KDE Landed Many Last Minute Features Ahead Of The Plasma 6.1 Beta

[creative]

I'm still on 5.27.11. Been using KDE Plasma exclusively for a week now. Really enjoying it, smart compositing is great. Probably going to stay on it for awhile. Can always go back to XFCE. Plasma is simply more integrated when it comes to some things. Never thought I'd actually like KDE this much.

Breeze Dark theme is the best thing I have experienced visually as far as desktop aesthetics go.

[skeevy420]

I imagine this information in a tooltips is difficult to maintain if it is detailed, because it requires translation into all languages. Maybe it would be enough to include these things in "help" if they are not already there now.

It could be in a side panel. It could be anywhere. Instead, it's nowhere and we're left to assume.

On Windows it's a brief description about what everything does. Frankly, the Windows descriptions aren't very good and we're left assuming with them, too. What makes them tolerable is that we can click on Change Settings and are given a hair less than what's offered on the KDE power settings: display and sleep times. We click on Change Advanced Settings and a completely separate program opens up that has fine grained controls and tells us what is happening with everything.

What sucks on Windows is that Power Settings buried 3 deep from the Control Panel and not linked to in their Settings app. You have to know to either go to the Control Panel or Search for power settings in Windows search bar (not the search in the Windows Settings app because you won't find it there).

Two separate yet joined Settings Management Systems. Fucking Windows

Moving basic information to a popup or a side panel or tooltip or anywhere near the top level of the power settings instead of nowhere or 3 deep in a completely separate Control Panel would make KDE more user friendly than Windows.

[aufkrawall]

I've just noticed that you can now bind krunner in custom hotkeys UI to meta key without hassle. Nice.

[thxcv]

They've removed a lot of them. Enough of them that tooltips are mostly pointless on KDE. I can say the same thing about tooltips on Windows. There's a clear divide in tooltips between legacy elements that have them and new elements that don't have them, both KDE and Windows. It sucks, tooltips can be very helpful.

There's everything to explain on the energy profiles page. Does it change governors? Set frequency limits? Change brightness? Change timeouts? Turn USB ports on or off? Unmount idle disks? It doesn't say what anything actually does. I can assume what everything does based on their names, but I also know that different BIOS/UEFI implementations, CPUs, monitors, LED lighting, etc don't allow the user to change any of that. Some things are on or off and high or low. It'd be nice to know what they're doing and if the system supports what's happening. I also know that Performance, Balanced, and Power Save do different things depending on the OS and software installed and that I shouldn't be making KDE assumptions based on GNOME or Windows. Not saying what any of them do anywhere is bad design, period.

Governor: AMD P-State Performance
Max Frequency: 5.4Ghz
Min Frequency: 400mhz
Screen Brightness: 100%
LED Lighting Brightness: 100%
Standby: Off
Hibernation: Off
Monitor Timeout: 30 Mins
Front USB Panel: On
Audio Volume: Muted

That's the kind of information that a side panel or tooltip should be providing here.

I've always thought that some tooltips should be expandable. You mouse over an option and it says the usual basic, almost ignorant tip like "Use the Performance Power Plan" but you'd be able to click the tip expansion icon and get the information above. Tip expansion could be used to hide tutorials and provide more information for things that aren't inherently intuitive.

I kept asking this myself but all it does is change the ACPI performance profile. So it depends on the platform you are using and that is probably why there are no details.
Anyhow, at least they could say that and refer to the ACPI profile documention, and show that it switches to "quiet" for example if you set it to balanced....

[DumbFsck]

The reason such bugs really fruatrate me, is because while Windows may have its own share of bugs (usually due to Microsoft breaking something with its Windows updates), when it comes to everything graphics related, let's face it, Windows is MUCH more robust.

On Windows, have you ever heard about cases like single app crashing your entire desktop session, or crashing it simply by moving your mouse cursor "in a certain way" or doing something too quickly, or the fact that simply power cycling your monitor causes a desktop session crash (or some app crash specifically on Gnome Wayland)?
I haven't

I have. I won't be able to remember them likedtildearrow did; but suffice to say that the only reason I know that "explorer.exe" is their desktop was because of crashes that left me with an empty 'desktop' showing only the wallpaper, then I had to open the 'run' program through hot keys (was it meta+r?) and restart explorer.exe.

Also I remember when a computer came with a keyboard that had a calculator key, I used it to open calculators until Windows locked up, it was less than 50, everything froze and I had to forcefully restart, taskmanager didn't work/open, run/execute didn't work, nothing, only pressing the reboot button in the front io.

Many times everything froze when opening certain games. Many times some windows process leaked memory and forced me to periodically reboot (idk, once every couple of days?).

I haven't used Windows in a long while, but I've seen similar things happen in other people's computers, then they ask me to help them fix it. I've seen it in basically every version of Windows.


I won't pretend that linux on the desktop is perfect, it does have many issues, sure. But to say that Windows doesn't have them and that sometimes Windows issues are even worse is madness.

Every similar issue I had with linux I could at least open another tty (alt shift + number? I don't even remember) and the system worked, so I could restart whatever program needed it, kill whatever was problematic etc.

And to my, during my use the past idk, three?, years I haven't had such issues. I'm not denying they exist, but saying I haven't had them. Maybe my distro is too well tested? Maybe I'm just lucky.


I DO think though that being open-source and writing blog posts etc., linux distros and DEs and software "expose" much more of their issues than Windows does, so that gives the IMPRESSION of it being much more broken than windows even if it's not. Imagine if Windows patch notes came with blog posts saying "fixed a crash in a rare occasion when a race condition between terminating a process through task manager while also pressing the 'x' button to close the window could close another unrelated program", even if no one ever had such thing happen, people would still talk about it as Windows being broken or how the system design itself is subpar and how their OCD doesn't let them use Windows...

[dfyt]

I'm still on 5.27.11. Been using KDE Plasma exclusively for a week now..

I'm using arch and haven't updated to 6. Every now and then I update - test it out and within 30 mins rollback with timeshift to 5.27 - Still get blurry text, icons, misaligned fonts, sluggish performance, forced to use poorly implemented scaling, broken shortcuts - when compared to 5.27 and this on highend hw. Stick to 5.27 as long as you can. 5.27 is like the Naboo Royal Starship vs a pod racer in terms of polish.

[creative]

dfyt
I'm on Slackware current running kernel 6.9.2 atm. Yeah that's interesting yet not so interesting that Plasma 6 is slower. Maybe they will be optimizing stuff down the line?

Generally on this distribution they do tend to wait until software is fairly mature before implementing stuff, even though it's a developmental branch. Not booted into stable for awhile, sure I have some updates pending.

[ahrs]

Yep. David Edmundson opened merge request for GTK4 2 years ago but it hasn't landed yet.

He also opened one for SDL so not just Qt. SDL merged bits of it with no issue but since the GNOME folks can't play nice and think "this is a stupid idea", it won't make it for GTK. They'll just have to keep crashing.