KDE Plasma 5.22
kde.org
kde.org
I used to love KDE 1 and 2, since KDE 3 they've adopted this really bland interface I can't push myself to like. It's like there's only three available colours: light grey, light desaturated blue, and white. The whole desktop is a desaturated grey-bluish interface with grey icons that doesn't have any personality, feels cool, bland and insipid. And when it's not grey, it's icons without any cohesion with the rest of the system using all colours of the spectrum, giving them a Fisher-Price look. It feels as inviting as if it were the user interface for a medical device, smelling of bleach and trying its hardest not to have any personality whatsoever.
One can dislike GNOME how much they want but at least there is a soul to the design, like there was a soul to the original Windows 95 design. At least it used colours with more than 10% saturation.
I really wish KDE would stop adding features and knobs and more settings panels and just adopted an OPINIONATED design guideline. Choose a brand colour, explore the palette a little bit that's not grey and blue grey and white grey.
I can't even imagine using anything else at this point.
I guess Qt 6 is out now, and so Qt 5 will soon be unsupported if it isn't already. I wonder how the balance of rewriting and breaking API changes will work out for the Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 transition! Here's hoping the KDE devs figure out how take advantage of the opportunity for helpful/necessary API changes without having to cut or reimplement too many features. What users have got at present is really, really nice
I'm sure the constraint is frustrating in some ways, but you've built a desktop experience worth conserving as you advance it!
It's a tiny thing but it drives me nuts (and luckily for me it has also been driving someone working on KDE nuts so they fixed it!)
At the same time, the fact that this is my biggest complaint regarding KDE Neon should be a clear indication that I'm quite a happy user in general :)
"oh, our not-KDE desktop environment can't do AT ALL what KDE does uneventfully, we need to catch up with these guys"
But I do agree that it tends to see key features implemented well ahead of its biggest competitors. It also has really good built-ins, and imo something that doesn't get emphasized enough when discussing its configurability is how _usable_ its configuration interfaces are. Plasma has a much better story for configuring global keyboard shortcuts than macOS does, for example. I generally find the KDE conventions for organizing configuration options impressively orderly and discoverable, especially given how much functionality they expose.
I was using Ubuntu Budgie and the Bluetooth did not work well. It would pair but not connect, or show connected but it wasn’t. Tried KDE and it suddenly started working (still in Ubuntu).
So last night I installed Mankato KDE and I gotta say, Plasma feels much more serious. Less of a toy and more empowering to the user.
The default looks don’t really match my style, but everything I touch works and the UI is VERY informative (wifi signal numbers in each SSID in the list for example). Very pleased with it. And above it all, Bluetooth works great.
Monitors are getting bigger and have higher resolution, but the default still seems for a single monitor laptop experience.
Workarounds like Kronkite and others don't do the trick.
I've wanted this for so long now, I'm strongly considering building this out myself as there's no traction behind this from the core devs.
The latest additions are _nice_ but aren't really what I'm looking for.
The Linux OSS desktop is really very sweet. Thanks to all this work, nice people of KDE!