How's KDE Plasma 6 Going FEAT. Nick from The Linux Experiment!

and as much as I did not like using Mac OS for 30 days I hate using Windows even more it did happen that I received internal internal criticism and people still felt like okay he copied window no we've been doing that for like five years and honestly the the current Breeze team it's not bad like it's legible it has good contrast it's very usable it's just that I think so I just wanted to say that plasma 6 is coming finally and a very important detail of plasma 6 is that we haven't decided to just do a plasma 6 because we thought okay it's been enough time since plasma 5 let's just do something new but rather obviously cutie released a new version of its toolkit qd6 and since we rely a lot on cutie we decided to create a new plasma to go along with the new release of QD but at the same time given that we were kind of forced to make a new major release of plasma we thought okay what do we want this new kitty plasma version to be and we kind of discussed this and decided some things months and months ago and just now finally we're getting some results and seeing how that things we decided are actually translating into real code so I was really wondering since like your channels is much bigger than mine and people when Cosmetics are released are very likely to go to you to hear about the latest stuff what do you expect plasma 6 to go and what do you think the developer should have at this point uh decided as their goal and targets for plasma 6. okay so uh I'll try not to color my answer too much with what I know of plasma 6 uh I'm gonna try to to talk from the point of view of like I don't know what's in there and first I think it's a great thing to have made like a major release like a separate from the usual cycle like not forcing you to yourselves to have a a four month release cycle for this one I think 5.27 is a great is that a great stage right now it's really stable it works well it has decent Wyland implementations like it's a good base for people to wait until plasma 6 happens now for plasma 6 itself for me personally uh I think what should be the focus because of what should have been the focus since development already started a lot is probably like just spending the time to refine things uh further than what 5.27 has done because I think 5.27 and just the whole KD 5 series was kind of constrained uh in terms of what you could do because well it has a lot of baggage and people are expecting regular updates with plasma 6 since you're already porting to qt6 you have the opportunity to rework a lot of stuff and so what I would expect personally is uh just a lot more polished not necessarily more features because I think Katie has virtually everything anyone could ask for uh maybe the only thing that you can't really do with it is like sort of a basic Mac OS dock because like you can kind of replicate that with a plasma panel but it doesn't exactly work in the same way that's about it so not necessarily more features but just more polish like finalizing completely finalizing the Wayland transition making the plasma desktop and plasma is a little bit less finicky to to place to align maybe unify the visual style of a lot of plasmoids which can be very disjointed like if you try to place them on a column on your screen none of them will have the exact same width and stuff like that just generally a lot of Polish and you can take the time to do that and you can basically bring KDE at a level that I don't think it has reached before not even at like the 3.5 series now the second thing is not necessarily a plasma thing it's more of a an application thing like we've seen the no map ecosystem completely explode in terms of number and quality and and I wish Katie had like the same kind of vibrant ecosystem caddy has a lot of cool applications but you don't see the same number of smaller utilities that look really easy to use that look really like that really follow the guidelines of the desktop and I think that could be an opportunity as well but that's not necessarily linked to plasma yep and in fact that is very similar to what we decided especially it was uh we discussed that in the past we haven't had a history of major releases that were like super stable and people were super happy about in fact I know of developers who started contributing to KD plasma because a major release was like pretty bad and they hopped in to help out and we wanted this to be completely different having something that is very stable out of Redbox as soon as it's released and we didn't quite look for new features and even though we knew that I mean plasma 6 is one year from now people are going to make new releases and new features that's just gonna happen and you mentioned the dock I work with that and currently my plan there is already a complete redesign of the panel settings we do have to change it further because of technical stuff and I would like to add a button that allows you to make it a DOT uh just a button which wouldn't be an additional feature compared to what we have currently it would just make it floating at the center with the dust manager and not feeling the whole screen yeah sort of like something you could do manually but doing it in one click instead of having to place everything yourself yep just making it easier and more streamlined that's kind of the goal and I do agree with the normal application ecosystem being a Target like a goal for for what we have to do and uh it's what we were and are trying to do with the kurigami a lot of lots of things are switching to kirigami and uh very soon couple of days we are going to have a new um Suite uh in kurigami for email contact and calendar and to do which is pretty cool I think is it based on the calendar app yes basically the Calendar app grew so much that he decided to split into multiple smaller apps that's cool it's an awesome application