KDE Developers Had A Very Busy Valentine's Week With Many Plasma Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Developers Had A Very Busy Valentine's Week With Many Plasma Improvements

KDE developers had a very busy Valentine's week with working on more fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.24 as well as making early progress on Plasma 5.25 and improving KDE apps and other areas of their open-source desktop environment...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Valentines-2022

[Steffo]

Some feedback, because I know KDE developers like are reading here:
I'm a Gnome user and I tried KDE Plasma 5.23.x Wayland Session on Fedora 35 and what shall I say? The complete UI is cluttered! I had really difficulties to get into the workflow of KDE Plasma (last time I used it, was maybe two years ago for several months). When Plasma started, I get two irrelevant notifications. The first one I don't remember anymore, but the second one was that ETH0 has connected successfully to the internet. This is the same behaviour for years! I reported this as a bug report years ago, that KDE Plasma is incredible noisy and always wants attention from the user. Having internet access, is a irrelevant information when I boot the computer, because this is what I expect! Even if I manually connect to some WLAN router and this was successful, just show it by showing a WLAN status icon like everybody else.
My next problem was when I opened a window, they appeared in some corners with an inappropriate size. Nothing what a user expects! I had to move and resize the window and this for several applications!
What also disturbed me was animations. It made Plasma subjectively too slow for me and I didn't find the settings to disable this! There were a bunch of sections in the settings and also the search option didn't help. After maybe 30 minutes I removed Plasma again, booted into Gnome and was relieved.
This Plasma experience stressed me as a user and I'm not stupid! I'm a software developer who developed image processing and AI algorithm.
There were so many obvious user experience bugs so that I was really shocked and I had the impression, that KDE Plasma was getting worse in contrast to two years ago and didn't learn anything about user experience in all these years! Just think about it why intelligent people like software developers, data scientist and so on, are using macOS despite being expensive and closed source. It's because the OS doesn't stress the user and many things work out of the box pretty well.
The buzzword customization is no excuse for a bad user experience!

[Devorlon]

Some feedback, because I know KDE developers like are reading here:

Definite agree, despite what I read about Gnome I've not found another DE that just gets out your way while still having a traditional windowing system. Everything else is either visually cluttered or looks like a crude imitation of Windows 95.

[kbios]

Some feedback, because I know KDE developers like are reading here:
I'm a Gnome user and I tried KDE Plasma 5.23.x Wayland Session on Fedora 35 and what shall I say? The complete UI is cluttered! I had really difficulties to get into the workflow of KDE Plasma (last time I used it, was maybe two years ago for several months). When Plasma started, I get two irrelevant notifications. The first one I don't remember anymore, but the second one was that ETH0 has connected successfully to the internet. This is the same behaviour for years! I reported this as a bug report years ago, that KDE Plasma is incredible noisy and always wants attention from the user. Having internet access, is a irrelevant information when I boot the computer, because this is what I expect! Even if I manually connect to some WLAN router and this was successful, just show it by showing a WLAN status icon like everybody else.
My next problem was when I opened a window, they appeared in some corners with an inappropriate size. Nothing what a user expects! I had to move and resize the window and this for several applications!
What also disturbed me where animations. It made Plasma subjectively too slow for me and I didn't find the settings to disable this! There were a bunch of sections in the settings and also the search option didn't help. After maybe 30 minutes I removed Plasma again, booted into Gnome and was relieved.
This Plasma experience stressed me as a user and I'm not stupid! I'm a software developer who developed image processing and AI algorithm.
There were so many obvious user experience bugs so that I was really shocked and I had the impression, that KDE Plasma was getting worse in contrast to two years ago and didn't learn anything about user experience in all these years! Just think about it why intelligent people like software developers, data scientist and so on, are using macOS despite being expensive and closed source. It's because the OS doesn't stress the user and many things work out of the box pretty well.
The buzzword customization is no excuse for a bad user experience!

Well the notifications are completely customizable in system settings, including for what network events you want a popup.

Same for the animations: you can enable, disable and even control their speed with just a few clicks.

I'll agree that default window positioning is sometimes confusing, but IIRC there are some improvements already done in the latest versions

[Steffo]

Well the notifications are completely customizable in system settings, including for what network events you want a popup.

Same for the animations: you can enable, disable and even control their speed with just a few clicks.

Well, guess what: This is what I got as an answer a few years ago in my bug report. But as the Plasma developer, you don't really get what I am talking about...

[ngraham]

Window placement has been changed to Centered by default in Plasma 5.24, so that should help.

Bad default window sizes is a valid complaint, but it's app-specific so we can't fix it without you telling us which app has a bad default window size.

The system notification on login about the network being connected is valid, it mildly annoys me too.

As for animations, you can disable them in System Settings, right on the main page. The UI control for it is literally staring you in the face when you open System Settings: https://i.imgur.com/PtwOK5b.png. Whether animations are too fast or too slow turns out to be a highly personal preference thing, which is why we have this UI to let you control the speed or turn them off.

[arun54321]

Plasma animations are not good tbh. Wrong easing curve or QT limitation or something? IDK. How about learning animations from android & iOS?

Changing animation speed slider is not going to fix it. Taskbar preview animations are awful. Simple lazy fade animation, glitching with blur, No previews for minimized apps, different preview heights among them (one with media controls and one without) etc. May be kde plasma is all time WIP product? or Is it a niche DE designed for "power users" who keep playing with DE, changing themes and stuff without doing actual work? I'm pretty sure steam deck chose plasma just because it had taskbar like windows.

Cluttered UI like windows 2000, XP. Too many buttons here and there in the name of usability and discoverability. Breeze icons in system tray looks like they are from windows 9x. squarish geometric shapes for icons? Really?

Gnome does lot of animations, still looks fast, easy and smooth. (With mutter double/triple buffering patch) . New status icons of adwaita for wifi, battery, sound look good. When KDE is going to improve like them?

[ngraham]

JFYI I just submitted a fix for the unnecessary "Network activated" notification issue: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma...e_requests/105. It didn't turn out to be too hard. Shoulda done that years ago.

We have gotten some complaints about the easing curve we use for our animations, and are looking into changing it. However stuff like this is *really* subjective. It's easy to say, "this animation doesn't feel right" but surprisingly difficult to explain exactly why that is, or propose a change that fixes it. We are very open to suggestions, as this is a common complaint. If you have concrete, actionable suggestions, please do share. Preferably in the form of a bug report--or even better, a merge request, if possible. But an actionable bug report is useful too.

[Vistaus]

Plasma animations are not good tbh. Wrong easing curve or QT limitation or something? IDK. How about learning animations from android & iOS?

Not so familiar with iOS, but the Android animations are appalling, se please don't look at those for inspiration.

[Vistaus]

The system notification on login about the network being connected is valid, it mildly annoys me too.

I find it to be very helpful with my flimsy connection. If you do disable this, at least let me enable it again.