KDE Plasma 5.9 Hits The Web With Global Menus, Better Wayland Support

[schmidtbag]

Wayland is almost good enough. Since I don't do anything too GPU intensive on my KDE setup, I can wait, but I'm still antsy to use it. I may give Wayland another shot after this update just to see if my personal issues have been addressed. Touchpad stuff was a really big one, so it's nice to see they have paid attention to that.

[haagch]

From the announcement:
Pointers can now be confined by applications, gestures are supported (see video right) and relative motions used by games were added. Input devices were made more configurable and now save between sessions. There is also a new settings tool for touchpads.

Probably should have read the announcement then, thanks.
I'll give it a try when it lands in arch.

edit: It already landed in testing. Time to change my mirror.

[devius]

Is there any tutorials/video tutorials of how to used KDE?

You use your mouse and click on the stuff that's on screen...

Seriously, it's not like you're switching to CP/M or CTOS.

[haagch]

Wow, it's completely broken on wayland. No window borders, systemsettings5 crashes everywhere and stuff flickers weirdly.
Hopefully this is just an archlinux packaging bug and will be fixed shortly.

[bug77]

Wow, it's completely broken on wayland. No window borders, systemsettings5 crashes everywhere and stuff flickers weirdly.
Hopefully this is just an archlinux packaging bug and will be fixed shortly.

Try Neon (I expect they'll have images out within 24h). Whether in a VM or a Docker image, it should tell you what you need to know. I'd do it, but since I'm on Nvidia, there's no Wayland for me.

[DarkCloud]

Wayland is far from tier1. Latest Qt release was not tested with kwin on wayland. Failure predestined.

More LOCs, more bugs, less users. (Go figure why this is not offered to enterprise users on RHEL and SLE)

Don't tell Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes and Ford that, as they are either shipping cars now or will be shipping cars soon with Wayland and Qt, I suspect there are even more auto companies.

[darkbasic]

Wow, it's completely broken on wayland. No window borders, systemsettings5 crashes everywhere and stuff flickers weirdly.
Hopefully this is just an archlinux packaging bug and will be fixed shortly.

Great, I was going to ask if we finally got decent multi monitor support on wayland but it seems we still have bigger issues...

[edoantonioco]

Wow, it's completely broken on wayland. No window borders, systemsettings5 crashes everywhere and stuff flickers weirdly.
Hopefully this is just an archlinux packaging bug and will be fixed shortly.

Try Breeze. Many themes doesnt work with wayland. Breath also work there.

[darclide]

Ah, yes, a great new release, as usual.

The "new" scrollbars are a great example for KDE still being subpar compared to GNOME and others when it comes to usability:

• The scrollbars differ between GTK and Qt breeze. Therefor GTK applications (e.g. Firefox, GIMP) will look and behave different to Qt applications
• The non-visual scrollbar size is still the old one, so that you can easily grab it with a mouse. Unfortunately this means that if you have the pointer next to the scrollbar, e.g. in to select text, and start dragging, it will drag the scrollbar even though the mouse pointer is not on it
• Even though the official changelog (https://www.kde.org/announcements/pl...-changelog.php) says "Make scrollbar size configurable." they are not. So we can't fix the above problems and KDE simply lies to its users.
• It's quite likely that applications that calculated spacing based on scrollbar width (e.g. the spacing needed in a table so you don't get a horizontal scrollbar once a vertical one is added) are now behaving wrong whenever used with 5.9

The new tooltips are also a good example. According to the Blog post: "Task Manager tooltips have been redesigned to provide more information while being significantly more compact." However, they not only provide less information (Activities lacking, application name no longer shown for launchers with no open window ...) whilst not being actually more compact. Again: horrible UX decisions, users being lied to.

Don't even get me started on other features, e.g.

• The announced preview in notifications not working (tested with 5.9 and spectacle)
• Global menus being a massive pain to set up, with no decent feedback on why they are not working (you need to configure multiple options in multiple places for them to work in the window decoration, nothing being explained to the user at all)

Nothing new though, we are used to that from KDE: Break things for no good reason while adding tons of new bugs.

Oh, and multi monitor is obviously still broken, even more so in Wayland.

So what does the release actually add that wasn't there and pulled in the past? The possibility to mute applications and a couple of new keybindings. And a subpar Wayland support, which is not remotely comparable with GNOMEs (which also works with nvidia, by the way.)

Summary: not usable at all, go with what all major distributions do and use GNOME or Unity.
Or, of course, you could go and report the above as bugs. Which will be closed as "WONTFIX" because the maintainer doesn't feel like it, or because it is Tuesday, or because they don't like your name. Expect being shouted at, lied to and threatened.
Such a great product from a great community.

[bug77]

Ah, yes, a great new release, as usual.

The "new" scrollbars are a great example for KDE still being subpar compared to GNOME and others when it comes to usability:

• The scrollbars differ between GTK and Qt breeze. Therefor GTK applications (e.g. Firefox, GIMP) will look and behave different to Qt applications
• The non-visual scrollbar size is still the old one, so that you can easily grab it with a mouse. Unfortunately this means that if you have the pointer next to the scrollbar, e.g. in to select text, and start dragging, it will drag the scrollbar even though the mouse pointer is not on it
• Even though the official changelog (https://www.kde.org/announcements/pl...-changelog.php) says "Make scrollbar size configurable." they are not. So we can't fix the above problems and KDE simply lies to its users.
• It's quite likely that applications that calculated spacing based on scrollbar width (e.g. the spacing needed in a table so you don't get a horizontal scrollbar once a vertical one is added) are now behaving wrong whenever used with 5.9

The new tooltips are also a good example. According to the Blog post: "Task Manager tooltips have been redesigned to provide more information while being significantly more compact." However, they not only provide less information (Activities lacking, application name no longer shown for launchers with no open window ...) whilst not being actually more compact. Again: horrible UX decisions, users being lied to.

Don't even get me started on other features, e.g.

• The announced preview in notifications not working (tested with 5.9 and spectacle)
• Global menus being a massive pain to set up, with no decent feedback on why they are not working (you need to configure multiple options in multiple places for them to work in the window decoration, nothing being explained to the user at all)

Nothing new though, we are used to that from KDE: Break things for no good reason while adding tons of new bugs.

Oh, and multi monitor is obviously still broken, even more so in Wayland.

So what does the release actually add that wasn't there and pulled in the past? The possibility to mute applications and a couple of new keybindings. And a subpar Wayland support, which is not remotely comparable with GNOMEs (which also works with nvidia, by the way.)

Summary: not usable at all, go with what all major distributions do and use GNOME or Unity.
Or, of course, you could go and report the above as bugs. Which will be closed as "WONTFIX" because the maintainer doesn't feel like it, or because it is Tuesday, or because they don't like your name. Expect being shouted at, lied to and threatened.
Such a great product from a great community.

I feel you. Especially considering the thousands of hours Gnome puts into making Qt applications indistinguishable from GTK applications. Or how Gnome has a wizard holding your hand for every setting you want to change. This Plasma thing is an absolute insult to users.





/s