I think it's one of the fastest growing career applications and you started the whole thing saying uh ignoring what I know of plasma 6 right what do you know of plasma six well let's see if I can remember everything I talked about in the past like 10 News videos so yeah obviously like Wayland fixes like making sure uh the the like the applications don't crash when the compositor crashes so that was a big one uh they are switching to double click by default uh there's a revamp in the settings page I think we're moving the like some buttons to the header of each settings page instead of having like a double row of buttons uh below uh there's a revamp of Dolphin settings a search fields in in various settings of various apps uh what else did I see a complete rewrite of the widget system as far as I understand it um what else yeah better integration with icon themes and sound themes uh was also a thing from the top of my head those are the big ones that I can remember that's already quite an impressive memory and uh we're considering when you write those videos and you record them you basically read every news article five times so yeah well to be fair I did like obviously a lot of video plasmatics I've also had a talk at kitty Academy and yet I still have all of my notes there with all the changes I wanted to mention because I'm gonna forget it otherwise but yeah the thing is we have to measure um different branches of development one of which is obviously we have a lot of uh stuff that goes underneath that the user won't see obviously but stuff that is not noticeable to the user is uh changes in the in the default and new feature Center designs as far as changes in the default one good example is the double click by default something I fully disagree on but but you think of that one what team are you I think it's a good change because that's what most users are used to but when I use KDE I always use it with single click like what like currently I'm on gnome when I use gnome I use double click but when I'm on caddy I don't know why I'm just used to single click on KD and it works for me but I think for most users double click is more what they know yeah we kind of had to switch to double click especially because a lot of distros were changing our default to make sure it was double click so we're not even deciding the default anymore these stores are doing it for us so we kind of had to switch my personal prediction is that is that we are going to switch back as a single click as soon as the rest of the industry realizes that it's better but another thing we wanted to do is to try Trevor some changes in design that are default changes so very easy to do but that could distinguish us visually from other desktops and one example of that is using the floating panel by default did you see that what do you think of it I think it was it was quite controversial I think it's really good as well because like for most people who are going to discover Katie it's gonna look better because let's be honest it looks better like you can't argue that a fixed panel stuck to the edge of the screen looks better than something that flows with rounded Corners you just can't it looks better and I'm not just saying that because you developed it but but it's it's it's a great look and people who don't like it it's like a right click and one toggle to to check like it's super easy to revert it if you don't like it but I think for new users it gives a more striking appearance and honestly when you're gonna see something like Windows 12 I would be very surprised if their taskbar wasn't the exact same way like instead of using the whole of the screen it would be centered and floating I'm pretty sure they'll do it yeah though that kind of worries me because if we try to make the taskbar floating to visually distinguish from other operating systems and then Windows 12 is like floating customer but I mean if we are first we can kind of say hey yeah you copied us yeah exactly well like that that was also the argument like when plasma 5 was released and the change in the breeze theme and the plasma theme like it was new it did not look like something like Windows 10 and then Windows 11 came and just basically looked exactly the same and people still felt like okay he copied Windows no we've been doing that for like five years yeah always happens there's a lot of like when Windows used our slogan uh oh yeah yeah that we saw that it was like I've heard of that already do you think there are other simple changes that we could do to distinguish visually from other odestos well they would probably be changes for the sake of being changes and not necessarily super usable but yeah for example having a different window button layout like splitting the buttons like you would get the window controls maximize and minimize on one side and the close button on the other one much like very old versions of Mac OS for example close on the right but everything else on the left uh you could have a very different theme I was sort of expecting for plasma 6 a different Breeze theme I know it has been revamped relatively recently in the in the plasma 5 cycle but I would have liked to see a different one uh I think the icons really hold up pretty well but I think the general theme for the apps feels a little bit flat a little bit dated in my opinion but that's very subjective so yeah but this would be changes for the sake of changes they wouldn't necessarily bring much usability in terms of how things work so I think honestly Katie's strength is not necessarily looking so different than other things out of the box it's more that you can make it look very very different if you want to through that then I will admit that there are some issues who are basically all KD developers or almost all caddy developers use the default theme with their default settings and because of that most third-party themes