KDE Will Prioritize Wayland, Consistency & Apps Over The Next Two Years

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Will Prioritize Wayland, Consistency & Apps Over The Next Two Years

This summer KDE was looking for ideas on new goals to pursue along the likes of their successful Usability + Productivity initiative. In marking the start of their annual Akademy developer conference in Milan, the KDE developers announced their new set of goals to focus on for the next two years...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-2019-Goals

[tildearrow]

I agree that the Wayland compositor is still in early stages, and doesn't feel right at the moment.

[Baguy]

I am so glad that this won as the initiative! Wayland is extremely promising, and if the plasma devs can get as much momentum in it as they did with the usability initiative, then we will definitely be getting big progress in the future. For now i'd personally like to see mainly bug fixes for Wayland, but i am definitely interested to see what they cook up.

[skeevy420]

I'm undecided. I don't know if consistency means more or less apps will start with the letter K

I know I'd prefer "KDE Audio Mixer" or "KDE Audio Manager" over "KMix". Yeah, there's filter by description, but that's just not the same nor does every program even have that menu entry so it falls back on its name so you have Sound Mixer and Music Player next to PulseEffects and then there's trying to determine what Image Editor , Paint Program, or Drawing Program are and which one I should use to make funny cat pictures (more about consistency with non-KDE/Plasma programs and new user confusion over what's what).

Hint: They're Gimp, KolourPaint, & LibreOffice Draw and Yes, Maybe, Oh Hell No.

[dragon321]

I'm undecided. I don't know if consistency means more or less apps will start with the letter K

I think they dropped this idea. We have Falkon, Dolphin, Okular, Gwenview etc.

I wish they would change some older names to new. For example I don't like name "KSysGuard". "KDE System Monitor" would be better name.

[ms178]

What about performance improvements / new features for their OpenGL backend or Vulkan to replace it in the long run? I haven't heard too much about it since Martin Gräßlin was in favor of OpenGL improvements back then, but Vulkan matured quite a bit in the meantime while KDE is still only OpenGL 3.1 at best.

[R41N3R]

I'm quite happy that they acknowledge Wayland now as a priority and that it's current state leaves much to desire especially when considering open bugs like the subsurface flickering! I personally would love to see a Vulkan back-end in favor of OpenGL, I'm sure it would allow to focus more on stability in the long run (RADV works exceptional well, Android 10 enforces Vulkan, ...), but if they won't do this in the near future I might be able to run Plasma/Kwin at least on top of Zink :-)
A focus on consistency and KDE apps sounds great too. I hope they will split KDE Applications in core and experimental packages. Kicker should go to trash, unstable applications should be moved out of the core packages making it clear that they must be improved (e.g. Kmail), get rid of Konqueror in favor of Falkon (why do we need 2 browsers?), make sure that the user will see much less KDE Plasma or application crashes, provide one nice music player that actually works, make breeze visually nice and clean, enforce a consistent app look and feel, remove the need for a new user to first customize KDE before it looks and works fine, promote beautiful applications like latte-dock, provide an easy backup utility, provide a profile sync for multiple machines e.g. based on Nextcloud, get rid of stupid messages like when opening a Nextcloud webdav folder, improve the bug reporting utility, make multi monitor setups work, do not copy files twice when copying them to a network location, improve touchscreen usage, make notifications less annoying, allow fractional scaling on Wayland, let flatpak applications work fine on Wayland, ... and last but not least improve stability.

[EarthMind]

Didn't they say they put X11 on a feature freeze before and then they continued porting new features to X11?

[ms178]

I'm quite happy that they acknowledge Wayland now as a priority and that it's current state leaves much to desire especially when considering open bugs like the subsurface flickering! I personally would love to see a Vulkan back-end in favor of OpenGL, I'm sure it would allow to focus more on stability in the long run (RADV works exceptional well, Android 10 enforces Vulkan, ...), but if they won't do this in the near future I might be able to run Plasma/Kwin at least on top of Zink :-)
A focus on consistency and KDE apps sounds great too. I hope they will split KDE Applications in core and experimental packages. Kicker should go to trash, unstable applications should be moved out of the core packages making it clear that they must be improved (e.g. Kmail), get rid of Konqueror in favor of Falkon (why do we need 2 browsers?), make sure that the user will see much less KDE Plasma or application crashes, provide one nice music player that actually works, make breeze visually nice and clean, enforce a consistent app look and feel, remove the need for a new user to first customize KDE before it looks and works fine, promote beautiful applications like latte-dock, provide an easy backup utility, provide a profile sync for multiple machines e.g. based on Nextcloud, get rid of stupid messages like when opening a Nextcloud webdav folder, improve the bug reporting utility, make multi monitor setups work, do not copy files twice when copying them to a network location, improve touchscreen usage, make notifications less annoying, allow fractional scaling on Wayland, let flatpak applications work fine on Wayland, ... and last but not least improve stability.

While stability / consistency across their app infrastructure is "nice to have", I'd argue that it is a distraction of developer attention which could be used better to complement the Wayland goal (e.g. as mentioned above Vulkan/performance and keep the efforts on usability going). I don't mind if they focus on the apps which serve a high user base / are necessary because no popular alternative already fullfills the functionality. But that might be their Imageviewer, Dolphin, KDenlive and maybe three other apps. In my eyes there is no need for two browsers, KMail, PIM and a bunch of other software I never bothered to use even once as there are plenty of good alternatives out there already.

[phoenk]

Didn't they say they put X11 on a feature freeze before and then they continued porting new features to X11?

That was just kwin, the window manager and compositor. The rest of the ecosystem was not on any sort of feature freeze.