KDE Plasma 5.11 Officially Released With Vault, Better Wayland & More

[uid313]

Mind elaborating? It hardly looks any different from before... I understand GNOME is pretty basic, but KDE has been becoming less confusing after every release.

Also note that everyone was whining how "confusing and terrible" GNOME was when it first released, but once people set aside their petty complaints about not liking how different it was, people grew to like it. Though I personally don't use GNOME, I do feel it is a very well-made environment. What I'm getting at is just because you can't handle how different something is, that doesn't make it shitty.

KDE has way too many buttons, toolbars, knobs and such. It is crammed. Then you have tabs, and when you pick a tab, inside there you are presented with another set of tabs. It is just so overwhelming.

[schmidtbag]

KDE has way too many buttons, toolbars, knobs and such. It is crammed. Then you have tabs, and when you pick a tab, inside there you are presented with another set of tabs. It is just so overwhelming.

Why couldn't you have said that in the first place? I firmly disagree with you, but at least what you said here has some use and meaning.

Anyway, KDE is designed this way intentionally. With GNOME, you either get too few options, or, you have to deal with things such as Tweak Tool, which doesn't [usually] come pre-installed and is a far more cumbersome and overwhelming approach. GNOME has a lot of fantastic power and features but most of them are hidden away from the user's control.

What I don't understand is how can you be a Linux user but find KDE overwhelming? The sole purpose of Linux is freedom of choice and customization. KDE is far less overwhelming than installing Debian (using the base installer) or Arch. If you only use distros like Ubuntu and Mint, well, clearly you don't fit the demographic of KDE. And No, I'm not saying Mint and Ubuntu users can't/don't/shouldn't use KDE.

[schmidtbag]

My use case for the zip files is, for instance when i download a subtitle: i just want the file, not the zip...

Ah right, that makes sense. You should still be able to open with Ark though, but for the time being I don't think I can help you here since I'm not using your config and don't plan to for a while.

The issues i have are with VLC. Doesn't work. At least when i tried it. A couple of years ago...

Are all of your experiences from a couple years ago? All the modern DEs have evolved quite a bit in that amount of time. Meanwhile if you were using a distro like Ubuntu LTS, you were probably using something very broken and outdated when you first tried it. That being said, I never had that problem 2 years ago, either.

On the panel i get weired behaviour like the notifications getting messed up and showing on top of each other, or clicking to hide them and they show up instead and vice-versa. Looks like some kind of problem KDE has trying to figure out the sizes/positions of stuff according to my monitor resolution, which was pretty standard when i tried it (720p)...

I use KDE on my laptop, which has a 1366x768 display, so 720p shouldn't be the issue. Every once in a while when KDE has some major change to its rendering there have been issues with rendering things like notifications, but they're usually short-lived. For example when I started using Wayland almost a year ago, the notifications would appear totally opaque and in the dead center of the screen, when they used to not do that. That has been fixed a couple months in. So yeah, I take your point that KDE sometimes has some UI breakages, but as long as you're not using an outdated version or cutting-edge release (like I do) it tends to be pretty compliant.

I also don't like much the Menus that KDE has. Kickoff could be great if the categories were vertical instead of horizontal. Such a small, simple change would make way more usable IMO.

They have that - there are all sorts of menu style options. KDE comes with 2 by default I think, but some distros add more.

[grok]

What I don't understand is how can you be a Linux user but find KDE overwhelming? The sole purpose of Linux is freedom of choice and customization. KDE is far less overwhelming than installing Debian (using the base installer) or Arch. If you only use distros like Ubuntu and Mint, well, clearly you don't fit the demographic of KDE. And No, I'm not saying Mint and Ubuntu users can't/don't/shouldn't use KDE.

I don't follow.. installing Debian is about the same as Ubuntu or Mint (or Windows for that matter), you partition the drive and hit "Next" on about every question. Although there was that one version where they decided for our own good that we don't need networking firmware blobs, even on net-install installers. (or the more common issue now of wireless networks with a web portal for access. Good luck running it in an installer that is only an installer.)
Debian+lxde iso is easy to install, came with a graphical installer when I used it (not very different from the text installer, but good looking. I guess 80x25 with no mouse scares people)

I do agree with or understand your point though, I'm only attacking insignificant detail.