do tend to break over time because we are just testing we are not testing them so but that's definitely on on us yeah and you could you couldn't test all of them like if you had to test every default theme and every Quantum theme like you would only be doing that and it's not exactly your job to do it so yeah usually we have like a couple of themes that are meant for testing purposes do you know of the fluffy bunny thing yeah it's wonderful yeah that is the theme that you usually research to when we have to test something it's pretty funny in the video Recaps that I do about it regarding the theme revamp that is actually something that a lot of people coming to Kitty asked for very often people would join the visual design team and the first thing they would say is let's do a big redesign let's do everything from scratch we can't quite do it for a variety of reasons obviously mainly mean power and we often had to say like these are great ideas but we can just cannot do something like that and I usually have had to say in videos like it's very good that you want to join visual design theme and contribute the first thing that you do should not be to say let's do everything from scratch like when you join a project try to slowly yeah you pick a screen that looks super dated or is illegible and you try to revamp it so it looks like more legible and and better layout but you don't jump in saying let's redesign the whole thing because first you don't have any credibility in the team so who knows where you're coming from what your ideas are what your experience in ux or UI is and second obviously people want to do that but if they haven't started on it then maybe it's not just because they lack the ideas probably because they like the time to do it yeah and we do actually have a lot of things that are being redesigned from scratch within the very steam which is a lot of different uh Small Things One well obviously we improved it in the breeze itself the theme a lot over the last releases we have I think half of an idea which I don't know if we're gonna follow up on that but we kind of have half idea to change the name from Breeze to something else to actually say okay we did change a lot of things in the last releases and we want that change to have a name uh but other things that are coming are completely literally designed some of him as an as an example and obviously that required having an interface to change sound themes which we should soon have and uh I will admit that most people I talk about this sound theme with are like uh plasma has sounds I didn't know that well they are yeah when you plug in like a laptop like you've got a sound notification I think some notifications also have sounds uh pretty sure the critical ones yeah and I think when you boot up No Maybe not maybe not at startup I don't know I think not but there are not many but honestly you don't want your desktop to bombard you with sounds all the time like yeah for important things cool but yeah though don't send me a a beep every time I receive one single notification because that's gonna drive me nuts which phones does like do which fonts do out of the box for some reason I'm really annoyed but that actually yeah especially when you like you know group conversation and all of a sudden people wake up and start talking and your phone starts beeping like crazy every two seconds it's horrible yeah I couldn't get rid of the notification sound of my phone eventually I just set 100 milliseconds of silence as my notifications and that worked yeah that's that's a good workaround and uh there's a lot of things happening with colors as well because in 5.25 we introduced a lot of colorful features and uh and the look also I I like like the the window tinting and the accent colors in general they look really good yeah I totally agree so what I did for plasma 6 is create a series of tasks that were like can we please enable all of that by default and uh and luckily people were like no for different reasons for each one as an example I really wanted an accent color that changes depending on the wallpaper so Dynamic accent color and other developers rightfully were like we can't change the colors of the elements every time the user changes the wallpaper that my this tracked or confuse them and I can see that happening and secondly I wanted a window tinting so tinting with the default blue color every window slightly but that also didn't get gain much traction but we did decide on tinting the header bars so the idea is that by default blue because that is the default accent color all header bars should be it's like the tinted blue that is another redesign that we are working on and that isn't complete yet and honestly the current Breeze team it's not bad like it's legible it has good contrast it's it's very usable it's just that I think the changes that happened in the like starting from I think 5.23 or 5.24 or something uh like with the with the different colors for hovering over elements in menu stuff like that all those changes were cool but they were perceived as relatively minor in terms of visual changes and so for people who've been using KD since the start of the KD5 series the desktop hasn't really changed uh much in terms of how it looks and that's not necessarily a problem but I understand why people would want it to evolve like more drastically than what's already been done but but it's a good thing like it works it works it doesn't look old like it's not like it's Windows 98 or something yeah do I have to agree that I say yeah and I haven't used any other theme in years so I can't really compare there's um another which is why really we are focused on a slightly slight improvements like slowly making it better and better even for plasma 6. there's also a cambernet who redesigned all the icons of dolphin so all the folders main types and such so now the new folders that ideally should