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

[cl333r]

KDE Plasma is incredible noisy and always wants attention from the user.

Same here. It has too many options "on" by default. And the messages stay for too long you have to click on them to get rid of quickly. It's annoying feels like KDE is lonely and needs attention.

What also disturbed me were animations. It made Plasma subjectively too slow for me and I didn't find the settings to disable this!

Same, despite reports of making it fast overall Plasma (5.24) is more sluggish than Gnome (and I hate Gnome). IMHO the Plasma devs must develop Plasma using HDD disks, not SSDs because i.e. doing a cold search for an app from the start menu stutters and I'm pretty sure it's because there's I/O going on and when you're on an SSD you barely notice it. Gnome is fluid no matter what, even on HDDs.
[/QUOTE]

I'm creating a file browser [1] and QClipboard doesn't work under Wayland with Qt 5.15.x (Ubuntu 21.10), so cut/copy/paste of files doesn't work at all on Wayland - I don't have any X11 specific code. Have no idea what's wrong. Dolphin somehow works but it uses other backends like KIO so it's too deep to research.

[1] https://github.com/f35f22fan/Cornus

[arun54321]

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

AOSP 12+ animations look good enough. I'm not talking about OEM skins like miui, oxygen os, one ui.

[bug77]

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

Telling a Gnome user about settings, sheesh

On a positive note, I can see accent colors now allow choosing a custom color. Idk when that sneaked in, I'm pretty sure it wasn't there a few releases ago. Much appreciated, it's very useful in conjunction with various color themes.

[makosol]

I like to have the notification about internet connection, it is a change in the system, which notifications are for.

[makosol]

After maybe 30 minutes I removed Plasma again, booted into Gnome and was relieved.
[...] 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.

So why don't they use GNOME instead ??

[Steffo]

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

I looked at the patch and you actually get notified, if you loose connection. But you don't get notified, if you have connection.

[Steffo]

So why don't they use GNOME instead ??

Because macOS and the whole Apple ecosystem, is still the reference, when it comes to the best out of the box user experience.

[ngraham]

I looked at the patch and you actually get notified, if you loose connection. But you don't get notified, if you have connection.

...And even then, only within 10 seconds of logging into the system. Thereafter, you are always notified of both activations and deactivations.

[Steffo]

...And even then, only within 10 seconds of logging into the system. Thereafter, you are always notified of both activations and deactivations.

Yeah, this was in respect to the boot process. But still: You have to be aware, that this is a KDE Plasma way. Other OS don't do this at all and in my opinion KDE people have to learn about user experience from other OS and not the other way around! It would be wise if you would do that.
Many developers think, that if there is no technical bug, everything is OK, not to mention if it is customizable. This is the exact reason why this obvious user experience bug survived for years and even pointing that out in a bug report, they didn't see any issue, because this is not a technical bug. In my opinion, KDE developers need to be lead by UX people. My impression is, that developers are in charge about (almost) everything. I have no other explanation for this UX bugs.

[ngraham]

This is the exact reason why this obvious user experience bug survived for years and even pointing that out in a bug report, they didn't see any issue, because this is not a technical bug.

Speaking from the perspective of being a colleague of all major KDE developers, I am happy to report that this assertion is completely false. The reason why the bug went unresolved for so long is a simple manpower shortage. Too much code, not enough developers to work on it, and the issue in question is at worst a minor and temporary annoyance, not even a functional bug. Worth fixing, yes (and that's why I decided to try fixing it today) but lower priority than other issues, given KDE's limited development resources.

Most UX issues in KDE software haven't been fixed simply because there is a finite amount of time in the day to fix them, and other things may be deemed more important (e.g. fixing functional defects and regressions, porting away from deprecated and soon-to-be-deleted APIs, improving performance, and making the Wayland session work better). Not because our developers are a bunch of UX-ignorant basement-dwellers.