Re: So I have a Plasma 5 desktop!
Hi,
I have made the transition on my "small" notebook, the one with the
tiny 1366x768 display. The update to plasma 5 was a breeze compared to
the pain of converting the box to a SuSE-like btrfs setup with
subvolumes for root, usr, var and a bunch of other subtrees that now
allow me to go back to a snapshot without losing other data. I
wouldn't have dared the transition at this point otherwise.
On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 12:13:02PM +0200, Michael Schuerig wrote:
> Anyway, some features appear to have been lost in the upgrade. Here's
> what I'm missing so far:
>
> * Skype and others don't show up in the system tray any more.
> Apparently, I need to install sni-qt which isn't packaged, yet. See
> https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=289&t=124670
That's a pretty big transition, especially for the background that
sni-qt is dead upstream and won't come up in Debian any time soon.
> * Plasma Search, the successor to KRunner, doesn't remember the history.
> (Really? :-O)
>
> * The Veromix plasmoid doesn't work anymore and there doesn't seem to be
> a suitable replacement to control PulseAudio from a panel.
But, do you have sound? I seem to have lost sound completely. In
System Settings, all I can see is my hardware devices in "Audio
Hardware Setup". Both the "Device Preferences" and "Backend" tabs
don't offer anything to be selected. Pulseaudio is installed, and both
mpg321 and paplay on the command line work.
Other than that, I am having a déjà vu regarding important functions
missing from the current release, although not so bad as with KDE 4.
Most prominent absences are
- Screensavers (with the additional fun of the canonical solution
being "use xscreensaver" if you want something shiny instead of a
blank screen) and
- the QuickLaunch plasmoid, which allowed placement of launchers in
multiple rows inside the same panel. I would like to have some
feedback to replace QuickLaunch without wasting too much screen real
estate since normal launchers take about twice the panel space theat
QuickLaunch used to take. I hope there is some neat new way to do
things in plasma 5.
Otherwise, I hate to say that I do not (yet?) see any substantial
improvement over KDE 4 other than "it's qt5 now" (which is probably
important).
- Konsole's profile handling is still queer regarding window sizes,
but since konsole's author considered that a feature since KDE 4.0, I
guess we won't see any improvement here.
- It is still not possible to sensibly use a vertical panel, which is
quite important on small displays such as my 1366x768 panel which is
not high enough anyway and one doesn't want to waste Y coordinate
pixels with panels. A vertical panel is either unuseable because the
task manager fields are too small to have any valueable contents or,
on a wider panel, the icons get scaled up according to panel width so
that they fill up too much of the panel space. It is obviously still
not possible to place small icons side-by-side to each other in a wide
vertical panel.
I appreciate the Debian KDE team's work and acknowledge that most of
the issues mentioned here are upstream issues that Debian cannot
solve. Sadly, this is another instance of an "upstream didn't care
enough" that we have had so often in the past in the KDE world.
Greetings
Marc
--
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Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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