KDE Plasma 5.5 Has Evolved Well Beyond Where Plasma 4 Ended

[GreatEmerald]

Running 5.5.2 on OpenSuse Tumblweed here. Other than the traditional KMail crash first use, it's behaved well. The aesthetics have been polished, as well.

Me too. And yes.

Akonadi: If I add up all the akonadi entries in KSysguard, it's over 200 megs. Default configuration on a new install. (All I want is to have it index KMail messages and return them in a Krunner search. It doesn't. I don't care about calendars, etc. Plus, I have no idea about the difference, if any, between "Plasma Search" and "Desktop Search", but both have entries in System Settings.

That's a bit odd. In my case, in KSysGuard I see... nothing related to Akonadi. Nothing at all. Not a single entry. I do have it installed, but it looks like it's not running by default if nothing is using it (and it looks like nothing is using it on my machine; I'm not using KMail, mind you).

KWallet remains so dysfunctional I can't figure out if it's broken or if it's working as intended. It seems to be essential for using KDE as envisioned since nothing else exists to retain passwords which is a sine qua non of contemporary computing. Typically, the first time a user will know it exists is when an app needs a password. Then KWallet will interrupt things with a pop-up dialogue demanding a choice be made to use it or not, and then a choice between GPG and Blowfiish. None of this is explained or justifed, and I wonder what planet developers and packagers live on if they think typical desktop users have any idea what GPG and Blowfish are.

If Kwallet is the core and essential component it seems to positioned as, then it needs a complete interface and usage redesign and KDE needs to run a first-use tool explaining what it is and leading and hand holding a user through the configuration of GPG/Blowfish, etc.

You must have the wrong packages installed. Make sure kwallet5 and kwalletmanager5 are installed, and that kwallet and kwalletmanager are not installed. Also, if you want it to go away, you simply answer yes to all the questions and use a blank password, and you'll never hear back from it again.

[GreatEmerald]

Screensavers have a purpose and it is related to desktop machines. For instance, they are meant to immediately show that a desktop machine in a noisy environment is ON, so that people do not switch it OFF by pressing the power button, thinking to switch it ON.

Uh, that's a really bad rationale for it. Why exactly do you have the power button configured to turn the machine off when it's running? By default it's set to display the logout dialog.

Also, before pressing buttons, people prod the mouse to check if it's on or not. It's much more convenient than to look for the power button.

My biggest beef with Plasma5 is the apparent inability to customize the various data formats (date, time, numbers, etc.). The only options available seem associated with countries. That might be fine if you actually care nothing about customization, but you're truly humped if you want something other than some country's default.

I would be grateful if someone could point out to me how to set my taskbar clock to a 2-line entry that shows the date like "00:15" rather than "0:15", and the date to "2016-01-10", and numeric formats like "1'000,00", while keeping my timezone locked on the US east coast, and my language set to English (US). Plasma4 could do it handily, but after hours(!) of trying to get KDE/Plasma5 to do it, I have so far been foiled. Frustrating does not even begin to express it.

For now I'm stuck with KDE Fedora 21, as all the later versions based on Plasma5 are fundamentally broken. It's quite disheartening, actually, and terribly sad to see a highly customizable system do the lemming rush, joining this industry-wide rush to dumbing down systems, and removing features and customizability, and apparently catering to the "you don't really need customization, we know what you should be using" mentality.

You seem to be overreacting. The format customisation is unfortunate, yes (I really don't like my file sizes being displayed in binary prefixes, I much prefer SI), but there's nothing that KDE developers can do. Formats are now handled by Qt. So if you want this to be fixed, then open a bug report in the Qt bug tracker.

[stout]

I feel your pain about customizing various formats, but I don't feel KDE is being dumbed down. Jut remember every UI has to be simplified at some point, otherwise you's end up with tons of options, a manual and a dedicated PhD in navigating said options. Deciding which options should be readily available and which can be safely buried under several menu/options layers is is hard. Inevitably, some option you are fond of will be affected by these changes. It's annoying when it happens, but that's how things work.
To avoid this, usage reports are used, but afaik, Linux DEs don't have such systems in place. Even if they did, I don't know whether the installed base is large enough to produce meaningful numbers. Plus, users would complain that the DE contains spyware (see the reaction towards Win10).

And welcome to phoronix, btw.

Thanks for the welcome. To be sure, I have no issue if the less widely used options are buried, even buried deep, but in this case the ability to apply basic customization appears to have been removed entirely, and replaced with options that are so limited and obtuse as to be hardly worthy of the term "customization".

If I want a particular date format, for example, I'd have to try several country names, perhaps go through dozens of them until eventually I come across the format that I want, but now all the dates have a different language in them, not English. How do I fix that? See what I mean? I can have any format I want, so long as I stick to one used by English-speaking countries. That's not customization, that's a straight-jacket.

If the options I want are somewhere else, even if I'd have to modify a config file somewhere by hand, I'd be ecstatic to learn where to find them, and would be happy to post a big apology. Anyone? Please, pretty-please, with sugar on top?

[GreatEmerald]

If the options I want are somewhere else, even if I'd have to modify a config file somewhere by hand, I'd be ecstatic to learn where to find them, and would be happy to post a big apology. Anyone? Please, pretty-please, with sugar on top?

See my reply to you one post above. (I guess you missed that a new page exists?)

[bug77]

If the options I want are somewhere else, even if I'd have to modify a config file somewhere by hand, I'd be ecstatic to learn where to find them, and would be happy to post a big apology. Anyone? Please, pretty-please, with sugar on top?

In this particular case, I have given up. Maybe the settings panel will add the ability to properly customize these one day, but until then I just think of the formats as broken and try to ignore them. Annoying as hell, especially from my favourite DE...

[anda_skoa]

I would be grateful if someone could point out to me how to set my taskbar clock to a 2-line entry that shows the date like "00:15" rather than "0:15", and the date to "2016-01-10"

That's what I have configured. As far as I can tell that's the "24-hours" checkbox and the "ISO Date" format option.

I used to love KDE because it was NOT dumbing things down.

My understanding is that this is a current limitation of Qt.
I.e. Qt's locale system not being as flexible as KDE's formatting code and attempts to contribute the more advanced KDE code have so far been unsuccessful due to limitations on Windows.

Cheers,
_