KDE Is Looking For Ideas On New Goals

[RealNC]

For me, the guy behind https://github.com/tildearrow/kwin-lowlatency did a lot more than all the KDE devs combined :-P Plasma is actually pleasant now.

[schmidtbag]

Honestly, I'm fine with the way KDE has been trending over the past couple years: more stability, less bloat, and improved Wayland support. I don't really want more features, I just want polish and optimization.

KDE is at a point where no matter what they're going to do, they're not going to please everyone with the default appearance. And frankly, I'm getting really tired of people whining about any environment's default appearance. Seriously people, it's not hard to change it to something less ugly yourself. But really, who the hell uses KDE with all default options anyway? If you're willing to make a few adjustments to make it behave the way you want, what's so hard about choosing a new theme?

[polarathene]

Did they ever fix the problem in Dolphin where USB drives would report being ready to disconnect before they actually were? Data loss-causing Stuff like that always made me uncomfortable using Dolphin to organize my files. Which should be a top priority in my opinion.

I believe they have, I can't remember when. Dolphin and KIO have been given a lot of love in recent releases over the past year or so. If not, there's an easy fix to it which is to adjust the kernel settings for reducing the buffer size(where files are copied to before writing to media). I had done that back in 2016/2017 when I had similar problem.

[polarathene]

They should make a DE that could be beautiful. I never ever found a beautiful KDE setup. No matter what I do, it's unpolished.

I've seen plenty of customizations with some really nice / beautiful bits. I did go through the links I've noted down for such, but opted not to include any as they imo only did a particular thing nice and the rest wasn't too appealing, so sharing them here wouldn't likely motivate you. I'm pretty confident that you can do it, it'd just take a lot of time to refine to what you'd be happy with.

There are some good ones on r/unixporn though iirc.

This is a beautiful lockscreen though! (Doesn't seem like I can embed the gif/video
https://gfycat.com/competentbelovedjenny

https://giant.gfycat.com/CompetentBelovedJenny.webm

[danmcgrew]

I don't care WHAT else you do, but for God's sake, make ALL text pure black on pure white.

What is with this new age shit of making the contrast of text as bad as humanly possible, like gray letters on a light blue background? Or even gray letters on a white background? Designed by a millennial wuss, who thinks he (she) is doing something cute; simply because they can do it, and for no practical reasons whatever except to play with the computer; certainly not with the end user in mind.

Make it look just like a newspaper, or a properly printed book. Black on white. Period.

"To the software developer, 'User' is synonymous with 'Idiot' "--anon...

...and vice-versa, in an unfortunate amount of cases.

[polarathene]

Small but annoying: allow specifying non-default options for mounted devices such as USB drives. I want noatime, and I don't want VFAT filesystems mounting everything upper case.

You can set those with udev rules no? I suppose you could have some GUI support for such somewhere, but how many people want such support would likely make it pretty low priority unless you contribute it yourself(or give someone financial incentive). Isn't FAT filesystems restricted to storing their labels in upper case? If you just want a nice name, Dolphin allows you to assign a "pretty" name for the device, and I think it remembers it, should solve your issue kinda.

I would REALLY like a KDE equivalent to Arc Menu. My #1 complaint with KDE is having 4 kinds of Application menus and feeling like each one isn't what I want.

Seems reasonable. I'm sure it's quite doable, and was a bit surprised there wasn't anything like it in the kde store(they have about 12 menus).

[polarathene]

I don't care WHAT else you do, but for God's sake, make ALL text pure black on pure white.

Make it look just like a newspaper, or a properly printed book. Black on white. Period.

I understand where you're coming from, but I absolutely wouldn't want every bit of text to be pure black on pure white. Sometimes you want to grey it out if it's out of focus(titlebars) Terminal I prefer darker bg but not necessarily white text(it's green atm that the distro provided, not overly fussed). Text editors for writing code, absolutely want syntax highlighting with a variety of colour to convey information. I use QOwnNotes for writing well notes in, it does helpful things like assign a highlight text colour for url links, reduce emphasis on markdown characters like # when used in headers(you only care about the actual header text).

Plenty of good examples also don't use pure black/white, that's usually not ideal, I don't have any good examples to share with you off the top of my head though. A newspaper as you mention however often isn't pure white and the blacks can be a bit faded

As long as you're able to swap out the colorscheme for your preference(which you shouldn't assume applies to everyone), then no point in complaining about defaults.

[lolren]

First of all, i would like to thank ngraham , a KDE developer, for listening to us, the users. I think now KDE it's the only DE that listen to what the users want.
Now, as another suggestion if I may, would be to focus the attention on tray icons. They cannot be dragged and moved in another order. Thus, on a laptop, for example, the battery indicator ends up not being visible, having to click "show more icon".

Keep up the good work. 73!

[oiaohm]

Small but annoying: allow specifying non-default options for mounted devices such as USB drives. I want noatime, and I don't want VFAT filesystems mounting everything upper case.

https://superuser.com/questions/879963/how-do-i-change-a-usb-flash-name-from-uppercase-to-uppercase-and-lowercase-mixe/1289605

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44095/how-to-change-the-volume-name-of-a-fat32-filesystem/44159

I guess you mean the drive label. This is a horrible problem. Reality is if you have set the VFAT label under Linux to be mixed case or lower case that is exactly how the drive will show under Windows, OS X and Linux. But how windows in fact set the file system label in the file system with fat32/16/12 was in fact uppercase it.

autorun.inf label change hack is not that much on Linux thinking you have already mounted the file system by that point in a created folder so that information is a little late to be useful.

Annoying as hell is you can correct fat32 label under Linux and one incorrect click pattern under Windows triggering a straight rename without changing anything and it uppercase again.

Uppercase vfat drives issues is really a Windows bug. Writing the set label to autorun.inf and processing autorun.inf could be way forwards but even this comes with down sides of getting deleted or not updated. Please note putting autorun.inf on drives also causes stall as anti-virus under windows always want to scan that before letting open access to drive. So this is not really effective work around

The uppercase of FAT32/16/12 labels by Windows is a Microsoft design choice. Even windows users complain about the fact they mount a drive and the drive label is uppercase.

Basically you are not going like like my answer on the uppercase labeled VFAT drives.
1) It a Windows Bug complain to Microsoft and be ignored at that point accept they are jack ass on this defect.
2) Stop using windows and receiving drives from those using Windows.
3) Format and label everything under Linux/OS X and the problem then goes away as long as those drives don't get messed up by Windows.

Or if you have to use Windows or receiving drives from those using windows live with the bug and accept it the price of dealing with Windows. Basically its not a Linux defect or KDE defect.

noatime idea makes sense this is something that changes would need to be done the Linux/KDE side.

[jacob]

The look should be a priority IMO. I've never seen a KDE-based distro that doesn't look like something from 1992. Appearance is important, and having it by default, not as a 3rd party theme, is important too.

Secondly they should do a thorough review from a usability point of view. So far KDE's approach has been to solve every problem by adding a new option, but that's not the right thing to do. They should preconfigure the desktop to be streamlined, easily navigable and discoverable so that every common operation could be achieved in exactly one, preferably obvious, way. At the moment, KDE is a mess where the file manager alone has more options and settings than a nuclear reactor control panel, the settings app is not just overwhelming but also illogical, which makes it nearly impossible to find what you are looking for without spending half a hour browsing through it, setting up a printer probably couldn't be made any more confusing, USB flash drives are marked as ready to be removed before they actually are etc... All things considered, GNOME is to KDE in many ways what the original Macintosh was to Windows 2.x/3.x. Yes, the latter was a million times more configurable. And yes, virtually everyone found the former to be much better.