be that have to be in plasma 6 otherwise I'm gonna be very annoyed at myself are much more rounded actually and friendly looking so hopefully that is another thing that will slightly improve Breeze and that's a good approach like instead of having a complete rework of everything just touching up a few details that you feel are sub-optimal or have aged worse than the rest it lets you iterate and see what works and then like if people love the new photos I haven't seen them but the rounded folders maybe you can like redesign a bunch of other icons in the same sort of rounded style and go from there and if people absolutely hate those icons and everybody thinks like it looks childish or cartoonish or I don't know then you can move that back and go back to another style so that's that's a good approach to design what we are currently deciding now that we are closer to the release of plasma 6 is when actually to release plasma 6 because we don't have any kind of date as of right now do you think that we should go for like further in the further away but with more testing or should we because it's been quite a while since the last plasma release our people are getting I would say yes I would say push it as much as you can well not like three years but but push it if you need more time for testing push it a little bit because if the goal is to provide a very stable very solid first version of plasma 6 and and not repeat some mistakes from earlier versions of plasma whether the initial version of a new series was was pretty buggy then I think it's better to have more time for testing like people already know that it's not going to release like in in October or November so if it needs to be pushed to January February March next year I would say do it because it's always better to have something that is really cool out of the box really complete you have all the features you wanted all the new design touches very good stability for most use cases then having something like okay you guys are getting impatient so we're gonna release it and now everybody has a bad first impression with it because like I don't know multi-moditors is broken for some reason and then every everybody's gonna think Oh Katie is so buggy I'm never using that again even though it's fixed in the next release I I would say push it if it needs more time yeah I do think that a lot of people will try out plasma 6 for plasma with plasma 6 for the first time in quite a while to decide if it has improved enough since the last time they tried it so I do look of it as the an occasion to show that plasma has really improved in the last years yeah and in a more logistical sense uh if you ship a half broken or at least one major use case candle broken and and you say oh we're gonna fix it then you have the chance of distros still shipping your older release instead of the new one which means that now you have split your user base between plasma 6 and plasma 5 and I don't think that's great so yeah I would say give it as much time as you want 5.27 is a very good platform for people who like KDE and judging from the comments on my videos like people are excited for plasmatics but they're not like impatient in the sense of oh if they don't release something in the next two months I'm out I'm moving to something else so I don't think there's two I don't know if if that is the same as the experience that you might have as a as a member of the KD team and and a developer but me personally when I talk about Getty like people are excited about plasma 6 but they're not saying like we need it right now that's good well as a member of kitty team most people I talk to are also members of the Kelly team and they know how to use the beta of plasma 6 so I mean I live on plasma 6 already so I'm not particularly eager to have it released I can use all the features anyway and another things the thing we have to decide on and I'm actually quite interested I I know I'm throwing a lot of decisions we are making onto you because I'm really curious to see outside and yes the release schedule So currently we do three or releases every year so one every four months which has some issues as an example it's very hard to align with destroy release schedules which are often a couple of times a year and also for it means that the time between we are done with the release and we are going to publish the release is very short which is a problem for promotion like the promo team has requires a bit of time to know about everything that has been done and write an announcement to the videos and such so we are considering switching to as lower reschedule which would also have its own issues as an example you make a change I don't know in January if due to stuff it's the wrong time you might have to wait even seven months to have it actually released to users so there's a bit of benefits and issues both both ways what do you think of that well I think the the two releases per year schedule is pretty good sure it means that you're gonna have to delay some features if they are not ready for inclusion but but I think it also means you don't have to follow like Katie had some kind of tick tock release cycle like you had one with a lot of new features and then you had one with a lot less features but a lot of bug fixes for the new features that were added and I think this can give the impression sometimes that Katie is not very stable because if you start using KDE on a on a release that is bug fixes then you have a great time but if you start using it on a release that is majorly features you might have some problems so I think if you have more time for each release to polish it and make sure that all the bugs are well all the bugs you can never fix all the bugs but most of the bugs and the most annoying ones are fixed then I think it gives a better impression the ideal way but I'm not sure that's doable would be to have like two releases