KDE Is Looking For Ideas On New Goals

[Termy]

I'm not an unconditional zealot of GNOME, but in terms of efficient screen usage it seems pretty good. A single thin bar on the top and a dock on the side (with the Ubuntu Dock extension... which should be default!) is clean, easy and doesn't stand in the way. I was initially very sceptical about their new trend of using CSDs for everything and I still think there are inherent flaws in that design, but on smaller screens it is a great advantage too. GNOME has its fair share of problems but screen waste it ain't.

I was more referring to the default apps than the DE itself. While the whole concept of Gnome takes a while to get used to, it is not bad in itself. But when i look at nautilus and the like, there are mainly big buttons with a ton of space around them ^^

KDE, to me at least, suffers from the same problem as virtually every single Qt-based app I've ever seen. No matter what, it always seems to have that "plastic" look and feel, with fonts and colors that somehow always look ugly, and a general lack of thought in terms of users' workflow. Rather than asking themselves "What exactly is the user trying to achieve in this dialog, and what should the answer be?" they just always seem to take the easy way out by showing every toolbar and option imaginable at all times. Which, among other problems, wastes screen real estate a lot. Those and other criticisms are not new, of course, but KDE's response so far always seemed to be "but... you can customise it!". Which, from a UI design point of view, is NEVER the right answer.

I can't follow your "plastic" argument, but in regards to workflow, that is kind of a question of philosophy.
In theory, the context sensitive UI you are describing might be a good idea. In reality, i've never seen one that actually works on a larger scale and is intuitive. Sure, if you KNOW what you need to do to achieve a task, you can get by.
On the other hand, with the "every toolbar visible"-approach, i SEE where i need to go to get something done.

Sure, it is debatable which approach is "better", but as i said - for me, the context-sensitive one never really worked out for me. It's the same thing as with ribbon-menus...in most applications, those are just not well done imho, i still really hate MS Office or the Windows Explorer UI as you always have to search your way around. Solidworks is the only program i know of that has done a decent job with ribbon-menus and context-sensitive UI.

So i personally really hope that KDEs answer to those criticisms remains the same
Sure, there is always room for improvement and i am open for new ideas - but please don't dumb down the UI for the sake of some kind of illusive "intuitive" approach...

[Britoid]

The ugly "plastic" look is when no theme is installed for Qt. The distribution really should install a decent default theme. But I know that for example Ubuntu expects you to install the Qt themes manually, which is honestly not acceptable.
Then again, it also expects you to install a compiler manually and all the -dev libs manually too, so I suppose I'm not its target market…

No, distributions should not have to distribute software with modifications for it to look presentable and cohesive, that is not their job.

KDE to me isn't cohesive, there's different design patterns everywhere, icons that don't really make much sense, I could go on. There's also seems to be no single tick box to turn off desktop icons, why?

[grigi]

No, distributions should not have to distribute software with modifications for it to look presentable and cohesive, that is not their job.

KDE to me isn't cohesive, there's different design patterns everywhere, icons that don't really make much sense, I could go on. There's also seems to be no single tick box to turn off desktop icons, why?

No, Gnome owns GTK, whereas KDE doesn't "own" it, but merely helps maintain it. So they can't dictate that a basic theme be installed.

[mr_marmalade]

I've used KDE since 3.something nearly 20years ago. I've occasionally tried Gnome but always bumped into features just not being there and everything being so sparse & given up quickly. I've never understood why people like Gnome so much over KDE, it just seems so unintuitive & limited to me.

KDE isn't perfect & I make some basic changes to it to make it how I like it, but nothing major. I dislike the Breeze theme though; e.g. rather than just showing a little picture of a HDD for a HDD its something with little bits & bobs on it that isn't readily recognisable. I'm not sure if they've changed the 'start' menu icons back to the KDE cog either (because I use Debian stable) but that's another example; an arrow pointing at the taskbar with 3 dots next to it is meant to expand something upwards, eh? What was wrong with the KDE cog that is all over their own website, why throw away that branding in the very place we expect to see it since Windows 95 onwards? So I use the Oxygen icons, they're nice & clean & instantly obvious.

I'd like Wayland to be a super-dooper 100% working thing on KDE like everybody else, but I mean that's just due to my semi-geeky interest, it isn't as if any of the desktops are particularly un-useable on X. I can live with X until it is ready. I've got an nVidia card anyway so its not as if I've had much hope until recently when they submitted some EGL patches or something to KDE; which is good. But Wayland has been in the news for maybe 10years, I doubt I'll even notice it when it becomes the Debian default.

[grigi]

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.

I ran those stuff, but (s)he does too many changes at once. It was very unstable with all those patches together :-(

I do think that the following should be upstreamed:
* The low-latency part except for the ms stretch. Setting it to anything but ZERO causes issues for me.
* The non-linear stuff really makes transitions seem smoother.