From the short video, KDE looks usable. My beef is it seems to be optimised for 1920x1080 monitors, but try it at 1024x768 and you're greeted by a giant huge ass start menu and other big windows and GUI elements. I guess it would be barely usable on 1366x768. Well, that's a significantly better res already so maybe not much a big deal.
The Gnome 2 clone (Mate, XFCE, LXDE) work well enough on 1024 width. Was formerly a fan of Win 2k/XP classic GUI, it was good even at 800 monitor width.

[schmidtbag]

I think he's referencing the behaviour of the SMB KIO slave. If you use it, it will download the file before starting playback instead of stream it. KDE needs to move to something like gvfs for handling remote file shares.

I have experienced that, but I don't currently. I think the reason for this is because I have my SMB share in fstab. Since it is mounted as a local filesystem, that might act as a workaround. I could be wrong though.

[schmidtbag]

I don't follow.. installing Debian is about the same as Ubuntu or Mint (or Windows for that matter), you partition the drive and hit "Next" on about every question. Although there was that one version where they decided for our own good that we don't need networking firmware blobs, even on net-install installers. (or the more common issue now of wireless networks with a web portal for access. Good luck running it in an installer that is only an installer.)
Debian+lxde iso is easy to install, came with a graphical installer when I used it (not very different from the text installer, but good looking. I guess 80x25 with no mouse scares people)

Remember, I was referring to the Debian base install, where once you install it and reboot, you're left with just the CLI. I did just remember you can install KDE through the installer (even using the net-install), but I personally avoid doing that since I'm always given hundreds of MB of packages I don't want. Regardless, I see your point.

From the short video, KDE looks usable. My beef is it seems to be optimised for 1920x1080 monitors, but try it at 1024x768 and you're greeted by a giant huge ass start menu and other big windows and GUI elements. I guess it would be barely usable on 1366x768. Well, that's a significantly better res already so maybe not much a big deal.
The Gnome 2 clone (Mate, XFCE, LXDE) work well enough on 1024 width. Was formerly a fan of Win 2k/XP classic GUI, it was good even at 800 monitor width.

You can shrink the GUI elements. My 1366x768 experience is pretty comfortable, but, I also don't use any of the "start menus", and, I have my taskbar mounted on the left side of the screen rather than the bottom.

[grok]

You can shrink the GUI elements. My 1366x768 experience is pretty comfortable, but, I also don't use any of the "start menus", and, I have my taskbar mounted on the left side of the screen rather than the bottom.

Ah, thanks.
The issue for me is I expect to be stuck with big GUI elements, or stuck with some silly issue I don't know about yet.
I think I would like a "Welcome screen" feature : that's for dummies, introduced some long time ago in Windows but Linux Mint copied it with a bunch of links to "help", settings install software, IRC, website, install codecs etc. and of course "don't show me again"
KDE isn't really an OS but for all purposes it feels much like an OS.

Alternatively the best "UX" experience I ever had was the tutorial in Windows 3.0 or 3.1 which taught how to use the mouse (and even "press this key" to go forward, "press this key" to go backwards before you know how to mouse), then how to use menus, how to minimize and move windows.

I'm going very far in this argument so as to say, I feel lost and I'm like a first grader.

[grok]

Remember, I was referring to the Debian base install, where once you install it and reboot, you're left with just the CLI. I did just remember you can install KDE through the installer (even using the net-install), but I personally avoid doing that since I'm always given hundreds of MB of packages I don't want. Regardless, I see your point.

I also did use Ubuntu in this way. You can have a CLI-only Ubuntu, or install LXDE, Xorg and ALSA to get things going on a computer with 192 MB RAM (or more, or less) and an actual 4GB to 10GB hard drive. Was left wishing for a CLI and/or net install Linux Mint at that point although that wasn't such big of a deal (I much later figured out that Lubuntu is ugly, but in the end you can make it not ugly by changing the icon theme, clicking around in the menu and "appearance" applet).
Just to say that I have had a high esteem for Ubuntu i.e. it's not just dumbed down OS with Unity and Amazon for dumb people or the Microsoft Windows of linux.
In that line, Debian Lenny and then Squeeze got Ubuntu-like in the way of just working. Ubuntu 8.04 was amazing and good for a few years back then (I think it had KDE 4.0 and so with a couple other controversies I will have no trouble understanding if other people didn't like it at all)

[flubba86]

I think you will also need to bring Qt 5.9 at least. Easy breeze?

Turned out to be way too ambitious. Theres a LOT of dependencies that need to be updated. It can be done, and I probably have the skills, experience, and knowledge to do it, but I don't have the time or patience for _that_ much dependency work.