per year in my opinion of course uh two releases per year and having some way to deliver some new features in the middle of a of a cycle like for example if if you have your release in February but your feature has been started in January and will only be ready like two days after feature freeze or something maybe having a way to include it in a 0.1 release during the cycle is good but at that point you're also cannibalizing the new features for the next version so it's not easy I I think I think it's better to stick to being close to distroll releases because ultimately unless you have like unless you want to push KD knee on heavily as the distro for getting then you kind of depend on them so so you have to have most recent distros ship your most recent desktop so I think it's the better approach it has drawbacks but I think it's best what do you think of carinion random question I love it every time I need to try something on caddy I run neon because like it's it's on Ubuntu base I know this by heart like I know all the tools and honestly it's been super stable for me the user Edition never had any problems with it you speak better of kerinion that most Kitty developers have talked about Union about you know maybe they use the testing or unstable versions more uh because me personally when I need to test the latest release of KD for one of my videos I obviously use like I think it's the testing or the unstable I never remember which one is is the right one but but I use one of these which obviously like you're testing pre-release software it's gonna have problems but like the user Edition I would personally pick it over something like Ubuntu for example okay that's good to hear obviously it sadly doesn't quite uh I cannot share that because I I did have major issues with cadillion settling so we we would like to try something new with Kelly neon how it's done maybe based on something else this sort of sort of things but nothing is ready to talk about it so I will stop with Canadian one thing that we can do if we decide to switch to a couple of releases every year and that would be nobody has told me don't do this yet so I'm gonna say that until somebody does is we could ideally align our kitty plasma release exactly on the same day as The Gnome release and have some card sort of desktop party this would make my life miserable so so please don't and I think it might be badly perceived like oh they're trying to overshadow the competition let's call it that I think it's better if the dates aren't perfectly aligned honestly because yeah you're basically dividing the attention of everyone between two things that they might have been interested in but yeah if you want to do that like sure why not but but it's gonna make my life very hard it's true that mine as well obviously but I was like Curious to try it out one time because it is true that it might divide the attention attention between the two but what we tend to see in Kitty promo is that whenever you have more announcements on the same day they tend to have a much wide wider audience they reach a much wider audience compared to splitting them over time so I was kind of curious to see maybe just trying out well I think a good case for doing that would be maybe if you have some kind of major collaboration with gnome I don't know like the KD team and The Gnome team work together on some kind of standard let's say for accent colors or whatever and both releases ship with that support in it maybe that's a good thing like okay yeah we worked hand in hand uh let's and that would also put to rest the debate of KDE versus gnome because people always fight online about that but every time there's a new release of gnome the KD team is like hey congrats guys it's awesome and and the same way like I I mean yeah maybe it's a cool idea but please not every time that will send a strong message we try to do that with the apples force of uh that was pretty funny we really organized with you know to make sure to have like we really wanted the message to be stopped doing like desktop Wars you can compare desktops to Showcase what's different but like what's the best well news flash nothing is the best for everyone so that's why Windows is so bad because it's trying to be good for everyone and it only succeeds at being mediocre for everyone because you can't please everyone with one single interface it's impossible yeah I've received a Windows computer just a couple of days ago to test it out I boot up windows it's terrible I hate it I'm currently working on a I used windows for 30 days video like I did like the Mac OS video and as much as I did not like using Mac OS for 30 days I hate using Windows even more in the end it's just it's it's horribly designed I hate it are you using the very latest release of Windows 11 yeah yes so everything is blurry which I like and also to me quite laggy it's very laggy and I've got ads everywhere in my start menu like I even got some weird banners in the file manager saying hey use OneDrive in office 365. like why are you showing me this in the file manager like it's an ad for your services in your OS like I paid for the OS when I bought the computer that you don't have to show me ads that you have my money already stopping yeah really and I gotta say I understand when people say that plasma when you start customizing things feels a bit unstable or unpolished like you if it's everything is as is by default and you don't touch anything then usually it feels quite stable it shouldn't break but if you start customizing that yeah but I gotta say with Windows I got the same unstable finicky sensation when like popping up the overview they have which comes from the bottom and just yeah it's like it's kind of stuttery it's not smooth like some of their gestures with touch pads they are not one-to-one gestures which completely baffles me like you you do it's like a keyboard shortcut