[Britoid]

No, Gnome owns GTK, whereas KDE doesn't "own" it, but merely helps maintain it. So they can't dictate that a basic theme be installed.

KDE owns the KDE frameworks which KDE apps use, a lot of apps that use Qt don't use the KDE frameworks and aren't even themable.

[duby229]

I'd settle for an out-of-the-box install that doesn't look like complete ass. As much as I admire the KDE devs and their positions on many things like not putting up with Nvidia's crap, installing KDE on Arch has always left me with a horrible desktop. I know a lot of people favour functionality over appearance, and I respect that, but I like a nice looking DE, and Gnome gives me that, KDE doesn't. Settings menus with large blocks of grey space really don't appeal to me.

you're insane dude.... If three quarters of your screen as empty space and the first quarter as five times too large looks nice to you, then well....... Insane....

[blackiwid]

There's also seems to be no single tick box to turn off desktop icons, why?

Really? I thought KDE is all about having options and configurability, I know some people like it, because they never even tried to live without desktop icons and just are against changes in general, but come on.

It's a bad habit to place the files on the desktop and just shows that your programs must be so bad to navigate folders that you have to bypass that. Of course in Windows I did the same, but it's a really bad idea to manage your desktop by muscle memory on the location of the icons on your desktop because if you ever change the display or use a laptop without external display have fun find your 100 desktop folders.

It also keeps work nonstop in your vision field so you never can chill fully. But again that is all debatable but that you not even have a easy way to activate that is really big hit in the legend that kde would have good customizability, because you just ignore 40-60% of the users that never would use desktop icons.

About gnome's screen usability, I can suggest:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extensi...maximus-three/

It does the same as Maximus and Maximus-two but works with current gnome version

https://github.com/wilfm/GnomeExtensionMaximusTwo

Also I liked:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/

faster animation speeds.

And then you should be able to scale the UI back with the new fractal scaling to your liking.

It seems to me that with gnome you might have to add 1 or 2 small things usability wise but with kde your usability (if you are ok with 1mio settings at every point) is fine but you have to tweak the looks hard.

The problem is that people first choose by looks and functionality later, so therefor KDE will always loose.

I also find interesting that kde people are fine with desktop icons but 1 complains about nautilus not usable enough that suggest to me a very file focused work flow instead of a application focused workflow.

I would argue that the latter is better. But if you do much file operations I can see the critique on nautilus, But then I would argue that nautilus sucks not that gnome sucks because nautilus sucks, that's a bit stupid imho. Sure nautilus is kind of part of the desktop in a way but it's really hard to decode if you say gnome is ugly because you don't like nautilus.

But there is a nautilus fork that has as example still the compact view:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y4uQ2.png

It should integrate well in gnome, so no unsolvable problem

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nemo

[skeevy420]

No, distributions should not have to distribute software with modifications for it to look presentable and cohesive, that is not their job.

KDE to me isn't cohesive, there's different design patterns everywhere, icons that don't really make much sense, I could go on. There's also seems to be no single tick box to turn off desktop icons, why?

While that would be a nice option to simplify what I'm about to post....

All you have to do is remove the .desktop files from the Desktop folder

rm ~/Desktop/*.desktop

or right click the desktop > Customize Desktop > Location > Custom Location > Create a directory with nothing in it and use that

Not trying to be an ass, but it is literally the job of a distribution to make modifications for programs to look presentable and cohesive. The alternatives are called "Arch Linux" & "Gentoo Linux" and you're free to make it look as presentable and cohesive as you wish...or not...

Upstream KDE has no idea what Ubuntu, Manjaro, Debian, or Suse will be doing or if the user will use something like Kvantum so the best they can do is offer Breeze and various Breeze compat packages. Suse and Manjaro have their own forks of those themes to try to make a presentable and cohesive desktop that uses their design & theme standards. It's pretty dumb to think that KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Deepin, Sway, Awesome, or ??? are supposed to follow every design and theme standard for every distribution in existence.

Install Suse or Manjaro. Either one is a great example of how a KDE desktop can be made pretty and cohesive by default. Manjaro even offers an alternative GTK3 that tries to restores the old style so GTK and QT programs look somewhat unified...it's better than default GTK3 but not as good as just using a GTK2 version of something if possible.

Also, there's a big difference between offering something in the repos and properly supporting something in the repos...or the difference between Ubuntu and Neon. Properly supporting something in regards to desktops includes working with themes and having a dedicated UI team to work on having cohesive interfaces and contributing upstream where they can.

[rlkrlk]

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.

KDE3 let you specify default and per-volume filesystem mount options. I'd simply like that option back.

I'm not referring to the 8 or 11 byte filesystem label. I don't care about that. But I want noatime -- very, very badly -- and I want the filenames from my camera memory cards to look like

dcim/100canon/img_0000.jpg

rather than

DCIM/100CANON/IMG_0000.JPG

which can be controlled by means of the appropriate mount options.