KDE Plasma 2 Technology Preview Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 2 Technology Preview Released

The KDE development community has put out the first official technology preview of the upcoming Plasma 2 user-interface...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU0OTE

[sykobee]

As long as I can turn off the graphical effects that slow down the user experience (the "start" menu seemed to have a lot of these for switching between tabs, changing selection, etc) then this is looking pretty good.

[Pseus]

I personally don't find KDE's UI as productive and clean as the one from Gnome, Unity or even MacOS. Which is not a bad thing. I guess I just don't find the old "taskbar with app names" idea attractive. It's cool they are making progress, though, I'm all for choice

[schmidtbag]

I personally don't find KDE's UI as productive and clean as the one from Gnome, Unity or even MacOS. Which is not a bad thing. I guess I just don't find the old "taskbar with app names" idea attractive. It's cool they are making progress, though, I'm all for choice

Kind of a contradictory statement, considering KDE's UI is of the most customizable of all of them, and in the most user-friendly ways possible too. You can set up KDE to act just like any other DE, but you can't say the same about most of the others. The only thing I don't like is some of the feature options in System Settings are a little disorganized, and, KDE is still pretty bloated.


I never really understood why people dislike something because of the default appearance or layout. If the way the developers set it up is the only way to use it, then I can understand the problem. GNOME 3 was disliked so much not because they completely changed how GNOME is used but because there is little to no freedom in tweaking it to your preference/needs, and the only way to do it to some degree is through somewhat inconvenient tools like gconf-editor. BTW, I don't hate gnome - I personally don't prefer it, but I think it was well made for what it tries to be.

[miskol]

4 words

Worst user interface ever !!!!

Wake up KDE and hire somebody

Plasma media center is same .....

99% of nice UI effects are Qt effects.

[estersios]

I love KDE but I agree with Pseus that default desktop is quite outdate.

[hubick]

I switched from Gnome to KDE exactly because I'm perfectly happy with a simple functional WinXP style desktop. PLEASE DON'T EFF IT ALL UP LIKE GNOME DID.

[Awesomeness]

The only thing I don't like is some of the feature options in System Settings are a little disorganized

People are working on this, although AFAIK the work as not been merged into this preview, yet.

KDE is still pretty bloated.

No, it's not. It's modular. You don't have to install everything.

GNOME 3 was disliked so much not because they completely changed how GNOME is used but because there is little to no freedom in tweaking it to your preference/needs, and the only way to do it to some degree is through somewhat inconvenient tools like gconf-editor.

The whole sentence is just BS. There was never a Gnome release as configurable as Gnome 3. Gnome has just learned from Plasma and Firefox to its UI totally configurable via extensions: https://extensions.gnome.org/

[uid313]

Does it work with Wayland yet?

I don't like KDE because it has too many options, buttons, toolbars, menus, and settings.
It's overwhelming.
It suffers from bloat and feature creep.
Also I found it requires way too many clicks.

[cynical]

Kind of a contradictory statement, considering KDE's UI is of the most customizable of all of them, and in the most user-friendly ways possible too. You can set up KDE to act just like any other DE, but you can't say the same about most of the others. The only thing I don't like is some of the feature options in System Settings are a little disorganized, and, KDE is still pretty bloated.

Not exactly. I've attempted to change KDE to look more like Unity since that style fits my workflow best (and KDE has many benefits from its various frameworks) but the end result never feels quite as polished as the DEs that specifically focus on that workflow. This is obvious and expected, but unfortunately the flexibility of KDE means that it does everything fairly well but is also not exceptional in any of those areas. This is excluding the Windows-style default desktop, which is done perfectly. (unfortunately I hate that environment)

I never really understood why people dislike something because of the default appearance or layout. If the way the developers set it up is the only way to use it, then I can understand the problem. GNOME 3 was disliked so much not because they completely changed how GNOME is used but because there is little to no freedom in tweaking it to your preference/needs, and the only way to do it to some degree is through somewhat inconvenient tools like gconf-editor. BTW, I don't hate gnome - I personally don't prefer it, but I think it was well made for what it tries to be.

Which is exactly why you are a KDE user. Other people don't particularly care for lots of options and would rather have an exceptional default layout that they don't need to spend time to tweak according to their specific needs. This is where DE's like Unity/Gnome/XFCE/Cinnamon find their niche. I used to think more like you did in the past but with the newest DEs I've attempted to adapt my workflow to the environment, and after some period of adjustment I've grown quite comfortable with some of the newer ideas. (like tapping a key and filtering selections by app name, combined dock + launcher, middle clicking titlebar to lower focus, dragging titlebar to top of the screen to maximize instead of using window controls, etc)