leopold

leopold , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

A product of its time. KDE 2 released in 2000 and this is a pre-release screenshot of a non-default theme. The default KDE 2 theme looked like this. It was competing with the likes of Windows Me, Mac OS 9 and GNOME 1.

leopold , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Looks like Motif with its trademark terrible contrast (black text on dark grey, very accessible) and a lame marble texture slapped on top of it. Also that button in the bottom left corner has like zero margins. Very 2000 overall. Not something I’d ever want to use, tho. To be fair, the default theme KDE 2 ended up using was significantly better.

leopold OP , 4 months ago

Activities do a lot more. Virtual desktops are purely a window management feature. They contain windows and very little else. Activities can have different, panels, wallpapers, desktop icons, etc.

leopold OP , 4 months ago

KDE Non-LInear Video Editor. Or Kool Desktop Environment Non-LInear Video Editor, if you will.

leopold , 5 months ago

offtopic, but why is this comment yellow? never seen that before.

EDIT: Oh wait, I think it’s to mark unread comments. Haven’t seen that before. Must be a new thing.

leopold , 5 months ago

LibreOffice uses its own toolkit called VCL which uses a number back-ends to render using native toolkits on all platforms, similar in concept to WxWidgets. I don’t know if the way VCL works allows Qt6 fractional scaling to just work, but a Qt6/KF6 back-end already exists and can be forced by setting SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=qt6 or SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=kf6, so you should be able to try it out right now.

leopold , 5 months ago

Maui confuses me. The Plasma Mobile homepage features Index, Pix and Vvave prominently. Additionally, those three and Nota are featured on apps.kde.org and the git repositories for all Maui applications are hosted on KDE’s GitLab at invent.kde.org/maui. Index in particular is very important for KDE, since it’s the only mobile-friendly file manager Plasma Mobile has. The Maui blog is also aggregated on Planet KDE. So clearly Maui is very closely related to KDE.

However, Maui Shell is hosted on Nitrux’s GitHub, not KDE. Maui apps also don’t use a lot of standard KDE infrastructure like bugs.kde.org. Plus, the elephant in the room, Maui apps have a totally different HIG from the rest of KDE. Mauikit apps are convergent, use CSD and force the standard Maui theme. They always use hamburger menus over menubars and rarely use more than one window. Apps focus on simple interfaces and simple feature sets. Some of these things, such as convergence, preference for hamburger menus and single window interfaces are also found in some Kirigami applications, but in Maui it’s universal. It feels like a Qt version of GNOME much more than it feels KDE. Combine Maui Shell with Maui applications and you end up with a desktop environment which has nothing in common with KDE’s flagship Plasma. So what’s Maui? How is it related to KDE? I don’t get it.

leopold , 5 months ago

I just use the web client

leopold , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Desktop environments are always developed alongside a set of applications, which is what differentiates them from simple desktop shells. These applications aren’t exclusive to the desktops they were made for, they’re simply designed to fit their aesthetic and design philosophy to offer a more consistent experience. Most desktop environments have a fairly limited set of applications, covering mostly the essentials. The most commonly found types are terminals, file managers, settings, image viewers, media players, text editors, screenshot apps and software centers.

GNOME and KDE are the exceptions, by virtue of being much larger than all other desktops. Both maintain a very extensive set of applications with a wide range of purposes, which tend to be widely used regardless of desktops. GNOME’s Evolution and KDE’s Kdenlive for instance are among the most popular apps on Linux, since they’re among the best apps to use to fulfill their respective purposes (PIM and video editing).

leopold , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Every Linux distribution packages the dependencies for the software they distribute and will automatically install when needed. If you’re trying to install GNOME software on KDE and you don’t have the necessary GNOME dependencies installed, the package manager will just install them for you. This is why using applications cross-desktop isn’t something the average user has to worry about. It should just work.

leopold OP , 5 months ago

glad kcalc is finally becoming usable

leopold OP , 4 months ago

I remember trying just about every GUI calculator I could find and trying to get one I could actually tolerate. Any calculator which pointlessly hid what you’d written from you every time you added an operator like KCalc did was automatically out, which disqualified a surprisingly and disappointingly large amount of calculators. Any calculator without a standard skeuomorphic interface was also out, because I didn’t feel like relearning how to use a calculator.

