KDE 5.0: 4 Things We Want To See

KDE 5.0, The Future Is The Past

As you probably already know, Qt 5 Alpha has been released for your consumption by Nokia labs. As we move closer to mid-life for KDE 4.8, we can see KDE 4.9 looming around the corner. With a 4.9 release by the KDE team and an alpha quality build of Qt 5 just a download away, one thing is certain. KDE 5.0 is coming. I’m sure you remember the rough road KDE 4.0 traversed to get where it is today, and while the initial releases upset a lot of users, it was worth it to get where we are today. KDE 4.8 is awesome in every way. It works great on a wide range of hardware, and older hardware too! The KDE 5.0 release, on the other-hand, is filled with mystery. That’s what were here for! Here is a list of things that we would like to see in KDE 5.0.

**1 Less Qt, more Plasma!**

Don’t get me wrong, Qt is incredible. I use it in my day job to rapidly design interfaces for our products and nothing I’ve ever worked with is quite as good or as easy to use. It’s also good for April Fools jokes! It took me only about 6 hours to re-create Microsoft Outlook in Qt, and sell it as a news story on April 1st. The results are very convincing!

That said, Qt applications are boring in this brave new world of touch. Of course the default Oxygen theme looks great, and in my opinion, better than anything the competition is bringing to the table, but plasma is the technology that will bring KDE full circle between point-&-click and touch-driven interfaces. This is already being accomplished to some degree in the Plasma-Active community and being executed on the Vivaldi tablet.

Contact Touch On MeeGo

My gripe with this is not about touch however. Programs like ReKonq, Dolphin and Calligra should all get the Plasma treatment. With Qt, the KDE team will always be stuck in a world of legacy interaction between the app and the user. In order to move forward, Plasma must finally be fully exploited.

2 Overhaul System Settings

KDE is already the king of configurability, but that flexibility comes at a price. Some tasks or configuration options that should be trivial, are not, and in this way I believe that the Gnome Project is doing a few things right. I want on/off switches.

Nothing could be more simple than being able to simply turn a service or feature off, without having to make decisions about how much of it you want to turn off or on. Simply allow me to turn it off. Nepomuk and Akonadi are perfect examples of the need for this. I shouldn’t need to discover ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc and change;

StartServer=true

StartServer=false

How does your average user figure this out? They don’t. They just lose cpu cycles to it, unaware of the waste in power and resources. In some cases, on older hardware, the performance impact is so great that a user may abandon KDE altogether and simply decide that KDE is too slow.

Some items in system settings have been fragmented unnecessarily for some time, leading to user confusion, expecialy when configure the look & feel of the environment.

Pages: 1 2

Dean Howell
April 5, 2012

Tags KDE, KDE 5.0, plasma active, Qt

archerb

Keep your tablet interface off my desktop!!!!!

Keep your desktop interface off my tablet!!!!!

Why is this so hard to understand?
- Tadeas
  
  Exactly. Plasma Desktop on desktop. Plasma Active on tablet. Plasma Netbook on netbook.
- http://www.ubuntu.com/ Moraru A. Lilian
  
  KDE alllows you to decide what you want. May be you have a desktop with touch screen and want to use the Plasma Active(not it is not available to switch like the Netbook version but it will be later), you just switch to it from options. It doesn’t take almost any time, what’s the problem? It gives you options, it’s really good.
  - archerb
    
    I’ll admit that I am digging KDE the way it’s set up now. On Desktop 1, I have the standard desktop icons found in the ~/Desktop folder.
    
    On Desktop 2, I have the netbook interface where there items from the menu are located on the desktop.
    
    The reason this is different than a straight up “touch” interfaces is that I can easily switch by clicking on Desktop 1. Either way, both have the taskbar across the bottom and the K button that has all my apps. Also, both are extremely easy to configure.
    
    Every day that I use KDE, I like it more and more. I really hope they don’t screw it up.
archerb

“Desktop environments are clamoring over the idea of touch and are completely redesigning their desktop environments to suit this brave new world. ”

No, they are not. This is why Unity and Gnome3 suck. They are designed for touch and then thrown onto the desktop. Why is it so hard to keep touchscreen interfaces off of devices that use a mouse? No one… AND I MEAN NO ONE likes a tablet interface on a desktop!
- http://www.facebook.com/apostate9 Rob Holman
  
  Sing it, Brother/Sister. Seriously. SCREW TOUCH! I don’t want fingerprints on my screen. Touch is for phones. Am I the only one who thought this blog was way off on just about every point? The problem with KDE is not enough things are see-through? Make it more like Unity? WTF?
- ScionicSpectre
  
  Sorry, but I, my parents, my family, and my friends love GNOME 3. Most of my designer buddies think it provides a lot over OS X, as well. The only people who seem to have an issue with it are geeks and power-users who always customize things and are never satisfied with how they come. They have abnormally precise requirements of their desktops.
  
