Make KDE Plasma and Neon Better

Brainstorm
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Make Plasma 6 and KDE Neon 6 Better!

1: Make other browser the default in Plasma

Seriously, most people don’t use Firefox, open it once and then leave it there, so it would be nice to have another browser, like for example, Vivaldi, Vivaldi is a fast, customizable browser, and has excellent performance. It has features like the Vivaldi panel and has compatibility with Bing AI web out of the box, if not then Chromium is good too, it’s basically Chrome, and the KDE Team can edit it so that it fits in with Plasma? (I like it the way them the way they are, both of the browsers) and you can re-enable sync with, for example, this guide Chromium Sync - Learning to Pi, so it’s a good option too, or it would be really cool to when the user installs, let them choose their browser!

2: Breeze is old, Material 3 Guidelines and Blur are Beautiful

Breeze is seriously old, and doesn’t look all that good anymore, so I think the KDE Team should make a new theme that uses Material 3 Guidelines and icons, I also think that it would be cool to see Material You icons on the desktop, the ones that change with your wallpaper, and Blur would be really cool too, you could leave a toggle for Blur tho, here’s an example, just note that I’m not sure if it follows Google’s Material 3 Guidelines: Utterly Nord - pling.com, please note that the theme also has a light variant, Utterly Nord Light, Which is important, and in the theme maybe offer an option to change the Material You Icons to another shape

3: Color Scheme with Material You, and no not just tilting a few things

It would be really cool to have real Material You on Plasma, and I’m pretty sure that a lot of people want MYou on Plasma, the wallpaper theming till now is good but isn’t Material You, here’s a link to someone who implemented MYou to Plasma, look at the gif that there is that shows how the MYou work: GitHub - luisbocanegra/kde-material-you-colors: Automatic Material You Colors Generator from your wallpaper for the Plasma Desktop, it would be cool to have that in Plasma by default

4: Just put the Themed pill-shaped Control center

Please put a pill-shaped theme Control center in Plasma, like Android’s or Gnome’s, if you make the MYou theme this will go wonderfully, it will be really good because the replacement Plasma comes with is really bad, terrible, it’s da worst

5: Let’s step up the compatibility in KDE Neon!

It’ll really make KDE Neon’s game step up if you include Wine by Default and Waydroid, as many distros are already doing this, please put Wine and Waydroid by default

6: Let’s edit Plasma

It would be really cool if there were a switch to enable custom developer-made KDE Plasmas

7: Pre-set Layouts pls!

Put like, some pre-set layouts, like, Windows Like, macOS Like, Ubuntu Like, Windows 12 rumors Like, and to let you save your layouts

8: Plasma Dock

Pls put a dock option in the KDE Plasma panel, it would be really cool

Notes: Pls note that I can edit and add things to this list

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You can set it the way YOU like. Not everyone will like what you do, nor how like mine to look.

Vivaldi, is that free software at all? It IS a lot more buggy than Firefox (in my experience)

As to wine, Waydroid, etc, no. It is extra software for the user to include as they choose.
(I won’t use a system-installed wine, myself, and though I do love Waydroid, it has to actually work, which it doesn’t for everyone. It stopped being usable for me, after hardware upgrades).

What major, or even ‘mid=level’ , non-niche distro actually provides all this buggy software ootb?

That is not the point for Neon, which isn’t a distro to begin with.

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Independent of my thoughts on the specific proposals here, some feedback on the approach:

Do you have data to back up that most KDE Plasma users don’t use the web browser that’s the default on the vast majority of Linux distributions? And Vivaldi is not entirely open-source software, so it would feel awfully contradictory to the mission of KDE to promote a closed-source solution to such a critical application.

Based on what?

If you’re asking volunteers to spend their volunteered time to change the experience for many, many users across the globe based on your personal preferences, calling what those volunteers have designed and built “bad, terrible, da worst” is probably not the right approach.

Go for it:

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not jumping in on the original post, tl;dr not on neon, not even on GNU/Linux, also too demanding title and you can’t argue taste.

Just a small objection concerning about respecting volunteers work, since recently it seems to come up here frequently in one way or the other. Speaking not for kde, plasma or neon but just from my experiences from my own little projects.

Is it ok to give feedback on voluntary work? Yes, for sure. Feedback and reflecting on it is invalueable to improve. And even negative or from non tech folks because it opens up a different perspective one might have not thought of. So, criticism is definetely not a no-go; and part of releasing code/art/distros is having to deal with it.