I used GNOME calculator for a while, but switched away because I found the interface for programmer mode to be hella confusing when I really just wanted to have hexadecimal and binary modes. I also used Uno Calculator for a while, a direct port of the Windows 10 calculator, but the port was a bit rough and fonts didn’t work so well, otherwise it would’ve been perfect. I finally settled on Deepin Calculator. A bit basic and completely unthemable beyond switching between dark and light themes, but it was very easy to use and had all the functionality I needed. I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t just go with Qalculate!. I know for a fact I tried it and it seems like it would’ve been perfect. I’ll probably just be using KCalc from now on, tho.

leopold , 5 months ago

twm and paperwm are two very different window managers

leopold OP , 5 months ago

because those two things are pretty much what Plasma needs the most at this point. the two most common complaints about Plasma are that it’s buggy and that it’s ugly.

leopold OP , 5 months ago

Yeah, Plasma isn’t great under heavy IO and as far as I can tell that’s not really getting fixed in Plasma 6. It’s one of the biggest problems I have with it right now. On faster storage it’s not really a problem, especially on SSDs, but on slower storage it can definitely be. I would recommend trying a different desktop.

GNOME is generally heavier than Plasma, but might indeed perform better in the scenario. You don’t have to use GNOME with GNOME applications if you don’t like them. You can easily use GNOME Shell and Plasma applications. There other desktops worth a try outside of GNOME and Plasma, tho. LXQt should be very fast. Enlightenment even more so.

Also, I don’t think memory safety is among KDE’s biggest concerns. Qt afaik handles a lot of the memory management and it is a professional toolkit which has received a lot of testing. It shouldn’t be too problematic. Writing memory safe code is also much easier in C++ than it is in C. Yeah, Rust is better, but it doesn’t seem to me like this is something that’s causing that many problems in KDE.

leopold , 5 months ago

Most KDE apps are Linux-only. More popular apps will often have some support for other operating systems, but that support is only good for the most popular apps, like Kate, Krita, Okular or Kdenlive.

leopold , 5 months ago

Is there any reason to move away from Bugzilla? Afaik the reason why they’re not using GitLab issues it’s missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has. Also afaict the language thing is more of a choice than anything. Qt already has excellent Python support, but having everything written in C++ and QML makes things easier. But yes, they definitely could use more money and more paid developers. KDE could really use more manpower.

And yeah, a ton of devs would much rather be working on open source software, but if it’s not directly profitable it’s not gonna generate a lot of jobs. You need a lot of donations just to hire one developer full time. There’s always going to be a lot more jobs in closed source software than in open source.

leopold , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

What’s wrong with KTorrent? Also KDE has a ton of apps (like 200 of them last time I counted). Many of them are certainly the most popular tool for what they do on Linux. On other operating systems, they’re usually not very popular, tho. Krita is probably the most popular of the bunch and might even be more popular than Plasma. It raises its own funds independently from the rest of KDE, tho. It’s also probably still nowhere near Thunderbird’s popularity.

leopold , 5 months ago

I’ve heard of this before, but as far as I know that no longer exists. Most of the KDE apps available on other operating systems can be found here: binary-factory.kde.org. Okteta is indeed one of them, available on both macOS and Windows. There are definitely a fair amount, but many of these ports are in rough shape and this is still a small portion of total number of KDE apps available on Linux.

leopold , 5 months ago

You misunderstood. I’m aware KDE doesn’t support languages other than QML and C++. I’m saying this is probably a choice on their behalf to make things easier to maintain. Whether or not this choice is good is up for debate, but I don’t think it is the result of a lack of funding.

As for where your money goes, their donation page has a section on this which also links to annual reports. Some larger KDE projects do have their own donation buttons (like Kdenlive and Krita), but most don’t. A lot are just too small for it to be worth it, but this is still an area that can be improved. As for the “KDE Team”, that’s a pretty nebulous concept. I don’t think there is one, officially. KDE is a community of mostly volunteers working on KDE software. Most of the ones paid to work on KDE aren’t paid by donations, but are hired by third parties to work on KDE, like Blue Systems or Valve. Right now I believe most of the money is spent on infrastructure and events. Afaik, most of the people paid directly by donations are Krita and Kdenlive devs, since that’s what they raised their own funds for. KDE wants to start hiring more developers tho and I imagine their successful Plasma 6 fundraiser will allow them to do this.

Also, keep in mind the fact that Mozilla software including Thunderbird is just significantly more popular than pretty much anything KDE makes. Yes, KDE is infinitely larger in scope than Thunderbird is, but Thunderbird sees a lot more mainstream professional use than any piece of KDE software and that’s what gets you money.

leopold , 5 months ago

Seems to me like it was just abandoned by the dev. On GitLab, the repository is archived. KDE already has several other chat clients which use more open protocols, KDE devs are probably more interested in using and maintaining those. Most of KDE’s official channels are on Matrix, which’s why NeoChat gets the most attention.

leopold , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

You should be able to access SMB shares in Dolphin by typing smb://[ip address] in the location bar. If needed you can also set default username and password in System Settings->Network->Settings->Windows Shares.

Also, you can make Smb4K start automatically with Plasma by adding it in System Settings -> Workspace -> Startup and Shutdown -> Autostart.

I’ve never really used SMB, so maybe there are better solutions.