  I’m the same way, but GNOME 3 fits those requirements for me. Also, I’d say you’re right- I wouldn’t use Plasma Active on my desktop, and I wouldn’t use Android or iOS on it, either. But GNOME 3 isn’t a mobile environment. It’s a keyboard/mouse environment that is enabled for touch. Most of the touch features don’t show up unless you’re actually on a device with a touchscreen.
  
  They’re paying attention. They’re coders and designers- they use it on a daily basis. They wouldn’t make something they couldn’t be productive with. It’s not for everyone, and I don’t think you should use it. But it seems to impress most people and save them time and headaches, making using their computer a bit more natural and ‘made of easy’.
  - Jerry McCarthy
    
    You’re a hypocrite. You obviously don’t like it but you’re too much of a coward to admit it.
    
    You state the only people that hate it are geeks and power users then you state that you are one to. Therefore logically, you hate it. So say you do.
    
    Most everyone is going to Linux Mint and using Mate Desktop. Also the rest are using KDE 3.5.12 on whatever they can find.
    - ScionicSpectre
      
      First of all, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts and think about them yourself. I’d also like to apologize for being unclear- I do find in my personal experience that most people dissatisfied with GNOME 3 to the point that they’ll comment about it on the internet tend to be power users with abnormally precise requirements.
      
      However, I clearly don’t think that every picky computer user has the same requirements. I should have said that GNOME 3 was the environment that finally fulfilled those needs for me, personally. I’d always been customizing to get something like it, and it came with more goodness than I got even out of my heavy customizations in KDE. And it’s supported, which is great!
      
      Most Linux users I know wouldn’t really identify themselves as such. Novell was based here for a long time, so Linux isn’t really news where I grew up, and when it comes to friends and family they all prefer GNOME 3 to 2. They enjoy the ‘shock’ of a new way of using their computer.
      
      I think doing something new for the sake of it is foolhardy, of course, but I agree with the logic behind GNOME’s interaction design. Most people I meet do in real life do, too (not representative, clearly).
      
      I hadn’t heard of this exodus to Mint & Mate, but I have heard of Cinnamon. Still, I’d like to know whatever metric you’ve gathered the term ‘most everyone’ from. I’d also like to thank you for editing your message for clarity.
      - M Obetz
        
        Except, most of the non power-users I’ve met *don’t* want the ‘shock’ of a new way of using their computer. One of the reasons I think KDE has been performing well so recently is that Windows 7 shares so much with it in terms of UI design that non-computer people can make the switch without having to re-learn how to interact with their computer.
        
        These new touch-friendly interfaces are definitely worth exploring further, but not at the cost of a traditional layouts. It is very clear that GNOME wishes to phase out their ‘classic’, design, in many places referring to it as “Legacy”. I cannot express how deep a mistake I feel this is, as it creates an incredible barrier to entry for new people who might otherwise make the switch to linux.
      - http://twitter.com/x11tete11x x11tete11x
        
        for me gnome shell has a lot of unuseful things like the top bar, why it shows the name of app that you focus?, it isnt configurable, extensions are very bad… why i cant choose in what place of panel i wanna put the extension? why i need gnome-tweaker to change gtk themes? why isnt good themes to gtk3 ? why developers dont want gtk3? why now we have a no configurable WM? …
      - Craig Wessel
        
        Wow! Not only am I STUNNED by your grammar, but also by your enlgish comprehension. You amaze me really. Anyways, it all comes down to preference. Like me! I like GNOME 3. I use Linux mint with gnome 3 instead of cinnamon. And I love every minute of it. Linux Kernel at the base, rock solid, Mint, Rock Solid, GNOME 3, Rock Solid.
        
        God you know I like GNOME 3. So stop griping, geez.
      - Craig Wessel
        
        Thank you SO MUCH! GNOME 3 is perfect for me as well! I don’t get why everyone hates it so much! I have set GNOME 3 in front of LOTS of people and they all say, “This is so much easier and cleaner and crisper than Windows 8′s Beta’s were!”
Jacob Faraday

Brave new world of touch!? Ever try the windows 8 consumer test? If KDE actually made a tablet interface their standard for KDE5 with no option of using the older more effective interface, I would use LXDE, XFCE, or heck, make my own interface with a window manager, pypanel and conky!

