KDE's Plasma Team presents a first glimpse at the evolution of the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma 2 Technology Preview demonstrates the current development status. The Plasma 2 user interfaces are built using QML and run on top of a fully hardware accelerated graphics stack using Qt5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma 2 is a converged workspace shell that can run and switch between user interfaces for different formfactors, and makes the workspace adaptable to a given target device. The first formfactor workspace to be demonstrated in this tech preview is Plasma Desktop, showing an incremental evolution to known desktop and laptop paradigms. The user experience aims at keeping existing workflows intact, while providing incremental visual and interactive improvements. Some of those can be observed in this technology preview, many others are still being worked on.
KDE Frameworks 5 is a modular version of the KDE Libraries and will be released independently from the Workspace. A preview of KDE Frameworks 5 has been postponed slightly to early 2014, a first stable release is planned for later that year. Together with Plasma's converged Workspace shell, which supports switching between different, modular device-adaptable Workspaces, Plasma is more suitable for deployment on a wider range of devices. The team planses to release the first stable version of Plasma 2 this summer, with an end-user ready desktop Workspace. More formfactor Workspaces, such as Plasma Active and Plasma Mediacenter are planned to be added as they reach stable ports to Qt5, KDE Frameworks 5 and the Plasma 2 Framework.
KDE v4 Preview
Plasma 2 is in heavy development; this tech preview reflects a snapshot of this process. While the basic functionality is there, it contains many known and unknown bugs. The team is working on completing and improving the underlying infrastructure and smoothing out the user experience in more and more workflows. Plasma 2 is "dog-foodable", but not yet fit for wider testing of its functionality. The Plasma team will open the issue tracker in the coming weeks, after most of the show-stoppers have been fixed. Session- and power management services have been ported and are functional. Components that together make up the desktop, such as the task manager, launcher menu, notification area, clock and calendar have basic, but functional ports available. The coming weeks and months will be spent on finishing this functionality, ironing out bugs, visual polish and applying some smaller architectural updates to a number of parts of the workspace experience.
Plasma 2 Technology Preview starts up with a basic default desktop layout, providing an application launcher, a pager to manage and switch between virtual desktops, a taskbar, notification area and a clock. It comes with a number of example widgets. All of these components are basically functional, and will be further polished in the coming weeks and months.
The window manager and compositor of the Plasma Workspaces, KWin, has reached a close-to-production-grade quality in this technical preview. This is a very important milestone, given that KWin was the application most difficult to port by the KDE community.
The porting of KWin was difficult because it made heavy use of low-level windowing system specific API inside the Qt libraries, which was removed due to the introduction of the Qt Platform Abstraction in the Qt 5 releases. More details about the required changes are available in the KWin maintainer's Akademy talk. Most of the required API changes were already incorporated in the 4.11 release.
The Qt plugin for the X11 windowing system switched from XLib to XCB. This required rewriting large parts of the event filter inside KWin - a step which could only be done after porting to Qt 5. It was completely unknown what kinds of problems would be hit by such a port. There are not many window managers and compositors which have been ported to XCB. During the port the KDE team needed to add new features to Qt, was hit by regressions and bugs both in Qt and the XCB protocol bindings. Given that KWin had to be rebased on top of a new windowing system abstraction inside Qt, it is a great achievement to have a near-production-quality X11 window manager and compositor after such a short time.
A third area of unknown issues was the usage of OpenGL inside the compositor and QtQuick. This introduced a completely new area of threading related issues, which are explained in more detail in this blog post. Overall these issues are mostly solved, though the Aurorae-based window decorations have not reached production-ready quality; the Oxygen window decoration is recommended at the moment.
In the scope of Google Summer of Code, the configuration module for Desktop Effects was rewritten. It is making strong use of the new QtQuick Controls to enable a more flexible configuration. One of the first new features added to this configuration module is the integration of video previews of the effects. These videos have been created by Google Code-In students.
