Now that the dust has settled, how are people getting on with Plasma 5?

[xennex81]

In general I believe Linux users are putting up with a lot.

[Feathers McGraw]

Thing is, plasma 5 was supposed to introduce all these new features or architectural possibilities.

It has, but you'll need to wait for app developers to make use of them.

But from the viewpoint of this forum, it is all a black box. No one talks about those features, we don't know about them. To us, plasma5 is just plasma4 that looks differently and works worse. I don't see what was added, and neither does anyone I believe. If we were truly objective, people would be objecting to that and noticing that. But it's too much blind hope.

I recognise that some people have had problems with Plasma5. Personally, I haven't, but I don't tend to customise my desktop much.

However, I'm not sure "I don't understand what changed" equates to having objective reasons for not liking Plasma5. If you want to learn about new features, why don't you ask instead of assuming nobody is talking about it because nobody knows anything!

Most of the changes are new APIs, so they're not going to reach out of the screen and slap you in the face. Plasma 5 is built on a newer version of Qt. As an example, there have been quite a few advances recently in the Qt web engine(adding support for html5, for example), which is used by rekonq and many other apps. Given how much content we all use is actually remote content displayed locally using the Qt webengine (even if it's not in a browser directly), this is not a trivial improvement.

There's plenty of background noise about these improvements if you look for it, for example the Rekonq roadmap:


https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/rekonq/Roadmap


And here's the "what's new" page for the Qt5.4, which is what you get with plasma 5.2.2 on 15.04. That's just one small release, look through the other releases using the links at the bottom of the page and you start to see why sticking with an older version of Plasma/Qt means you'll start to miss out on features pretty quickly.

[xennex81]

Right, so Plasma5 is mostly about Qt5. Makes sense. And it's hard to know what it does unless you're a Qt programmer yourself. Still, so difficult! I cannot even fathom what I would need to do to get my hand (or my head) wrapped around it. It seems you need an investment of a lifetime to get anywhere close to Qt programming. First there's the programming environment, what editor, IDE, tools will you use? How to work with make (or build) files? Are there alternatives? It seems like a daunting process (and task).

[jpenguin]

Right, so Plasma5 is mostly about Qt5. Makes sense. And it's hard to know what it does unless you're a Qt programmer yourself. Still, so difficult! I cannot even fathom what I would need to do to get my hand (or my head) wrapped around it. It seems you need an investment of a lifetime to get anywhere close to Qt programming. First there's the programming environment, what editor, IDE, tools will you use? How to work with make (or build) files? Are there alternatives? It seems like a daunting process (and task).

When I started QT4, xcode; now you can use QT creator.

[Feathers McGraw]

Well, if you like to keep it simple you don't need an IDE at all. I chose to learn and understand what the IDE is doing behind the scenes first anyway, the reasoning being if you can manage with just a text editor and compiler you'll be fine on every device (phone, router, you name it), whereas relying on a specific IDE could screw you one day. I write my code in Kate (syntax highlighting is all I wanted), and compile from the commandline. I haven't written any Qt apps but will do one day.

You're right that learning this stuff is a big time investment, but it's fun too.

I don't think Qt seems that difficult, learning C++ itself probably takes more effort. Did you see the example code on that Qt WebEngine link?

import QtQuick 2.1
import QtQuick.Controls 1.1
import QtWebEngine 1.0

ApplicationWindow {
    width: 1280
    height: 720
    visible: true
    WebEngineView {
        id: webview
        url: "http://www.qt-project.org"
        anchors.fill: parent
    }
}

Pretty clean really, and I think that's the whole point, to make it easy to do things that would be difficult if you did them all from scratch.

[whatthefunk]

I generally like it, but its a little buggy. Switching activities freezes up the desktop sometimes and it seems to have problems with focus. For example, if I have one window on top of another, if I click on the back window, that window should steal the focus and pop to the front, but sometimes it doesnt.

The thing I like best is Kmix, which has finally caught up to the rest of the world. Now, you can control audio streams and devices without having to install desktop widgets and third party stuff.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I'm not in the mood for upgrading anything right now, so 15.04 and its Plasma 5 will just have to wait! I'm sticking with my older releases, from 14.04LTS on down to...6.04? (I can't remember now. My oldest, headless desktop--that I only occasionally access via the network for file retrieval--may still be on 6.04.) Anyway, when 15.04 settles down a bit more, I may take the plunge on at least one computer and then decide whether to proceed with some of the others.