The simple fact is that desktops are not tablets. I cant explain this any further. KDE developers have come way too far with KDE4 to throw everything down the toilet to jump on the bandwagon with gnome, canonical and windows.
Micheelsen

I would love to be able to raise the menu with a single press on the win-button (meta). Its possible and convenient in windows. Why not in KDE?
It used to be possible but disappeared in KDE 3 (I think). Why?
- minnesota linux
  
  Right-click on the KMenu, select “Application Launcher Settings”, go to the Keyboard Shortcut option, and set a shortcut.
  - Micheelsen
    
    Sorry, but that doesn’t work. In KDE meta only works as a modifier. I cannot define meta to do anything unless it is combined with another key. In lack of a better alternative I have defined the combination to be meta+<
    Well, its better than using the mouse but not good enough
    - Luticus
      
      This will fix it for you, works beautifully for me: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/ksuperkey?content=154569
      
      I know this is late (a year later) but I saw this and though “maybe it’ll help”.
      - Hans Micheelsen
        
        Oh, this is good! What a relief!!! I’ve been waiting for this for so long
        Thank you very much, dude!!
tanghus

“With Qt, the KDE team will always be stuck in a world of legacy interaction between the app and the user. In order to move forward, Plasma must finally be fully exploited.”

Strictly speaking Plasma is also Qt. What you are referring to is QWidget.
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qwidget.html
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minnesota linux

I’d rather see *more* overlap with the various System Settings, so that there may be a Network section that has IP settings, Wifi settings, and VPN settings, but also under the User section I could find VPN there as well (because as an end user connecting to work, I’m doing user stuff!), and under Hardware I’d have info about printers and displays but also about Wifi settings…

Basically, with SO MANY options, don’t make me find just ONE PLACE to make a setting; allow me to access that from the *many* places where it might make sense.

We can manually create this with KCMShell4 if we put each of these into a .desktop launcher item and manually arranged them in a folder at, say, ~/Settings/

shell$ kcmshell4 –list
The following modules are available:
kwincompositing – Configure desktop effects
display – Display Settings
autostart – A configuration tool for managing which programs start up with KDE.
ebrowsing – Configure enhanced browsing
kcm_phonon – Sound and Video Configuration
khtml_appearance – Configure how to display web pages
khtml_behavior – Configure the browser behavior
…
…
…

That’s something (an alternative Settings screen) that I’ve been working on but I keep getting pulled away…
The Beez Speaks

“Maybe this division makes more sense in German, I’m not sure.”
Anwendungsoberflacheerscheinungseinstellungen. Arbeitsplatzoberflacheerscheinungseinstellungen. I don’t think so…
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Lorne Greene

Enough with your freaking touch.
NO ONE is asking for it on the desktop.
You want it on a tablet? Knock yourself out.

Thats why KDE ‘gets’ it, desktop, tablets and netbooks are NOT the same thing.

The whole premise that 4.9 is almost here and 5.0 means trouble ‘because look at what happened last time’. Let’s not rehash things too much but the technical changes back then had to be done. You could patch things up or bring in a whole new infrastructure which will help in the long run. I havent heard any such thing even talked about. Just because x.0 was painful doesnt mean 5.0 will be. There is nothing to support this position except many numerology.

#3 is pretty useless to me: I hate defaults. I mean most of them but especially Oxygen buttons, hard to see for myself and most seniors… doesnt mean I dont like KDE, its just that the default means nothing, its just one more setting to change, like the wallpaper and icons to make this ‘MY’ desktop, not someone else’s.
Which I why i always suggest to people to look beyond defaults as they represent only one choice out of many.

#4 first sentence is the kind of things you read in places where they use ‘blogosphere’ a lot.
Ive got a 27 inch screen at work, two 24s at home, I dont see any reason on earth why I should start getting tennis elbow like my cousin Mike who has an HP Touchsmart and who slings pictures from side to side on his touch screen when I can move my mouse 2cm and do that and more?
Its like Ubuntu and their HUD. Why the heck would I want to go back to two hands on the keyboard? How does that even make sense with touch?
There is a place for touch and some form factors make perfect sense.
Some dont. Not in front of my 24inch screen or laptop.
The worst part of technology is having a solution in search of a problem.

But you do seem to understand that latter down…

Honestly i have very little wishes for my KDE desktops, I can make them look how I want, and for the most part, they are out of sight, out of mind.
Do your new defaults and knock yourself out with them as long as I can do what I want and make it look like I want after youve changed things.