We recommend building Plasma 2 Tech Preview from our git repositories. Git tags for this tech preview have been created. Packagers can pull the source code with the "plasma2tp" tag from the respective git repositories. Most people will want to regularly update to the latest version of the KDE Frameworks 5 in order to get a constant stream of improvements. This is best achieved with kdesrc-build, which automates the fetching, building and installing and updating of the respective source code modules. Regular testing ISO images have become available, and are in the process of receiving the last set of updates that have gone in.
Why are you guys making things more complicated? wasn't the systemtray supposed to dissapear and merged with the taskbar? are you going to add all that complexity for something that will held 2 or 3 items?
Will the old systemtray be available?It's not planned, but Plasma is flexible enough to allow multiple implementations.the new one is way to complex for me to feel comfortable with.Did you try it to come to this conclusion or did you just watch the video? If you tried it, please provide valid feedback through the bugtracker to show where you see problems.
wasn't the systemtray supposed to dissapear and merged with the taskbar?No, only the applications might be merged with the taskbar leaving the systemtray as what it's supposed to be: a system and notification area.
With the experience from the live cd which I assume is in the early states plus the video I re-affirm my previous statement. The new systemtray is showing me always information I don't want, is showing other things that are not requesting attention apparently with no reason.
The only thing I don't like is the new system tray, maybe with the time I will get used to it. I wonder why KDE designers like to add so much cluttering into interfaces the new system tray looks like systemsettings, something inside something inside something.
You'll be surprised that the new notification area is based on the exact workflows of the current one. It ties together the individual parts in the interface, and allows for much quicker transition between the individual items, and less reliance on hard to hit targets. From a mouse interaction point of view, it behaves the same as the old one, you don't need any more clicks to get anything done, in many cases it removes visually jarring transition between individual popup windows.
Well, the naggers will nag. :) It's interesting to see how much KDE evolved since I fled "the sinking ship" (v4.0). One of my main concerns is RAM usage, because I easily use 100-200 tabs in 2-3 browsers, plus virtualization and other stuff, so I don't want the OS and DE to hog my RAM, although to be fair they are the ones taking the least. But the more I can save by using a reasonable DE, the better for me. I hope KDE will soon reach a point where it's either lighter on resources or at least easily configurable for this goal.
It is depressing to see how little the system tray has actually evolved in KDE. It is still crammed with stuff that has no justification of being there at all. Windows had to introduce hidden systray icons because most of the Windows-world icons come from third parties. KDE apparently copied them because they don't want to think about the problem.
Hi I love what you guys are doing. I think KDE is evolving quite nicely.What I wonder if this iteration of KDE will support high resolution scaling the way OS X does with their system. Adjusting each part of the desktop fonts/bars/window manager/DPI/browsers zoom/ etc to allow the system to look half decent on a retina display is not so great. I wonder if there is a plan to include solution built in on the next KDE since high resolution displays like the Retina and Pixel seem to be the next evolution in displays.
A huge problem for this is, that not all developers do have such a display yet. It's especially difficult to get a high-res screen for a workstations. It's like always: if there is no itch to scratch ;-) Some developers who have such a display started to scratch that itch, though. Whether it will be complete till the first release of Plasma 2 is something I cannot say.
2. However, there is something that failed here: branding. Bad habits die slowly, and even I have caught myself tweeting and repeating that this is part of some mythical thing called KDE 5. We all know there's no such thing, but PW2 is seen not as something standalone, but as part of KDE 5.
Unfortunately for some positivist developers, you cannot define by now what does the word "KDE" mean. The KDE word became meaningful sometime between KDE 2 and KDE 3, and means an integrated desktop environment. We can repeat, and repeat, the "true meaning" of "KDE", but for most people, this is "the first piece of KDE 5".
Maybe I'm getting old and just don't "get it", but this preview leaves me totally un-impressed. I pretty much left KDE when KDE4 was introduced. Though there was lots of promises about improvements, this preview tells me is that I made the right decision. The sluggishness/resource intensiveness in KD4 is profoundly annoying, and this preview tells me it will be carried on into KDE5. A shame really, the world needs a good OSS DE. 2ff7e9595c
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