KDE Plasma 5.14 Beta Brings Many Improvements, Especially Wayland Polishing

[M@yeulC]

Will https://phabricator.kde.org/T4457 (virtual desktop protocol) land on time for 5.14? That, and a few bugs are preventing me from switching to Wayland for now, but it's steadily improving

[Hi-Angel]

About the only thing I can put my finger on (apart from me being accustomed to the GNOME HIG) is that I actively prefer the paradigm where settings changes are instantaneous and settings dialogs only have a "Reset" and a "Close" button. My argument is that on KDE, if you change a setting and move on to another settings pane without pressing "Apply" or "OK", a pop up dialog appears asking if I want to save the settings changes I just made.

That to me is evidence of a poor UX paradigm, as it clearly doesn't do what I expect and needs to resort to extra questions instead of just assuming that, yes, I clicked a setting because I really, truly wanted to change it and and I actively expect it to be changed once I ask it to change by interacting with it.

It also results in the weird situation where the view (the settings I see) and the model (the settings which are currently in effect) are intermittently out of sync until I press "Apply" or "OK". I get that this behaviour is similar to the old MS Windows paradigm of settings changes, but I would like to point out that I believe this changed with Metro and Modern UI (and of course Android and iOS), meaning that this paradigm is no longer universal -- quite the opposite in fact.

I glad to finally meet someone for whom those settings in various apps were re-done to exclude "apply" button. Because till now I had the feeling UI designers just go crazy — as they probably always do — and change stuff around for no reason at all.

I hate when there's no "Apply" button, because this means I can't change stuff just to see how it going to look like, and simply cancel if you didn't like it. The "Reset" button you're voting for would return you to some very distant default state, thus making every setting you changed for the system's lifetime to go into trash.

I bet you don't want to occasionally turn your mouse acceleration or screen contrast all the way up, and then to figure out it's very hard to undo the option because you don't see anything or the cursor is moving too fast. And with your paradigm you can't just close the window without applying it either.

So yeah, I consider it bad design to not have "Apply" button, and FYI I'm confused as well when I see a settings panel that lacks one.

EDIT: BTW, more real-world usecase that I worried about: it often happens that you scroll through a settings panel, and then some list-like widget gets under the cursor, and gets occasionally changed because of the scroll. And you have no idea what was the default state, before that happened. In my world you simply press "Cancel", and return back there; in your world a user would swear the designers that removed the "Cancel" button, and starts reading through the list and docs trying to figure out what should that be.

[shmerl]

Any chance they fixed the segmentation fault while using Wayland?

Not yet. Still happening and neither KDE nor AMD developers figured it out yet. Are you using AMD GPU?

[shmerl]

Which one? I do use it every day and it is very stable.

By the way, I managed to uninstall xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu and xserver-xorg-video-vesa in Debian. The crash is still happening in the Wayland session, so it's not related to it. It's something to do with messed up amdgpu and Wayland interaction.

Also, AMD developers commented they don't observe it in Arch, but they do see it in Debian. So may be it's something Debian specific. I might open a Debian bug about too, just not sure for which package.

[sa666666]

Pretty nice updates! And it is interesting that with KDE you always feel that it needs fixes and you always wait for newer versions with hope...

The very definition of "damning with faint praise".

[brrrrttttt]

By the way, I managed to uninstall xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu and xserver-xorg-video-vesa in Debian. The crash is still happening in the Wayland session, so it's not related to it. It's something to do with messed up amdgpu and Wayland interaction.

Also, AMD developers commented they don't observe it in Arch, but they do see it in Debian. So may be it's something Debian specific. I might open a Debian bug about too, just not sure for which package.

The bug says both Fedora and Arch don't hit the bug... so it's yet again ancient Debian packages with a bunch of Debian-specific patches?

[shmerl]

Packages aren't ancient, but possibly built in a different way. Anyway, the actual core is happening in kwin_wayland during interaction with libwayland. I'll open libwayland bug about it.

[Vistaus]

Not yet. Still happening and neither KDE nor AMD developers figured it out yet. Are you using AMD GPU?

Not even the Intel developers have figured it out as Plasma Wayland also segfaults on my Intel card. Both on my previous as well as my current laptop.

[Vistaus]

I glad to finally meet someone for whom those settings in various apps were re-done to exclude "apply" button. Because till now I had the feeling UI designers just go crazy — as they probably always do — and change stuff around for no reason at all.

I hate when there's no "Apply" button, because this means I can't change stuff just to see how it going to look like, and simply cancel if you didn't like it. The "Reset" button you're voting for would return you to some very distant default state, thus making every setting you changed for the system's lifetime to go into trash.

I bet you don't want to occasionally turn your mouse acceleration or screen contrast all the way up, and then to figure out it's very hard to undo the option because you don't see anything or the cursor is moving too fast. And with your paradigm you can't just close the window without applying it either.

So yeah, I consider it bad design to not have "Apply" button, and FYI I'm confused as well when I see a settings panel that lacks one.

EDIT: BTW, more real-world usecase that I worried about: it often happens that you scroll through a settings panel, and then some list-like widget gets under the cursor, and gets occasionally changed because of the scroll. And you have no idea what was the default state, before that happened. In my world you simply press "Cancel", and return back there; in your world a user would swear the designers that removed the "Cancel" button, and starts reading through the list and docs trying to figure out what should that be.

I personally agree with the previous poster, however, I do agree with you that for a few things, like applying themes and mouse settings, the Apply button is nice. But for the majority of settings, I like the instantaneous ones.

[Vistaus]

Which one? I do use it every day and it is very stable.

Not for me. Plasma Wayland crashes pretty fast after opening stuff for me. And mind you, I'm using Intel hardware, which is said to be the best supported on Wayland. GNOME Shell, on the other hand, is very stable on Wayland on this same hardware (but it's too resource-hungry, so I don't use it).