Sure there are small niggling things Id change but none of them are life changers: Id like kpackagekit back instead of the Win98 generation look of Muon but I understand that the diddling of defaults and programs doesnt really change my use. If I want to use LibreOffice, Thunderbird, VLC and Firefox it makes little difference which is the home default browser, world processor or video player (I like Dragon even with the childish name but I have found little reason to switch from VLC apart from a little period around 1.1).
I wish that sound wasnt such a problem (Pulse oh dios mio) and that JACK wouldnt require a 15yr old whiz kid to get running for most people.
I wish that dual boots wouldnt still look like some 1991 DOS horror on most distros (shame on Buntu and their famed user friendlyness, always one of the worst dual boots screens).
I wish that the MOST viewed item on the KDE taskbar, the system tray would FINALLY allow its icons to be made bigger because everything on the damn desktop can be made bigger EXCEPT the damn icons that you watch all the time.

But thats really nit pickingly petty.

Its been a blast to have added so many family and friends since KDE 4.3 came out and the best compliment is usually “I totally forget Im using Linux”.
minnesota linux

Here is a list of some tools that I’d like to see in KDE still:
http://gnuski.blogspot.com/2009/10/kde-4-please-integrate-10.html

I think it’s great that some of my suggestions seem to have made it into Plasma, such as the multi-monitor tool etc. Still, we can always have more power, right?
ears

Kmail, Akonadi, and Nepomuk all working!
ScionicSpectre

To be fair, I use a lot of applications in GNOME 3, and the replacement for the taskbar is the workspaces- that’s why they’re so dynamic and prevalent in GNOME 3. They are quite efficient. Also, the scale effect in the Activities overview has two benefits over a taskbar. First, you can see the window- it’s easier to identify a visual representation than text, and even an icon if you don’t know the application already. I don’t think this is treating me like a child- I think it’s just making things easier to understand. Second benefit is that the click target is much larger and easier to reach, since my mouse is probably already close to the middle of the screen, not an edge (if I’m using the super key to enter this view). Also, it’s nice not having to think about five different ways to get to things, although the traditional Alt+Tab and workspace switching shortcuts are there.

Unfortunately, you have to configure KDE to use Ctrl+Alt+Down/Up to switch workspaces, and you can’t middle-click the titlebar to ‘drop’ the window down to the bottom of the stack. I will admit, however, that I middle-click the titlebar quite often to sift through applications in GNOME 3- there has been talk of implementing a more obvious way to do this, officially. Also, I won’t deny that scrolling over the background to switch desktops is much easier than a keyboard shortcut or even the snappy GNOME 3 overview.

All I’m saying is that GNOME 3 isn’t quite so destructive to productivity as people think. Also, for me, the notifications system has become a boon to my productivity, as well as the ‘get all that visual crap out of the way and let me work’ approach. I like that I can easily talk to my clients as I’m working in Blender and Inkscape, without needing to click all over the place and lose my concentration. Just move the mouse down, type, move away. It’s like butter.

I think many of the good ideas and concepts from GNOME 3 could fit the KDE functionality ethos, and I hope more integration keeps coming to make it truly competitive. KDE was a dream come true to me once, but seeing just how clean and ‘Made of Easy’ something like GNOME 3 can be, it’s hard to switch back for more than a few minutes and not feel cheated. Of course, KDE 4 is still leagues above and Windows in efficiency, layout, consistency, and exceeds OS X in almost every area except layout design. I’d love to see some new HIGs and a serious, structured approach to splitting mobile and desktop apps, while providing recommendations to make it fit KDE. To be honest, the core KDE applications feel pretty inconsistent to me, and they don’t make the mark. The default browser has fallen far behind, KMail just hurts, and Kopete’s becoming more and more irrelevant as Empathy proves what you can really do with chat.

I want to see KDE shine as it once did, even in comparison to GNOME. And I think it would only take a few small initiatives to make it so.
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CyberKiller

About #2 – the system settings you show were only in kubuntu in one of the last versions of kde3. Search the net for kcontrol or KDE Control Center to see screenshots of how it looked in kde3 (and kde2 before that). Or just look at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KControl
alpha_one_x86

More performance, less memory, then: Qt5, wayland and profiling.
Integration of ultracopier into dolphin, and fast sftp browsing is the most needed in my case.
Craig Wessel

If this is what KDE is going to go to… It may be worth checking out. But! Don’t get me wrong here… I still think GNOME Shell is the best Desktop!
Craig Wessel

After seeing GNOME 3.6 I was appalled! It really IS Meant for touch devices. I will be using KDE now. Good day.

KDE 5.0, The Future Is The Past

1 Less Qt, more Plasma!

2 Overhaul System Settings

Related posts

**1 Less Qt, more Plasma!**