KDE Plasma 5.5 Has Evolved Well Beyond Where Plasma 4 Ended

[buzzrobot]

... there's this new thing called kwallet-pam, which will unlock the kwallet at login (provided the wallet and your user account have the same passwords), which should stop kwallet from bothering you. e.

That kwallet-pam thing was around in KDE4 for maybe 5 minutes, then vanished, and has apparently been revived.

[buzzrobot]

I
Additionally, KWallet is planned to be replaced by a better designed service (KSecret) so I can live with that for now.

Should have been done for Plasma 5. Sometimes it's a weakness lacking a "Person in Charge" who can simply direct that something be done, rather than trying to cajole volunteers to voluntarily come to a consensus.

[Krejzi]

That kwallet-pam thing was around in KDE4 for maybe 5 minutes, then vanished, and has apparently been revived.

It has just recently become an official KDE project. I have no clue about its history before that.

[callegar]

Krejzi, thanks for commenting on my points.

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.

[arboy84]

I like Plasma but it's still flaky on my system (5.4 admittedly, will try again after the release of Linux Mint 18 when I'll be considering another distribution for my aging laptop; currently Ubuntu 14.04 LTS). I like the direction Plasma is taking though. I think once all of the applications have been ported over to the new frameworks system then polish and stability will get better again.

It looks like Akanodi might finally get the fixes it needs to be less resource intensive.

[GreatEmerald]

Oh man, so many comments. I don't have the time to finish reading through everything, but I'll forget what I wanted to say, so I'll say things first

For one thing, why KaOS? Why not Netrunner?

While it's nice to see that Breeze icons are evolving, and that you no longer get problems with Oxygen icons being mixed in... well, there is now the opposite problem. I have my icons set to Oxygen icons (much easier to identify than the monochrome Breeze ones in my opinion), and things like Kdenlive display Breeze icons. It's pretty annoying.

Another thing that bugs me is search speed. If you start typing anything into the Kicker or KRunner, everything freezes for about 5 seconds while the disk is being searched. But I only manage to enter the first two-three letters before it starts searching! I get lots of irrelevant results and a pause before I can finish writing what I wanted to find in the first place. Sigh.

The plasmoids... I haven't tested 5.5 yet, but at least on 5.4, the music player plasmoid is broken. It causes music to skip, go to the next track prematurely, or get stuck altogether. It's a real shame. The bug was reported, but it was closed as fixed, even though it's not fixed at all...

The audio plasmoid really could use a way to show all running audio streams without needing to go into properties.

As for the timer plasmoid, that's weird, I've never seen it look that way. It's actually quite handy, and I use it for counting down the time to the beginning of a livestream and such.

[atmartens]

I had no idea about KDE Connect. Neat!

[stout]

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.

I used to love KDE because it was NOT dumbing things down. Now I'm beginning to think that KDE is history.

[GreatEmerald]

About Wayland, I sure hope it will be in a usable state in summer!

Though people keep mentioning XRender on Wayland. What?.. Isn't KWin_Wayland using QPainter instead? XRender is an X extension, it doesn't exist in Wayland as far as I know.

[bug77]

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.

I used to love KDE because it was NOT dumbing things down. Now I'm beginning to think that KDE is history.

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.