XFCE vs KDE

[Moltke]

KDE's been given a lot of attention these days and some serious work is being done:

https://pointieststick.com/2020/12/11/th...y-bonanza/

https://blog.vladzahorodnii.com/2020/12/...nd-future/

https://blog.vladzahorodnii.com/2020/07/...t-in-kwin/

[trinidad]

"It might come as a surprise, but the reason why we decided to add CSD support after so many years of being reluctant was Wayland."

Imagine that !!

TC

[Moltke]

KDE just keep getting better and better

https://pointieststick.com/2021/01/30/th...5p3GPwiDbg

[Moltke]

Plasma 5.21 is all about upgrading the looks and usability of Plasma.

https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.21.0/

- New Application Launcher.
- fixed most of the bugs reported by users.
- Application theme improvements.
- Breeze Twilight: a combination of a dark theme for Plasma and a light theme for applications.
- Plasma System Monitor.
- KDE is pushing to have first class support for Wayland, and Plasma 5.21 makes massive progress towards reaching that goal.
- Plasma 5.21 brings a new page to System Settings: the Plasma Firewall settings.
- The Media Player widget’s layout has been improved and now includes the list of applications currently playing music in the header as a tab bar.
- In Plasma 5.21, two new components for mobile in the official release.
- Discover now supports unattended updates.
- Pin KRunner (doesn't close automatically).
- Digital Clock has better support for time zones.
- The sound applet now displays the live microphone volume.

I tried it in OpenSuse Argon, https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Argon_and_Krypton looks nice and resource usage keeps low, though I don't quite like the new app launcher; has a "win 10 look-like style" and seems like more clicking is needed to do some stuff is possible to do now in kickoff with the keyboard. 

[Moltke]

A big Plasma feature was added this week: adaptive Plasma panel opacity
Now the panel and panel applets are more transparent than they were before, allowing more of a tint from the beautiful wallpaper on your desktop! But what’s this? You’re about to complain that you maximize all your windows so the increased transparency will look ugly? In fact, we now make your panel and panel applets 100% opaque when there are any maximized windows, ensuring no ugly effect! But what if you don’t want that either? Well, if you don’t want adaptive opacity we now let you make your panel and panel applets always transparent, or always opaque! Hopefully that should make everyone happy. ?

https://youtu.be/4exHfb8Qjl0
https://pointieststick.com/2021/03/05/th...s-in-kate/


    • Another notable feature got merged as well: the ability to have Kate automatically preserve and restore unsaved files or even unsaved changes in files when quit and re-launched!
          Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
    • Elisa now consumes less memory when you scroll around the app and see a lot of album art
    • Elisa now saves playlist files in the .m3u8 format which supports UTF8-encoding and non-ASCII characters, and also allows you to open playlist files already in that format
    • Renaming a file on a Samba share in such a manner that the only way its filename changes is that one letter is moved from uppercase to lowercase (or vice versa) now works
    • The Flickr picture of the day wallpaper now works again; its API key had expired. This keeps happening, so we are investigating a more generic way of keeping it working consistently
    • Plasma System Monitor apples no longer sometimes display a broken config window
    • Discover now always returns the appropriate number of apps when asked to find handlers for a file format
    • The feature to automatically match header decoration styling for GTK headerbar apps now works on multi-user systems when multiple users are logged in at the same time
    • There is no longer a blank entry in the Digital Clock’s time zone chooser; it now shows “Yangon”, a city in Myanmar
    • KRunner no longer dumps an ugly unprintable character in its search field when you hit the Escape, Backspace, or Delete key while the history view is open
    • The bottom buttons in various System Settings pages no longer sometimes get cut off when using Plasma Mobile or using a system language with long text
    • The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes crashes after spending a lot of time minimized
    • The “kill a process” dialog in the new Plasma System Monitor no longer suffers from a variety of minor visual glitches
    • When using the new Plasma System Monitor app to get new visual chart styles, the resulting window is no longer hilariously small
    • System Monitor widgets now correctly update their titles to reflect user-initiated changes immediately after such changes are made
    • The focus effect for buttons on the Lock, Login, and Logout screens now appears correctly again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.3)
    • Menus in GTK apps once again have the same height as menus in KDE and Qt apps
    • GTK apps using the new Libhandy library now display their top headerbars with the correct height
    • Fixed a few issues in the Breeze Dark Global Theme which were it causing it to not properly apply the intended color scheme and splash screen
    • When the screen is turned off, the system no longer wastes CPU and GPU power drawing un-rendered components
    • Search results in Kickoff which have icons provided by .ico files are no longer blurry (
    • Placeholder Text in Plasma text fields and text boxes now presents the correct cursor when you move your mouse over it and is never the wrong color or even inappropriately selectable
          User Interface Improvements
    • When using a wheel mouse, Gwenview’s image thumbnail view now scrolls by the same amount (matching Dolphin) no matter how large the thumbnails are
    • It’s now more obvious how to stop a presentation in Okular
    • In Kate, the F11 key is now used to enter and exit fullscreen as it does in many other apps, rather than toggling line numbers on and off
    • Gwenview now shows a quality chooser slider when saving images in the JPEG XL file format, if supported on your system
    • Everything in Plasma and QML-based apps now fully respects your animation duration settings, including not animating anything at all when animations are disabled
     

[Moltke]

The guys at XFCE are doing their best too https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2021/03...hats-next/

Task manager, Xfconf and Client-side decorations.



