KDE Plasma 5.5 Has Evolved Well Beyond Where Plasma 4 Ended

[FLHerne]

Simple example - the show desktop button. End of story. Garbage heap.

What about it? The desktop pager acts as one (click current desktop), any screen edge can show the desktop, you can set a keyboard shortcut.
If you're so fussy that it has to be exactly like the Windows one, write your own trivial widget to do it (i.e. take the relevant code from the pager and change the look a little).

Speaking of fussy, that's just what Breeze isn't. No shiny icons and pointless gradients competing to grab my attention from actual content.
Looking back at Oxygen, with all its fake reflections (at inconsistent angles) and shadows (likewise)...

[M@yeulC]

I miss a bit the lines in the statusbar indicating the active window. I wish there was an option to enable it as well.
The same about the old monochrome breeze icons.

Overall, I find the plasma 5 desktop being less and less buggy with each release, more and more complete; but less and less snappy, responsive, lean and light (to be clear; it's becoming a memory hog again). Maybe I need a system-wide reinstallation, though. Even gtk3 don't work at all on my setup [arch installed over a Slackwaer, bits might be remaining].
Kde connect is a really interesting bit of software; I always use it when I need to transfer files to/from my phone. A plus would be to be able to send and receive SMS messages, though.

[simgunz]

One thing that was not covered in the article is the multi-monitor support, which is completely broken in some installations. Probably it is related to the driver issues, but it's affecting a lot of users and makes Plasma practically unusable with a multi-monitor configuration. Unfortunately little progress has been done since two releases. I hope it will improve in the next releases.

[starshipeleven]

I just don't get why you are so angry.

This smells like failure to read.
He said "I want my KDE back, not this ridiculous, over-engineered, super-cool, looking like shat thing." He even used bold font for "my KDE".

I mean, seriously.

This has an obvious meaning, unless you are completely distracted by the boobies in the ads.
He is angry at kde devs because they turned the KDE he loved into something (much) worse.

That's a normal and understandable reaction.

What would be not understandable is if I was angry about KDE.
I never gave a flying about KDE and never will.
I do acknowledge that it is moar and moar a train-wreck, but since I use MATE (or XFCE as a fallback), I'm fine.

[Kver]

@Idonotexist

I have good news and bad news for you, so I'll just go point-to-point.

• On screensavers, you can still manually install and configure them, but developers have considered them obsolete for some time now so you won't find them in systemsettings. Boils down to inefficiency, obsoleteness, and some security issues with OpenGL wallpapers.
• Holidays are returning next release in 5.6! Already committed, they just barely missed the 5.5 freeze.
• On the various monitors, there's individual monitors which graph CPU, RAM, and network in detail. The general system monitor will show some of the details you mentioned on hover. For the network widget I believe the chart was removed to focus the widget on configuration, but you can get a network monitor graph which is focuses on that. Kind of like I said in my review; most of what you're looking for is still there, it's just dispersed differently, TBH I never used those widgets in Plasma 4, so I don't know the exact differences.
• I'm actually responsible for the wallpapers. :P
  Right now everyone in the VDG seems interested in improving the professionalism of Plasma desktop in general, and I'm no exception; the 5.6 wallpaper is more along the lines of what to expect in the mid-term future, and it has gotten good feedback. I expect a lot of details will be sorted out in March during a large developer event, and I'm expecting lots of progress. Link to the 5.6 wallpaper below for the curious.

[starshipeleven]

Seriously, you don't think you sound over the top angry? If you like kde3 or trinity or whatever, that's great. I wasn't telling you to go away. I just don't get why you are so angry.

Reading comprehension failure.
Please reread carefully the following sentence
"I want my KDE back, not this ridiculous, over-engineered, super-cool, looking like shat thing."

In case you still don't get it:
He is angry at kde devs because they ruined the kde he loves/ed. KDE 3 won't last long, it is getting "obsolete", and with wayland he will probably have to abandon it for good.

Which is perfectly normal, btw.

[Kver]

One thing that was not covered in the article is the multi-monitor support, which is completely broken in some installations. Probably it is related to the driver issues, but it's affecting a lot of users and makes Plasma practically unusable with a multi-monitor configuration. Unfortunately little progress has been done since two releases. I hope it will improve in the next releases.

There were a tonne of things I wanted to cover which I couldn't, either to keep the article a reasonable length, or because I couldn't seriously test it to my own satisfaction. Multi-screen is one of them.

From what I hear multi-screen support is improving, but there are still a couple gotchas for some use-cases. I don't know what they are specifically, but I understand it's partially in the Qt version and partially with a KDE framework working around the Qt issues. Supposedly the next major Qt version fixes many, many issues in regards to the whole situation. Use a grain of salt on this though, I'm not directly involved with this, I've just read what some random devs are saying.

[callegar]

... Or maybe, it has not evolved well beyond where plasma 4 ended ...

Probably, it is prettier or at least visually more consistent. But then:

• No more screensavers
• No more session save and restore (at least for now)
• No more guest session
• No more scientific calculator applet
• No more system tray for applications speaking the old protocol (all java stuff, for example)
• No more holidays in the calendar applet, nor PIM integration
• No more wallet auto-open at login

And then

• A lot of confusion with some applications that are still not ported to the new framework and feel out of place (organizer, some apps that still rely on kded4 and do not always start/stop consistently or need the kcmshell4 to be configured, which is not fully integrated in the system settings).
• Many issues with the system tray (the mixer icon often does not appear, particularly on slow systems, fix exists but will take a lot of time to propagate to distros)
• Same problematic threading model in plasma that causes all plasma to freeze when an applet has issues or is not cooperative enough.

In fact, it seems to be very much a matter of point of view. Plasma 5 seems to be praised by those who are more interested in the look of the desktop and to leave very much perplexed those who have lost features they used to rely upon and see these as regressions.

[cypx]

Ken Vermette, what can you say about KWallet(Manager) and Wifi?
On a clean-slate OpenSuSE Leap 42.1 install, which ships with Plasma 5, the awful piece of software called KWallet constantly interfered with my attempts at entering a password for a Wifi connection, constantly prompting me to set KWallet up in spite of my firm desire not to and several dismissals of that annoying prompt. Opening KWalletManager and "disabling" that subsystem causes KWalletManager to freeze and makes it impossible to reopen KWalletManager to "re-enable" KWallet, but KWallet still bothers me with the prompts. I resorted to deleting enough of KWalletManager to permanently brain-damage it, but ideally I'd like KDE to actually properly port KWallet to Plasma 5 and make it possible to disable cleanly.

It's true that the version 15.04 of KWalletManger, shipped with OpenSuSE Leap 42.1 is really annoying and made me a little angry too.
But the version 15.08, which has been released before Leap 42.1 and quickly made available as an update, fix most of the problem.
Additionally, KWallet is planned to be replaced by a better designed service (KSecret) so I can live with that for now.

[profoundWHALE]

I'm happily running KDE 3.5.10 and I'm content with it. I want my KDE back

You're already using the older KDE that you like, so you're just steaming over nothing.