since 2018).
I may switch back one day. I really have a soft spot for KDE, but I am fine enough with Gnome for now.
Last edited by STiAT on 21 May 2022 at 8:36 am UTC
KDE has long standing bugs especially in display handling which put me off in the end. They are either in the 15 minute bugs or even higher priorized, and if I saw it correctly the one which annoyed me most got fixed in this release (had this issue since 2018).
I may switch back one day. I really have a soft spot for KDE, but I am fine enough with Gnome for now.
Last edited by STiAT on 21 May 2022 at 8:36 am UTC
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Some of these flaws are quite heavy and point to structural problems, for example this bug:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342056
I'd like certain stuff to be a bit faster, but I wouldn't call that a structural flaw - even the original reporter of that bug noted that his use case (that of millions of small files in tens of thousands of directories) is an edge case. Nice to see Nate Graham commenting on it though.
1. The "bug" also occurs in much smaller cases.
2. I call it a structural flaw, because as one user pointed out, rsync works much faster and smoother without freezing the desktop etc. (I tested it multiple times myself).
This is a clear sign to me that the KDE team made mistakes in the design of this framework as they call it.
I'd honestly rather Nate & Co keep doing what they're doing by focussing on the small things that put people off in KDE. Canonical did a similar thing with Ubuntu - it was called the 100 papercuts project. Now they're replicating that effort in KDE (15 Minute Bugs) which is great to see.
Honestly I think thats in principle the wrong focus.
The most severe problems should have the main focus.
That doesn't mean that small problems should be ignored.
But this focus is exactly what people would do who want to sell a product instead of making it good by design.
While this might sound to negative, I want to add that I respect the KDE team, but to some degree I think they make wrong choices.
And the project could do better with better general choices.
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2. I call it a structural flaw, because as one user pointed out, rsync works much faster and smoother without freezing the desktop etc. (I tested it multiple times myself).
The bug also notes that comparing the rsync or cp is a waste of time, because the KIO helpers that perform the action in KDE are multi-purpose and have to work consistently across local filesystems, SMB, NFS, FTP, SSH, WebDav and everything else. So yes, I'd like it to be faster. But no, it's not a structural flaw. It's actually a very cool design that just performs poorly in certain edge cases.
As for the rest of your comments, we'll just agree to differ. The KDE priorities will never please everyone, of course, but I much prefer their decisions, approach and transparency compared to, say, Gnome.
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2. I call it a structural flaw, because as one user pointed out, rsync works much faster and smoother without freezing the desktop etc. (I tested it multiple times myself).
The bug also notes that comparing the rsync or cp is a waste of time, because the KIO helpers that perform the action in KDE are multi-purpose and have to work consistently across local filesystems, SMB, NFS, FTP, SSH, WebDav and everything else. So yes, I'd like it to be faster. But no, it's not a structural flaw. It's actually a very cool design that just performs poorly in certain edge cases.
As for the rest of your comments, we'll just agree to differ. The KDE priorities will never please everyone, of course, but I much prefer their decisions, approach and transparency compared to, say, Gnome.
Well I disagree. I think it is a lame excuse and does not have anything to do with compatibility for other protocols etc.
Especially the freezing of the desktop is an absolut no-go and shows that something is clearly wrong.
Processes seem to be not seperated (enough) and somehow the parts of the framework that are responsible for "reading and displaying" the filesystem also seem to have problems to deal (even) with (external) file copy processes etc.
So there is work to do.
Otherwise we can of course agree to disagree, as it is also a pointless discussion, because no one from KDE will change their way because of these comments.
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