Plasma 5.19 is out! If we gave alliterative names to Plasma releases, this one could be “Polished Plasma”. The effort developers have put into squashing bugs and removing annoying papercuts has been immense.
In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.
It’s been a joy to follow the focus on fixing papercuts in KDE and its applications, and now’s the time to give it a go through something like KDE Neon.
To enable the backport PPA and install 5.19 or stay on 5.18 LTS (which I have 0 issue with)? Now that is the question I am facing right now. My how times have changed, I would have jumped on 5.19 and updated my system if it were 5 years ago. Now I just want things to work when I sit at my desk and do not want to be bothered tinkering or spending time update if not need to.
Are you using Kubuntu? (I assume so considering you mentioned the PPA). I suggest upgrading! I had no issues, and the look-and-feel has improved dramatically (IMHO).
An example: GTK apps that previously refused to use the overall theme (Breeze Dark in my case), now look as similar as possible to the rest of the apps. I use Synaptic Package Manager, and until 5.19 it was always that wonderful beige color. Now it’s the same color as the rest of the desktop.
I know this is a minor issue to most, but for me it really increases usability overall.
Yes I am on Kubuntu 20.04. I only use a handful of GTK (Firefox, Thunderbird, Lifera, Libreoffice) applications for the rest I have found Qt alternatives (Ktorrent, VLC (which was always installed but hardly used till I made the move to KDE Plasma Desktop a year ago), Kate, Okular, etc.) which I love to use more so than the GTk versions. I will have to check out 5.19, thanks.
Sounds like we use similar setups – I have both Kubuntu and KDE Neon. My only gripe with KDE is that you still need to go into multiple places to get that consistency with Qt and GTK. Perhaps this applies to any attempt to get a consistent look-and-feel, not just KDE.
In KDE it’s Global Theme, then Application Style/Configure Gnome/GTK. I suppose it would cause more problems than it would solve if the developers just automagically kept those 2 “themes” in sync.
I should put some time aside this weekend then. Looking very attractive, and maybe like you I should also run KDE Neon user edition. Might do that on my laptop (once KDE Neon get re-based on Ubuntu 20.04) and run Kubuntu LTS 20,04 on my desktop.
It is so refreshing to see the intentional choices of the KDE project to support those of us that don’t appreciate the one-size-fits-all approach of the Gnome project. People want to be able to tweak things (see the plethora of gnome extensions), and having the common ones built right into the desktop makes a ton of sense.
I recently gave Pop OS a try on my primary laptop, just to see what all the fuss was about. By the time I was done, I think I had to install at least 5 extensions to get a desktop that would fit into my idea of usable. I was shocked by Gnome’s lack of options for seemingly common tweaks. I stayed on it a solid week just to give it a fair shake. But then after that week was up, I stuck Manjaro + Plasma on there to restore sanity to my life.
very similar journey
The screenshot they are showing for “consistent system tray applets” doesn’t even have consistency. The spacing of, what I assume to be a checkbox underneath the “B,” is off alignment from one picture to the next.
I agree the screenshot they use is shows a lack of consistency. I checked (since I’m running 5.19 now) and they are aligned in a consistent way. Perhaps I’ll send an email or flair to some support address to let them know that they’re own promotional material is incorrect. Thanks for pointing it out!
I’m going to stop commenting now because I realize I sound like a shill for KDE. I don’t work for the group. Just love the DE. Haha..
I am happily running Plasma 5.19 (with the kwin-lowlatecy fork) on X.org 1.21 (1.20.99.1) on Kernel 5.7.2-zen on Arch Linux.