I've been using Linux long enough that I was around for KDE 3 and KDE 4. I did not enjoy using them, but I love 5. I'm nervous about this upgrade. I can't think of anything I want that would merit a major version upgrade.
There are a couple of reasons not to worry about this upgrade:
A. 3 -> 4 required very very significant changes. 4 -> 5 and now 5 -> 6 are nowhere near that.
B. KDE really learnt their lesson on this and they are very careful not to create anything similar to that. Thus, not big rewrite/changes like 3 -> 4 are in the works.
This is just to get the whole project going with Qt 6 which isn't that much different from Qt 5.
Edit: Disclaimer, I used to be a very minor contributor to KDE around 3 -> 4 time.
Oh, KDE 3.5 was amazing. When KDE 4 came, I packed my stuff and never looked back.
Good to hear KDE 5 is doing fine at least, let us hope for the best.
I get that many people are more excited about rewriting stuff than fixing bugs but oh man is the risk is rarely ever worth it. If you have a good thing going, don't kill your golden goose.
I'm keen to see a fairly minimal change with KDE6 / Plasma 6 - so much is working great in KDE5 / Plasma 5 that it would be a shame to suffer reversions but presumably the odd one or two will crop up.
The only things I can think of I'd like tweaked are:
1. to make shifting pinned icons about more initiative (I must have the wrong mental model of editing the desktop layout as I always end up flailing around with something that seems like it should be trivially easy!)
2. Sort out Baloo: perhaps off by default and ideally to have better handling of exceptionally large compressed files (these usually result in it going into an hours long process of chugging away often with little to show afterwards!)
- Let me globally use Meta as default keyboard shortcut modifier. There's code in QT somewhere that does this but it's restricted to MacOS.
- Get back custom window icons in the task manager. Apparently Wayland doesn't allow this, so it got disabled for X11 too. I used to identify my n terminal windows by icon, but now they all look the same.
- A way to persistently attach shortcuts to select particular windows (again, said terminals). You can manually set shortcuts, but they don't persist. I used to have some scripting based on inspecting window titles, but it was fragile some update broke it.
- In Dolphin, Mac-style column view and ‘quick look’. (On the bright side, Dolphin will now let you disable the focus-follows-mouse behaviour of the preview panel; that just missed 23.04 though.)
Throw in better handling of network shares for non-KIO apps and finally fixing that bug where the text cursor randomly decides to jump forward or back on Wayland sometimes and their work is done as far as I'm concerned.
I don't hate KDE, I love many many things about it.
But have they ever considered moving their software beyond alpha quality before releasing a new major version? A major reason I'm not putting any more time into KDE is the expectation that it'll never be stable.
I know this is an incredibly snarky, cynical and just negative take, but that's how I felt when I was trying to use Plasma Wayland. That it was on a touch device made the experience considerably worse, but a lot of the UI glitches would likely have happened without it.
A friend of mine has a collection of KDE glitches that look like the ones I experienced, but are completely different.
Every KDE update blog post talks about bug fixes, but during the time I had been using KDE I couldn't sense any improvement. It's like they either fixed a minute subset of bugs or kept putting in new ones.
[+] [-] htag|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emilsedgh|2 years ago|reply
A. 3 -> 4 required very very significant changes. 4 -> 5 and now 5 -> 6 are nowhere near that.
B. KDE really learnt their lesson on this and they are very careful not to create anything similar to that. Thus, not big rewrite/changes like 3 -> 4 are in the works.
This is just to get the whole project going with Qt 6 which isn't that much different from Qt 5.
Edit: Disclaimer, I used to be a very minor contributor to KDE around 3 -> 4 time.
[+] [-] cardanome|2 years ago|reply
Good to hear KDE 5 is doing fine at least, let us hope for the best.
I get that many people are more excited about rewriting stuff than fixing bugs but oh man is the risk is rarely ever worth it. If you have a good thing going, don't kill your golden goose.
[+] [-] kps|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmstoker|2 years ago|reply
The only things I can think of I'd like tweaked are:
1. to make shifting pinned icons about more initiative (I must have the wrong mental model of editing the desktop layout as I always end up flailing around with something that seems like it should be trivially easy!)
2. Sort out Baloo: perhaps off by default and ideally to have better handling of exceptionally large compressed files (these usually result in it going into an hours long process of chugging away often with little to show afterwards!)
[+] [-] kps|2 years ago|reply
- Let me globally use Meta as default keyboard shortcut modifier. There's code in QT somewhere that does this but it's restricted to MacOS.
- Get back custom window icons in the task manager. Apparently Wayland doesn't allow this, so it got disabled for X11 too. I used to identify my n terminal windows by icon, but now they all look the same.
- A way to persistently attach shortcuts to select particular windows (again, said terminals). You can manually set shortcuts, but they don't persist. I used to have some scripting based on inspecting window titles, but it was fragile some update broke it.
- In Dolphin, Mac-style column view and ‘quick look’. (On the bright side, Dolphin will now let you disable the focus-follows-mouse behaviour of the preview panel; that just missed 23.04 though.)
[+] [-] franga2000|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarg|2 years ago|reply
Bitch of a problem to have to constantly patch between them, and you're not getting any support from the vendors.
[+] [-] solarkraft|2 years ago|reply
But have they ever considered moving their software beyond alpha quality before releasing a new major version? A major reason I'm not putting any more time into KDE is the expectation that it'll never be stable.
[+] [-] solarkraft|2 years ago|reply
A friend of mine has a collection of KDE glitches that look like the ones I experienced, but are completely different.
Every KDE update blog post talks about bug fixes, but during the time I had been using KDE I couldn't sense any improvement. It's like they either fixed a minute subset of bugs or kept putting in new ones.
[+] [-] hulitu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chickenimprint|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kps|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7e|2 years ago|reply
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