But the important part is having mutual respect and how things come across. The coder/artist/maintainer might also have a valid point in the way it’s implemented.

ok, now be excellent to each other. :slight_smile:

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Give Dolphin the tiling capability that Konqueror has.

Stop making all new devices hidden in Dolphin Places panel.

Stop Dolphin collecting KDE connect devices (with entries like kdeconnect://<long_identifier>/). A device that changes its MAC or IP creates a large list of entries (hidden, but still…), that all look alike in Places.

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Taste is subjective. That’s all I have to say about this one. :slightly_smiling_face:

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The only way to make Neon better is to add the LinkedIn hotkey: Draft: Add shortcut for opening LinkedIn (!1731) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Desktop · GitLab

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Agreed on this one. Terrible thing. Been around for a good while now.

Blockquote Stop Dolphin collecting KDE connect devices (with entries like kdeconnect://<long_identifier>/ ). A device that changes its MAC or IP creates a large list of entries (hidden, but still…), that all look alike in Places.

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All what you are writing seems more like personal preference than an objective opinion.
Also, if you will lead your life with the “What most people use/do/how they think”, then you are lost.

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Exactly my thoughts.

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Firefox ARE the browser for all user, it’s safe and simple to handle.

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Yeah, keyloggers and extreme spying by default sure is sooo safe…

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A GUI switch for audio routing presets, that auto-switches presets on certain events as well as allow manual switching.

Like If-This-Then-That for pipewire et al… to act on (un)plugging or (dis)connecting HDMI, headphones, Bluetooth, … and with the possibility to include multiple conditions.

And give it a one-click manual switching option for the presets, e.g. a widget with preset menu.

The emphasis for this would be not on qpwgraph-style routing (a fine thing in itself), but on higher level presets. And on ease and intuitiveness of use.

Example for presets:

active          plugged, radio,        sound                  
audio source    network                route(s)               
-------------------------------------------------------------------                      
VLC             HDMI, always           VLC > HDMI             
                                             
VLC             no HDMI                
                no headphones          
                no Bluetooth           VLC > internal speakers
                                              
VLC             no HDMI                
                headphones             
                no Bluetooth           VLC > headphones       
                                              
VLC             no HDMI                
                no headphones          
                Bluetooth              VLC > Bluetooth        
                                              
Elisa           always                 Elisa > Bluetooth      
                                              
System Alerts          
  and Speech    no headphones          SySo & Sp > internal speakers                                    

System Alerts          
  and Speech    headphones             SySo & Sp > headphones
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This bug got fixed recently.

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  1. Do you really know Firefox? What it can do? Its a remarkable browser in many ways. It does its thing locally, on your own machine. Page translations, Pocket stories, and so on. No clouds, no phoning home to Google.

I do use a portable version of Googleless Chromium for some things when I do not want to mess with my Firefox settings (like running FLightgear’s output telemetry over httpd in a smaller rotated display). But, when it comes to features, security, privacy, and usability, all things point to Firefox.

  1. I love breeze and the current look of KDE. I love its simplicity and cleanliness. In decades of PC use, I finally have a desktop that looks and acts exactly as I have always dreamed about. I do agree the Icons are a bit bland, so I use Papyrus. I have also changed the blue highlight scheme to orange. Neither of them were hard to do.

  2. I am not a fan of Android and I despise Google as a company. I use Android as I have little choice where I am (I wont pay the insane prices of Apple products, and Apple is no better), and a cell is pretty much mandatory these days. But, I have as much Google turned off as I can. I find it creepy. I have no desire to have any part of anything to do with android, or google, on my desktop. That includes Material You.

  3. Nor do I want a pill shaped control center on my desktop. I do not want Android anything on my desktop. Google, Android (and now Windows) and most of their apps collect huge amounts of user identifiable data, and are designed to promote behavioral engineering - like accepting paywalls, crippleware, SAAS, and pay forever subscriptions.

This is why I use Linux.

  1. Wine is a third party App. If you want it, install it. It is not hard. As for Waydroid… see above.

  2. You can. It is called kdesrc-build. Modify all you want. There is also QTdesigner, Kdevelop, and other tools you can use to create your own custom desktop apps. Plasma is just a group of Apps, so you do not need to build it all anew. Just what parts you want.