like you do the gesture and then the stuff happens but it doesn't move with your fingers come on you have like how many developers do you have Microsoft like can't you do that it's weird so many things are just badly integrated well let's not digress about Windows but yeah it's truly awful yeah and well you mentioned Jester let me mention one thing at the very hand just to say because I'm quite proud of it the one thing that I'm working on for plasma 6 right now is the new overview I don't know if you saw that so it is much much much much more similar to gnomus or gnome server view compared to what we had and it has the overview itself and the grid view all in one effect and you can just cycle between the three or you can just toggle one I quite like it it's everything is one to one gestures you can switch one to one desktops whilst in the overview I think it's I'm really bad that was the last remaining issue I had with KD on laptops it was like you you did I think it was a four finger gesture up for the overview or something and you had to do four fingers up again to get out of it which in terms of positioning of elements feels weird because you brought it up so to exit you should bring it down not re-bring it up and if you had configured a four fingers down to open for example virtual desktops and trying to exit the overview would automatically move you to the the virtual desktops without any transition and it felt weird so I'm I'm super happy that this is something that is being worked on it's awesome yeah it's true that you point that out gestures are I think I'm really happy that we have them now and I think they're really good but how they have been implemented I think they're a bit of a failure story of kitty because they were half off implemented by one contributor that just did half of the stuff and left it there we did include it into the release when it was clearly Half Baked I didn't really like it or use it and then for plasma 5.25 finally somebody came to finish off the stuff and we finally actually you know talked about the fact that we had one twin gestures for real and but still there were remaining issues such as this one which is obvious like why would you have to do three fingers up again yeah it's a small thing but it's a bit of a disconnect and I know I I'm super peculiar about this like people on my YouTube comments always tell me like who cares about one-to-one gestures like Linux Mint has gestures you you do the gesture it does the thing yeah but it does not feel good to use like if you do this yeah lift your finger and then it happens nothing has moved with your finger it's actually jarring and not helpful in terms of user experience it's not a smooth user experience one to ingest if you're doing gestures don't do them if they're not one to one it like just use keyboard shortcuts it's the same thing yeah I totally agree I do have to point out because I try to be honest as much as possible the back that you're referring to the four fingers down tracksuit overview has been fixed by Alish not me before I started working on the actually the day I started working on the new overview so credit where it's due I did not guess that that said you know when I present Kitty and at the same time I'm a kitty developer sometimes I worry that it might seem like I'm doing some stuff that I'm not doing Yeah Yeah you sort of feel like you're taking credit for other people's work but that's yeah it never came off uh as that for me personally when I watch your videos like I never feel like you're presenting things like hey look what I did it's like it's more like look what we did so I think I don't think people think you're like yeah taking everything for yourself it did happen that I received uh internal internal criticism between candida Developers for some stuff that I did handle incorrectly support on me so I really try to be careful on that that said that was actually kind of everything I wanted to say but if you have any questions about the development of plasma 6 that I can answer if you have any questions well I won't ask when does it come out because obviously we talked about this uh but uh yeah no I don't have any questions specifically I'm just glad to have like those weekly blog posts uh that that are published to see what what is being worked on how advanced and even some technical details which are really cool to learn about uh like how icon themes have been changed slightly in plasma six I really enjoy reading about this and yeah it will be ready when it's ready and as soon as it's out I'll start using it like as a daily driver because I want to see how well it works and I've been wanting to move back to KD for a while now because I like switching but I'm like I'm not going to switch to 5.27 if 6 comes out in like four months because yeah what might as well wait and have like a real big impression of KD at the same time uh when plus my six is out that is the pressure to Kitty developers to make a product that works perfectly and nothing is perfect like I I don't think I've ever used a Linux desktop that is perfect out of the box and has zero bucks like not even a proprietary desktop like my experience on Mac OS has been riddled with issues there are bugs everywhere stuff that doesn't react stuff that doesn't show on Hover tons of problems and windows same thing like the taskbar is a finicky Beast it it bugs out a lot on multi-monitor setups which you'd think they have this down by now but apparently not so it's not a problem if you have bugs like the problem is if you have major bugs that affect 70 of the user base I guess so that was everything from from and thank you so much for tuning in I hope this was interesting for you as well [Music] foreign

Channel: Nicco Loves Linux

Views: 39,363

Keywords: KDE, KDE Plasma, LINUX

Id: yk96267aMSk

Length: 39min 22sec (2362 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023