KDE Plasma 5.18 About To Release While Plasma 5.19 Well Under Way

[240Hz]

Different toolkits, different decorations, different rending, different compositors, different UX, different themes.

Desktops will stay fragmented.

Seething because nobody wants to accept your steaming pile of gnome shit.

[smartalgorithm]

Some changes for 5.19 are so minor that I wonder why they didn't put it for 5.18...

[Guest]

Different toolkits, different decorations, different rending, different compositors, different UX, different themes.

Desktops will stay fragmented.

... and many hands ready to steal all.

[tildearrow]

I'm going to probably get a lot of hate for saying this, but this isn't a good idea imo. GTK theming with large changes does break apps, but also a desktop should not be forcefully changing the appearance of apps, that's not what the job of the desktop is and denies the chance for an application author to make their app look how they want. macOS, Windows, Android skins etc do not skin third party apps (HTC tried and got in trouble) and Windows/Mac wouldn't dare ship with a Qt theme.

If a user decides to change it for themselves that's fair game though.

For balance, GNOME does not set any Qt theme settings (or GTK ones).

I agree. Why not let the user change it?

Is KDE slowly being influenced by GNOME and beginning to take options away from the user?

[usta]

Dolphin : User feedback: "so far so good, 160 MB Memory usage. It was ~7GiB before this patch."

Wow a really nice bugfix for dolphin { https://phabricator.kde.org/D27002 }

[Baguy]

Some changes for 5.19 are so minor that I wonder why they didn't put it for 5.18...

They have a feature review period where after that no further features can be added unless they are voted to be critical (kinda like a bug fix: important user experience fix because it annoyed so many people kinda thing EX: Xorg GTK frame extents). 5.18 is going to be a LTS release with a few years of bug fixes, so it's important for the upmost stability as well, which means they want to have plenty of testing done on a feature before it's added.

[Awesomeness]

For balance, GNOME does not set any Qt theme settings

GNOME pretends Qt does not even exist. AdwaitaQt is a Fedora project. GNOME devs would never ever create a Qt theme.

[ssokolow]

I agree. Why not let the user change it?

Is KDE slowly being influenced by GNOME and beginning to take options away from the user?

I don't follow. This is all about making sure that GTK+ applications honour the preference the user selects in the KDE control panel without having to root around in config files like ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

[polarathene]

I agree. Why not let the user change it?

Is KDE slowly being influenced by GNOME and beginning to take options away from the user?

What options do you think are being taken away? Breeze is the default theme you get with Plasma unless the distro has provided their own one(like Manjaro does for example). Setting a Breeze compatible GTK theme by default to go with that unless overridden by the distro provider is an enhancement.

The user after the install is still free to change the defaults to whatever they like. This just ensures you get a more consistent feeling desktop experience from the get go if you enjoy using some GTK apps. Nothing is taken away from the user.

[bug77]

Different toolkits, different decorations, different rending, different compositors, different UX, different themes.

Desktops will stay fragmented.

Luckily for you, there's always Windows or macOS. No fragmentation to speak of over there, enjoy.