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

[acobar]

Graham,

If you are reading this, my only complaint is about kRunner and Search. Please, let it be to have an option to fix the size of them instead of let them change dynamically their size. The animation is ugly and unnecessarily slow down the keystrokes, also, if the search results get bigger, a list is the natural presentation form, anyway.

Rest of KDE is already awesome and getting even better by day.

Congrats to all KDE developers.

[alcalde]

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...

Good distros take the default KDE and sculpt it into something beautiful.

I can't wrap my mind around someone being "stressed" because they got a notification that their Internet was active. It's Linux; *real* Linux. That means you can make it whatever you want to be with the force of your will, unlike Gnome. Embrace the power KDE has given you and achieve your dreams.

[alcalde]

So why don't they use GNOME instead ??

Because no one cares about any of the things these people are talking about. No one gets "stressed" over their desktop or they'd never leave their bed in the morning. This is just Gnome users trying to come up with some reason to bash KDE because it's not Gnome.

Stick 98% of the population (Windows or OS X users) in front of a Gnome desktop and they'll have no idea what the hell they're supposed to do. KDE is normal and it works. I've been using it for 8+ hours a day since July 18, 2010 and I have no idea what these people are complaining about. It's like the ghost of Steve Jobs has come back to pixel peep. "The RGB pallette on your window close animation doesn't reflect Adobe screen values and takes 2 picoseconds too long to...." What the heck are they yammering about?

Just boot up OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which has a polished KDE interface, use it and be quiet. It's nice and normal. My 79 year old mother uses it and I'm fairly certain she doesn't know she's not using Windows. If I can have a 79 year old using it, the idea that computer professionals are "stressed" and practically in tears writing sob stories about "when I opened a window, they appeared in some corners with an inappropriate size" (that's an application problem, not a desktop problem) and they had to quickly uninstall KDE to feel "relieved" is beyond bizarre.

KDE isn't Gnome. Nothing else is Gnome. Gnome is weird. Get over it.

[Firnefex]

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

Only if you are fine with the limited stuff in their ecosystem, else it is just as horrible.

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!

Nowhere I can configure and customize the whole system to my likings, only in KDE. And what you call "uncluttered", I consider a withholding of information.
When I use Windows, MacOS, Gnome every few seconds to minutes there are things that annoy me so much that I ask me why they can't do it like in KDE...

You see, its all a matter of habit. If you don't like it, don't use it or just invest some time to make it beautiful for you.
Being a developer of image processing and AI algorithm (how is that relevant to user UX?) I assume you to be able to click thorugh the settings menu step by step, finding everything to fix the things you ranted about. Else you clearly aren't willing to.

[Steffo]

Good distros take the default KDE and sculpt it into something beautiful.

I can't wrap my mind around someone being "stressed" because they got a notification that their Internet was active. It's Linux; *real* Linux. That means you can make it whatever you want to be with the force of your will, unlike Gnome. Embrace the power KDE has given you and achieve your dreams.

Yeah, "real Linux" and "real men" mentality. Try to explain this Linus Torvalds, because he doesn't use Debian, because the installation process was too complicated (he said this in a talk). He also said, that he doesn't want to maintain his desktop. And he is also the guy who complained that openSUSE needed sudo rights for printing something (his daughter called from school). So, if you want convince someone with the "real thing" mentality, then maybe guys who are so incredible proud of playing around with their desktop. If you like this, fine. I prefer to work and I don't want to get the desktop in my way and as I said: Customization is no excuse for bad user experience!

[Firnefex]

Yeah, "real Linux" and "real men" mentality. Try to explain this Linus Torvalds, because he doesn't use Debian, because the installation process was too complicated (he said this in a talk). He also said, that he doesn't want to maintain his desktop. And he is also the guy who complained that openSUSE needed sudo rights for printing something (his daughter called from school). So, if you want convince someone with the "real thing" mentality, then maybe guys who are so incredible proud of playing around with their desktop. If you like this, fine. I prefer to work and I don't want to get the desktop in my way and as I said: Customization is no excuse for bad user experience!

Sure. If there is a distribution Linus likes out of the box, why bothering with others? But often there is none, so you have to get active.
Noone here speaks of maintaining a desktop, its a one time job. After that, everyone can work. Not so with limited Gnome.
Lack of customization is no excuse for bad user experience!

[deck]

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!

I always find this kind of thing interesting, because it is the exact opposite for me. I find OSX virtually un-usable, while KDE is pretty much everything I want in a desktop environment. It is interesting you call out window positioning, as an example, cause OSX is extremely broken in this regard and has been for the past 8-10 years. OSX definitely stresses the shit out of me. Just finding the windows I want to tab between seems completely random, and never mind if I have two windows of the same type open. OSX's virtual desktop makes zero sense to me, while KDE is exactly what I want and expect.

I don't have any of the problems you are mentioning. When opening windows, KDE always opens the window where it was last positioned for me (OSX just seems to pick something random everytime). And for me, I only get network connection notifications if the network state changes. So I think I get that notification for the very first time I run KDE, and then never again unless my network adaptor losses it's connection and the re-connects; so yeah, kind of useful information. And I honestly have no idea what you mean when you say the UI is cluttered; for me, it is succinct and clean. Yes, there is alot of customisation available, but that is kind of the whole point of KDE, regardless if it rubs you the wrong way.

And for the record, I guess I am also an 'intelligent' person, as I am a full time developer and solution architect. I hate my life when I need to use my work Macbook.

So a little counter feedback, I guess; KDE team, keep up the good work. I can't imagine going back to GNOME or OSX as my full time DE.

[Hojita]

I really wish they fix that bug in the zoom effect when using the "push" setting, changes itself to "proportional"
It makes impossible to me to switch to wayland because it happens much often there, and in X11 I can just toggle the compositor off and on with hotkeys and fix it.

[Quackdoc]

Ill be moving back to kde from gnome soon, just a matter of finding time to do it properly. glad to see all the fixes comming out.

[mdedetrich]

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.

While I agree with your sentiment, there are definitely cases where certain things are unambiguously generally more aesthetically pleasing which usually has to do with how are eyes trained and how we perceive things.

When it comes to animations having an easing curve should definitely be the default because that does look more natural to almost everyone. It actually approximates how momentum works in the physical world, i.e. if a car breaks its velocity approximately follows an easy curve and this is why us "subjective humans" feel like the easing curve function looks more natural. https://medium.com/@ryan_brownhill/c...s-34f39e1b4a43 is a good explanation.