CPU-graph, Systemload and Netload got new icons



Weather plugin got a new icon, porting to Xfconf and improving the UX of the settings and forecast summary windows.



Finally, some plugins mentioned above now implement the xfce_dialog_show_help API, which creates a “Help” button linking to the plugin’s documentation.

[Moltke]

KDE people don't stop:

https://pointieststick.com/2021/03/26/th...-things-2/

New Features

    • Kate and KWrite now have basic touchscreen scrolling support!
    • System Settings now opens to a new “Quick Settings” page that displays some of the most commonly-used settings, and even includes a link to the wallpaper settings as well!



    • There’s now an option for Digital Clock applets placed on a horizontal panel to force single-line display of both date and time irrespective of the panel’s height



Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

    • When activating KDE Connect’s standalone “Reply to message” window, it now comes to the front automatically instead of hiding annoyingly behind existing windows (at least on X11; on Wayland, nothing comes to the front automatically, but it will soon once our proposed cross-app activation protocol is merged and then we adopt it.
    • Substantially improved the speed and performance of taking high DPI screenshots in Spectacle
    • Color scheme previews once again show the correct colors in the inner view section, and the preview no longer sometimes gets cut off at the bottom
    • In the new Plasma System Monitor app, the right sidebar’s content no longer sometimes gets cut off
    • Changing the volume no longer sometimes causes it to get increased or decreased by one percentage point more or less that the amount you would expect it to be adjusted by
    • In the Plasma Wayland session, changing random settings in System Settings or switching Global themes no longer sometimes randomly causes Plasma or KWin to crash
    • In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager is now capable of cycling through windows of a grouped task on click exactly as in the X11 session
    • KRunner’s history drop-down menu now always works even if you’re using a crusty old Plasma theme that’s a fork of an old version of Breeze and hasn’t been updated in ages and ages
    • The National Geographic picture of the day wallpaper now works again, and has been future-proofed a bit to hopefully make it less likely to break in the future if the source URLs change again
    • System Settings now shows whether the Window Behavior page has any changed settings with the customary orange dot in the sidebar when using its “Highlight Changed Settings” feature
    • Drag-and-drop operations in the Plasma Wayland session no longer activate every single window that the cursor passes over while dragging
    • Pressing the Esc key in the new Plasma System Monitor app while a popup is open no longer closes both the popup and also any other closable thing below it that was also open
    • KRunner no longer sometimes launches apps as the wrong user under certain circumstances
    • Unmounting a mounted volume after opening and then closing any files on it no longer gets stuck
    • Dolphin no longer sometimes crashes when playing a video preview in the Information Panel, and also uses a bit less memory when doing so.

User Interface Improvements

Kate and KWrite now tell you what to do instead if you mistakenly run them with sudo or kdesu to try to edit root-owned files



The subtitle for Plasma Vaults items now wraps, so that the error next never gets elided before the useful part of the message can be printed



    • Discover’s notification now retains its interactive button when viewed in the notifications applet, so you can click on it to open Discover and start the update
    • Klipper’s hidden feature to show a pop-up with all the saved clipboard entries right at the cursor position is now bound to the Meta+V shortcut, so now it’s super easy to press that and see all the saved clipboard entries and call up whichever one you want!
    • Taking into account user feedback, we have reverted the change to System Settings that put the Global Themes item into the sidebar’s header area, in favor of a new approach that simply indents all the child pages below it. This also restores the ability to click on the whole header area to go back



The configuration windows for Plasma applets have received a visual overhaul which makes them more consistent with other modern KDE apps and also fixes a bunch of bugs, particularly regarding the desktop configuration view not remembering its size and sometimes abruptly changing its size



    • The Highlight Windows effect that is displayed by default when switching windows no longer shows ghost outlines of non-highlighted windows that can cause a bizarre jumble on the screen when many windows are stacked on top of one another at the same or similar positions
    • Breeze tabs now have a subtle colored line on the top of the active tab, which makes it clear which tab is active when there are only two, especially when using a dark color scheme.
    • It’s now possible to delete installed Splash Screens installed using the Get New Splash Screens window straight from the System Settings page itself, without having to go back to that window.
    • The Emoji Selector window now offers an option to clear the history of recently-used Emojis.
    • The scrollbar mini-map in Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps now respects your active color scheme
    • Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based apps no pointlessly longer prompt you to save your changes when you close a document that’s both blank and also unsaved, because in this circumstance, there are no changes.

If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

[Moltke]

The KDE Plasma gets better and better; support for Wayland improves.  https://pointieststick.com/2021/04/30/th...much-more/
Dedoimedo: "The Plasma desktop is miles ahead of everything else" https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plas...esome.html

[Artim]

On Fedora KDE has been rife with glitches, according to some of the blogs I read and a some posts on Diaspora*. It may be fine on Ubuntu-based distros, though.

[Moltke]

On Fedora KDE has been rife with glitches, according to some of the blogs I read and a some posts on Diaspora*. It may be fine on Ubuntu-based distros, though.

I use KDE on 3 systems: Debian Bullseye/Testing, openSUSE Leap 15.2, they both work great. In openSUSE I'm using Wayland, and sure it isn't perfect just yet, but it's quite usable; responsiveness and functionality seems to be balanced.  I also installed Fedora 34, the KDE spin which uses Wayland by default, and while my experience hasn't been "hassle-free", it works fine most of the time.