KDE Plasma 5.6 Bringing More User-Facing Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.6 Bringing More User-Facing Improvements

While Plasma 5.5 was just released last month with many improvements and appears to be in great shape -- as outlined by Ken Vermette's big review of Plasma 5.5 -- even more great stuff is coming for Plasma 5.6...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.6-Early-Features

[Shaman666]

Am I the only one that really wants to see them stabilise the interface and add features - and put time into their mail client / groupware?

[zanny]

Am I the only one that really wants to see them stabilize the interface and add features - and put time into their mail client / groupware?

That is literally what this blog is about, adding libunity support and more info in the device notifier.

The UI has been "stable" since 5.0. Its just been broken. Stability has consistently improved since then but right now there are a ton of issues fixed in Qt that won't be released until 5.6 in two months. The huge delay on Qt 5.6 (since its the LTS before they break a ton of backwards features in 5.7) has kept Plasma 5 more unstable than it should have been the last few months.

On the topic of Kontact, there are simply not enough devs working on it. KDE already has a developer shortage across all its projects - this is a group of freelancers and a half dozen salaried employees at Blue Systems - trying to maintain dozens of applications and a complete desktop shell. Kontact is a huge mess, it has a half dozen applications some of which haven't seen love in almost a decade, and Akonadi is an unwieldy mess currently being transitioned from a database server to a library for backing store access so you aren't running a server process but instead interact with the database through a library. All the work is going into that right now, and its super important to simplify the complexity of Kontact so that the UIs and features can be modernized.

[bug77]

Am I the only one that really wants to see them stabilise the interface and add features - and put time into their mail client / groupware?

I was going to post something along the same line: these enhancements are on precisely zero list of complains people have about KDE.
Here's my top 3:
Slow startup when session restore is enabled.
Slow startup when your system doesn't (yup, doesn't) have bluetooth.
Windows are being restored seemingly on random screen and activities. Sometimes even the launcher (or whatever that thing that appears when you Alt+F2 is called) appears on the wrong screen.

[lunarcloud]

Am I the only one that really wants to see them stabilise the interface and add features - and put time into their mail client / groupware?

No, that's what https://kolab.org/ is for!
I don't run email outside a browser, and don't use groupware outside of work.

---

I want visual cleanups,
more widgets
with padding/consistency updates
and DWD ( https://kver.wordpress.com/2015/12/2...otocol-u-turn/ )!

[murraytony]

Email / groupware is undergoing a major re-haul, but is not out yet. So, yes, they are heavily working on this. Also, the they that works on these two things is almost mutually exclusive.

http://www.aegiap.eu/kdeblog/

[molecule-eye]

If only they would fix their text editor Kate and hence any katepart app: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256561. It's basically the reason I moved to gnome.

[Loose_Control]

Slow startup when session restore is enabled.

Tried deleting ~/.config/ksmserverrc and all files in ~/.config/session outside of a running session?

Slow startup when your system doesn't (yup, doesn't) have bluetooth.

Ok this is a new one ever tried to debug it?

Windows are being restored seemingly on random screen and activities. Sometimes even the launcher (or whatever that thing that appears when you Alt+F2 is called) appears on the wrong screen.

Session save/restore is pretty broken (http://marc.info/?t=144832701200004&r=1&w=1) i have switched to manual save session since it works better in my opinion.

[buzzrobot]

I know nothing about how a complex FOSS project like KDE is managed, but I do know a bit about how that works in the corporate world. One major difference, I imagine -- someone correct me if I'm wrong -- is that it is difficult to dissuade volunteer developers from working on whatever strikes their fancy and persuade them to work on something they'd rather avoid.

So, if a few volunteer developers spend their time working on the little trinkets outlined in that post rather than helping resolve long-standing failures in core, key, packages like Kontact and KMail, who can tell them not to?

In the commercial arena, a years-long litany of bugs and outright failure to deliver advertised functionality in mail and desktop search would have generated thousands of derisive posts and attacks on Microsoft or Apple, and an obvious impact on their revenue. ("Outlook is still broken in the new Windows! Why bother upgrading?")

[geearf]

Tried deleting ~/.config/ksmserverrc and all files in ~/.config/session outside of a running session?

Ok this is a new one ever tried to debug it?

Session save/restore is pretty broken (http://marc.info/?t=144832701200004&r=1&w=1) i have switched to manual save session since it works better in my opinion.

Oh I had been wondering about that for a long time.
I do hope they get to fix it.
What do you mean by "manual save session"?