KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Reaches Beta With Much Better GTK App Integration

[markc]

FWIW I just updated Manjaro/KDE with the kde-git package repo and this 5.18.80 beta just arrived...

[packages]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://repo.kde-git.manjaro.org/

[Danny3]

It arrived on Kubuntu 19.10 too, but unfortunately it was compiled with a very old version of Qt (5.12.4) from 2018.
I don't understand what's so hard for Kubuntu team to compile it with a more recent version ?

[ngraham]

Wonderful release but I hope that the Support for GTK applications using client-side decorations doesn't mean that the GTK application decide themselves whatever design crap they want to display on my system instead of respecting my wishes that I've set in the control panel, like the "Window decorations".
I've already set a Windows k10 Window decoration preference because I want big rectangular window control buttons (minimize maximize, close) instead of the small round ones, so i can more quickly pinpoint them and click them.

Unfortunately that's not something that's up to us (KDE Plasma devs). GNOME apps that draw their own titlebars can't easily be told to stop doing this and use the window-manager drawn titlebar. Some individual apps such as Lollypop offer an option to disable this, but most don't. There are invasive hacks that can be done to patch GTK itself so that it forces these apps to ask the window manager to render the titlebar, but it's buggy and has side effects and also isn't really appropriate for Plasma to be doing.

We put a lot of work into making apps look and feel better when using CSDs, which was pretty much the best we could do given these limitations. Hopefully it's at least a lot better than it used to be!

You're doing a great job andI really appreciate all your work.
KDE is awesome!

Thanks for the kind words!

[bug77]

Thanks for the kind words!

What, you still need people to tell you KDE is awesome? The only reason I bitch about it from time to time is that most of the time it feels it's just a few fixes away from greatness. And then there's Discover

[ngraham]

Hopefully Discover has gotten a lot better over the years. I know it's not yet perfect but IMO the Plasma 5.18 version is worlds better than the junky one we shipped with last LTS (5.12).

[ireri]

Hopefully Discover has gotten a lot better over the years. I know it's not yet perfect but IMO the Plasma 5.18 version is worlds better than the junky one we shipped with last LTS (5.12).

Can confirm, Discover in 5.17 is pretty usable, I've been using it since 5.16 for updating my system and it's been surprisingly reliable. There are some cases when you still need to use the CLI or Muon like when you want to autoremove packages or uninstalling manually installed .deb but each update Discover becomes more solid.