KDE Developers Still Managing Interesting Improvements Amid The World Happenings

[theriddick]

Is there any user experience benefits using Wayland yet? (obviously you can't with nvidia drivers because they hate wayland).

[paupav]

I don't think they're ugly. I like them very much.
What exactly do you think is ugly?

It feels janky. My biggest problem with design is that button size is either too big or too small, spacing, margins are never correct. There is always either too much or too little spacing. Consider following example (default flatpak instalation on my system):


KOLOURPAINT:
1. look at the tools. left row is much wider than the right one. Also there is too much horizontal spacing between tools (are those icons part of OS's/Flatpaks icon set? if yes why?)
2. why does toolbar with New, Open, Save options exist.
Those options are already present in "File" tab in menu bar, there should be options that are used while editing image.
Most of the users already know where Save button is or know shortcut for saving file.
3. look how much vertical space is wasted at the bottom
4. look at that transition between menubar and toolbar; it looks very ugly here and so does on kde's default theme where bunch of space is wasted. Header bar looks great when you consider how much headerbar and toolbar are wasting horizontal space here and not adding any value for new nor for the users that are have been using that program for a while.
5. kolourpaint doesn't change your cursor to anything so it is janky to use. It is actually really hard to know where is tip of a cursor

DRAWING:
1. all the tools are there for maximum productivity.
2. looks nice, all the space is used for something.
3. it takes 1 more click to get to colour palette
4. doesn't have spray paint tool
5. has bugs

look how much drawing space we get at the end with same height.
I'm sleepy sorry for bad english here.

Patches welcome.

I'm actually considering doing that, hopefully my redesign will be accepted.

[ehansin]

It feels janky. My biggest problem with design is that button size is either too big or too small, spacing, margins are never correct. There is always either too much or too little spacing. Consider following example (default flatpak instalation on my system):

What GTK theme are you using for the image above (right side of course)? I am okay with Gnome, but actually, in my opinion a lot of their defaults are kind of ugly. I'll spell it all out some day, but there is a lot about its appearance I think just looks amateur hour. But I see the potential. I have my reason why I stay away from KDE, but I wish it well. I'd love to see code sharing and ideas between the two camps, maybe that already happens.

[vladimir86]

I actually like KDE, but stopped using it because rogue processes and the bloody Baloo file extractor using 100% of my cpu. The baloo problem was as easy as not starting it up (why it auto starts anyway? It never finishes "indexing"), but the kdei.so.5 process if I remember well the name was a recurring bug that goes back to 2012. Forced me to check top every time my laptop would overheat and kill the process. It will resuscitate after a few minutes of use tho.

Funny enough it happens in most distros but Slackware -current, so maybe there is some sort of bugged library that the maintainer of current is aware off, but I never managed to solve the issue, nor find a proper solution googling it. Maybe I am unlucky and not many people experiences this?

[c2p_]

I actually like KDE, but stopped using it because rogue processes and the bloody Baloo file extractor using 100% of my cpu. The baloo problem was as easy as not starting it up (why it auto starts anyway? It never finishes "indexing"), but the kdei.so.5 process if I remember well the name was a recurring bug that goes back to 2012. Forced me to check top every time my laptop would overheat and kill the process. It will resuscitate after a few minutes of use tho.

Funny enough it happens in most distros but Slackware -current, so maybe there is some sort of bugged library that the maintainer of current is aware off, but I never managed to solve the issue, nor find a proper solution googling it. Maybe I am unlucky and not many people experiences this?

If I remember correctly Nepomuk was a nightmare for CPU and thrashed my HDD for hours. Later it disapeared and Baloo worked OK for me, but I can't use it since I switched from Gentoo to Kubuntu in 2018 because it crashes a few seconds after startup, the same when I run 'balooctl enable' in terminal, it crashes 2 seconds after start, so problem "solved" itself.

[thxcv]

It feels janky. My biggest problem with design is that button size is either too big or too small, spacing, margins are never correct. There is always either too much or too little spacing. Consider following example (default flatpak instalation on my system):

First of all nice answer. Second from your screenshot i would actually agree with most of your points...

So i just installed it on my system to check it out.
1. They changed it, the vertical spacing is correct now.
2. Agreed, at least it is configurable
4. Transitions also look different here, not perfect but better than in your screenshot
5. Cursor changes here
All of the points: I agree, there is too much space wasted in this one....

[skierpage]

I actually like KDE, but stopped using it because rogue processes and the bloody Baloo file extractor using 100% of my cpu. The baloo problem was as easy as not starting it up (why it auto starts anyway? It never finishes "indexing"),

Baloo works great until it doesn't. I like having a full text index for when ripgrep falls short, and its integration with Dolphin plus command-line tool is nice. I haven't had to disable Baloo due to maxing out CPU for several years as developers have fixed bugs. My problem 9 months ago was indexing would crash on a large panoramic JPEG (a bug in the exiv2 image parsing library IIRC) leaving an incomplete index, but it's OK now. If I leave

balooctl monitor

. running and rebuild the index it reports many problems indexing files but doesn't crash or max CPU, and I find the files I expect.

It's frustrating when something that's supposed to unobtrusively make your experience better causes problems, but building an index is hard; Windows indexing has given me equal problems over the last decade. If Baloo doesn't work either disable it and move on or dig in and help the developers with a great bug report.

but the kdei.so.5 process...

That doesn't ring a bell.

[mcloud]

It feels janky. My biggest problem with design is that button size is either too big or too small, spacing, margins are never correct. There is always either too much or too little spacing. Consider following example (default flatpak instalation on my system):
[snip]

None of this has anything to do with QT, It's just author's choice. I'm pretty sure kolorpaint is cloning window's paint app

[gregzeng]

Two KDE white men - USA?
Compare that to the GNOME team: generally Asian, not from the USA.

[gregzeng]

I don't think they're ugly. I like them very much.
What exactly do you think is ugly?

No shading, no curves. Sans-serif, rather than serif, but in the GUI design overall.
Also many other bad, bad features of KDE, but will mention this in a different comment.