KDE Usability & Productivity Initiative Coming To An End

[ngraham]

Discover is almost getting visually pleasant as the PackageKit frontends from 10 years ago, what about making these giant fonts respect the system settings?

In fact they do. We use the Kirigami Heading component, which is always a multiple of the system font. I can understanding wanting it to be a smaller multiple though. I'll consider it.

[ngraham]

Nice to hear about the initiative. As a staunch KDE user, I have not noticed much (if anything) in the way of usability improvements between the current version and 5.0. In fact, the #1 annoyance in KDE (for me, anyway) is still alive and kicking.

Well what is it?

[ngraham]

I am very glad for this initiative, as it has already made amazing changes in plasma. I really hope the next initiative is the security or wayland focus. How can one vote on the phabricator? ngraham

I actually have no idea lol. The voting procedures haven't been announced yet.

[ngraham]

ngraham
Please make the application search trainable by default so that most used programs show up first when typing the first characters of their names (and ordering should also make sense in general, e.g. show first the main launcher of something and only after it some sub function of it). I don't know why so many desktops lack this fundamental feature when pressing the meta key, at least by default.

This is what's supposed to happen, since it uses the KRunner data store, which has this feature. If it's not working properly, please file a bug so we can investigate and fix it! It would be helpful if you could mention whether or not the feature works from KRunner itself.

[bug77]

Well what is it?

It's when an application crashes and you're asked whether you'd like to submit a bug report. And you click "yes", only to be informed you can't actually submit a bug report, because the app doesn't provide a link for that.
I understand why it works the way it does and that it may not be easy to change. But it's annoying nonetheless.

Discover got annoying at some point, too. But I was able to fix that by learning apt, zypper and pacman instead. Yup, that's how unusable it is, it is easier to guess and grep package names than it is to sift through the countless results Discover returns that have no relation to what you have searched.

[timofonic]

It's when an application crashes and you're asked whether you'd like to submit a bug report. And you click "yes", only to be informed you can't actually submit a bug report, because the app doesn't provide a link for that.
I understand why it works the way it does and that it may not be easy to change. But it's annoying nonetheless.

Discover got annoying at some point, too. But I was able to fix that by learning apt, zypper and pacman instead. Yup, that's how unusable it is, it is easier to guess and grep package names than it is to sift through the countless results Discover returns that have no relation to what you have searched.

I agree. Discover sucks. The same about all that bloated desktop search too, for example.

KDE needs an extreme overhaul to be a competitive desktop environment against mainstream and alternative ones. It sucks less than Gnome, but even a monkey can do it better than GTK world.

[ngraham]

It's when an application crashes and you're asked whether you'd like to submit a bug report. And you click "yes", only to be informed you can't actually submit a bug report, because the app doesn't provide a link for that.

What do you mean by "because the app doesn't provide a link for that." Are you talking about distros like Arch that don't provide debug symbols so the crash reports are useless? Or something else?

[DanL]

I still use Synaptic in a Debian-based KDE environment. None of the proposed relacements (synaptic-qt, Muon, Discover) ever really panned out to give me something as fast and intuitive as Synaptic.

[M@yeulC]

I agree. Discover sucks. The same about all that bloated desktop search too, for example.

KDE needs an extreme overhaul to be a competitive desktop environment against mainstream and alternative ones. It sucks less than Gnome, but even a monkey can do it better than GTK world.

Well, discover sucked, but it has been greatly improving. I've never used it for system packages, though, I am too afraid of missing important warning/notices that pacman tells me (as well as minor ones, like "new optional dependencies"). I've used it for flatpak just fine (except it couldn't update the runtimes, or download new runtimes when updating, so that was rather limited. Oh, and it lacks (lacked?) sandbox/permissions controls for flatpaks too. So yeah, not quite usable yet, but it makes a nice flathub browser. Kirigami has improved a lot, and I'm glad that Discover will be available on plasma mobile.

It feels like KDE concentrated a lot of effort on plasma. That's much needed, but I think the VDG would need to pick the top "productivity" applications, and work on making their interface more approachable to beginners, while rethinking some bits. I would personally identify dolphin, gwenview, kolourpaint as part of that "base" package. With a media player that actually works, not sure which one that would be*. Maybe also kwrite/kate. I'm just approaching this from the point of view of a member of my family that's starting to study medecine, and has a KDE desktop.

*DragonPlayer wasn't able to play a movie in ages for me. THere's cantata, amarok and juk, but not sure which one would be best suited for playing media off a USB stick?

And then there's Wayland support. Surprisingly, not everyone is on-board with this one, and I see a lot of X-only features being added (that's not necessarily a bad thing, though). That's the main reason (besides wanting to try tiling, and something light) I jumped ship to sway. I understand it was delayed by Qt, and I actually got rid of most Qt apps I have (they still exhibit weird font issues when switching VT or resuming, for instance). But this would be a much welcome change of focus.
I'd like to switch back to KDE, to get back some of the polish sway lacks (even waybar is pretty rough). Or maybe mix-and-match pieces. But I guess I will have to hack kwin to get some proper tiling features and shortcuts.

One of the best cards KDE can play is the one of versatility: provide everyone with an environment they're familiar and able to work with. I recall an april fool for picking the user interface, that was somewhat implemented later. How about changing the set of shortcuts together with that? I see more and more windows-inspired default shortcuts, and a lot of them don't make much sense to me. I've grown used to only using meta for compositor/desktop shortcuts, leaving Alt for apps, for instance.

Now, if I could get another April fool's moonshot... http://www.alexl.netsons.org/117/ :P

[M@yeulC]

I agree. Discover sucks. The same about all that bloated desktop search too, for example.

Open source software tends to be cutting edge in some regards (where people are interested), while subpar in others. Search takes a lot of resources, at the wrong time. Indexation should only occur when nothing else needs the system (disk, network, CPU, RAM). I had to disable it on a lot of systems that were ram-constrained with a slow HDD -- or even SSDs. Due to Linux's poor handling of low-memory cases, all right, but that's no excuse for pulling this out when someone (a non techie) is actually working on their computer.

I'm always sad when I disable it, because the search functionality (especially full-text for PDFs) is top-notch