KDE Prepares Push For Its New Goals: Accessibility, Environmentally Sustainable, Automate

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Prepares Push For Its New Goals: Accessibility, Environmentally Sustainable, Automate

At this year's KDE annual developer conference, Akademy, they announced new community goals aroun software accessibility, environmentally sustainable software, and automating internal processes. A talk is being held later this month to further their agenda around these goals...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Community-Goals-2022

[tildearrow]

Phoronix: KDE Prepares Push For Its New Goals: Accessibility, Environmentally Sustainable, Automate

At this year's KDE annual developer conference, Akademy, they announced new community goals aroun software accessibility, environmentally sustainable software, and automating internal processes. A talk is being held later this month to further their agenda around these goals...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Community-Goals-2022

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I will give them a easy way of achieving "environmentally sustainable software": trow away the new System Monitor and bring back Ksysguard. The new one is a resource hog and nowhere near the easy of use of Ksysguard.

[ms178]

Environmentally sustainable would also mean to minimize CPU and overall ressource usage. If so, I am all for it.

[V1tol]

Environmentally sustainable would also mean to minimize CPU and overall ressource usage. If so, I am all for it.

That sounds incompatible with QML somehow

[uid313]

And still no focus on the most important thing of all; usability.
So it still remains an unusable mess.

[skeevy420]

I hope that "Boosting Accessibility" includes unifying all the various KDE accounts into one. Talk about user unfriendly needing a different accounts for nearly everything offered on the site. Bugs are one account, pushing commits are another, editing wikis are another, commenting on articles is another...I'm sure there's more that I just haven't tried to do. There ain't nothing accessible about that.

Group policy management for a single account would be much, much better than the status quo of managing multiple accounts to access multiple KDE groups and abilities.

In regards to the actual software, I've always thought that Better Tool Tips would be useful. To make an example up, hovering over an "Audio Codec" selection list and getting a Tip like "Pick an audio codec to use." is not helpful at all. Anybody with half a brain can use context clues to know they select something to use from those lists and if they need help they probably want to know more about audio codecs than they do the function of that specific drop-down list they're hovering over. While having the function of the list helps, that's not actually helpful in regards to making a decision between MP3, FLAC, Opus, Wav, or Speex.

That said, Better Tool Tips that include a lot more information might clutter up fast and annoy people so it could be implemented as a Dynamic Tool Tips feature where you have a Global and Per-App on/off override to either include the extra information in the Tool Tips or to use a minimal Tip that would include a link to more in-depth help located in the KDE documentation.

It might sound weird, but Tool "Tips" and the unhelpful help from the Help Arrow have always been my biggest annoyance with KDE...and most other software and operating systems for that matter. It's disingenuous to single out KDE for something that sucks industry wide. Not gonna lie, software with unhelpful help makes me want to throw a hammer at the developers.

Speaking of KDE documentation, there's a lot of Qt4 references in there. I have to question the relevance of that when Qt6 is right around the corner.

[schmidtbag]

And still no focus on the most important thing of all; usability.
So it still remains an unusable mess.

Either that's user error or you've got enough of an ego to think your opinion applies to everyone. I and I'm sure countless others find KDE perfectly usable. Sure, KDE has its glitches and problems, but so does everything else you can use.

For what it's worth, I say the same about other DEs. People like to trash on GNOME, expecting it to be something it isn't. When you have freedom of choice, why choose something that deliberately works differently than how you want, when you could just choose something that better suits your needs? I also say the same to people who transition from one OS to another (doesn't matter which), where they complain about how the new OS doesn't work the same way as their old one. It's not supposed to. If you want to keep things the same then don't change. This should be obvious.
Ironically, the inverse is also true, where for basically a decade, people have whined about the default aesthetic of KDE, which is so effortless to change. Like really... if you can't handle 5 minutes of tweaking something so mundane, why are you using Linux or *BSD?
</rant>

[Alexmitter]

Since owning a Steam Deck, I am now a regular KDE user and damn is it bad. I previously regularly tried KDE just to keep up to date with it and my judgement was way too easy on it back then. Having to actively use it brings up a whole level of awfulness that you just can not experience by giving it a try once in a while. Everything this desktop does is just clunkly, buggy and horribly designed in terms of UX.

I can't wait for valve to finally add a Flatpak Management software to the system's main shell so I don't have to use this desktop ever again.

Before I was just disappointed in Valve to use KDE, but after using it for a while I am angry because if this is how we represent the Linux desktop then people rightfully say no.

[Danny3]

I hope that with accessibility we will finally have a built-in virtual keyboard.
As for energy efficient, I think they should start working on a Zink backend and most probably a Vulkan backend too to have less overhead on the GPU side.