  3. If I want Windows, I will use Windows. If I want Mac, I will use a mac. If I wanted Ubuntu , I would be using Ubuntu. This is Neon. It is KDE. Not Windows, not Mac, not Gnome…

  4. …and if I wanted a dock, I would install a dock. Like Wine, its not hard.

I use Neon for its purity. I want my OS to be clean, simple, powerful, and flexible. Neon gives me that. It is also really efficient. I have 11 active desktop widgets running and my PC idles at 0.5% - that is lower than Windows when its doing nothing at all. And even on a fully laden, everyday use machine, running Cinebench through Wine shows its actually faster than a totally clean Windows.

Besides, as MS discovered, a desktop PC/laptop is not a phone or small tablet. The usage requirements are different. What works for a phone does not work for a PC, and vice versa. Everything you wrote seems like you simply want to turn it into Android. If I have a vote in this, then my vote is absolutely not.

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KDE rocks. Firefox rocks. Customization is the main reason computers rock.

When I found out computers can do nearly anything I abandoned almost all my dedicated hardware. Still need some real world equipment but computers are the interface now.

After M$ windows became scarey to me I now live in Linux land exclusively. The coolest part is Linux is a brand new workshop where anything is possible.

If I cannot figure something out there is always someone who has and is willing to share.

Vic

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  1. Strongly disagree. I always use Firefox, but I do have Chrome for things that will ONLY work in Google’s browser (though it’s very rare that I ever need to use it). It’s also extremely trivial if you have an issue with Firefox to make any browser your default.

Can you recommend a Free and Open Source browser, other than Chromium (which is also based on FOSS code which depends heavily on Google’s input)? I mean - apart from Brave, which many folks seem to like (but I and many of my friends really do not).

Firefox is pretty much the only remaining truly free browser.

From the now defunct Reddit Firefox thread, I understand that there are many people who just can’t use desktops too well and have trouble with settings etc. Firefox is almost perfect, I can’t remember the last time I had an issue except using Google Translate with my microphone.

  1. Breeze is developed and works extremely well for me, though I installed Lightly which I tend to prefer…

  2. My themes work perfectly with all my colour schemes.
    I really don’t like the Nord theme you linked (other than the colours, which I have already) with the ugly clock and too-transparent plasma,

  3. I don’t use Plasma on a mobile device, so I don’t want a ‘pill-shaped’ control centre.

  4. We don’t need bloat by default - and this isn’t a KDE issue - it’s a distribution issue. You can choose a distribution which includes it, or you can choose vanilla KDE and do it yourself.

  5. ‘Custom developer-made KDE plasmas switch’ seems to make zero sense to me.

  6. Presets for layouts is an interesting idea - and is something you can do with Global Themes, but it’s not as obvious or straightforward as I’d like… when I mess around with layouts I tend to experiment by using plasma config saver to save different theme/layout combinations… but in reality, people tend to use only one layout anyway.

You can experiment with ‘Activities’ for a variation on your idea.

  1. Plasma Dock is increasingly un-necessary now that panels can be adjusted to float and not take up the full width of the screen, this is why I abandoned Latte-dock last year and instead set up 3 panels (1 main and 2 hidden) to suit my needs.
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While most of OP is largely their subjective view on better I do want to say 3 things.

  1. Breeze is most definitely not old. Its a gorgeous theme and you should see it in Plasma 6. The upcoming changes really make it genuinely great and remove any need I had for custom icons now that your accent color changes things.

  2. I don’t agree with just going with a chromium browser because the windows/android world has settled on that. I think a chromium dominated web isn’t good on top of Firefox generally being a better choice from an open source perspective. (FF is also better at color management :upside_down_face:)

  3. I don’t think “be like GNOME or Android” = better. I being someone who used GNOME for over 10yrs till about a year ago I can appreciate GNOME and do like it but don’t think its the “better” set of decisions in regards to themeing and feel similar about Android. I think KDE makes themes fairly easy just the options feel a bit overwhelming at first.

I would’ve probably phrased the OP to be more discuss thoughts/discussion on other options regardng those ideas and other ideas vs “these are better” . It sort of implies KDE Plasma is worse which many will take issue with.

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I won’t be happy until they give me back my per-Activity panel configurations lol :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :rofl:
That was 85% of the reason I used Latte Dock to begin with. The current and future Plasma panels are great overall these days. Except for this glaring (to me of course) oversight.

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