Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
This April’s version of Kubuntu is the first to come by default with the new KDE desktop manager version 5, based on the Plasma 5 user interface toolkit. Previously, in 14.10, two separate desktop environments were offered; the more classical KDE 4 for users more interested in stability, and KDE 5 for early adopters and testers. KDE has long been known both for its quality graphics, and for its ease of use and configuration. Unfortunately, version 4 was a bit of a disappointment for many. At the beginning, it did tend to consume perhaps more CPU (and GPU) processing than would be reasonable, much RAM, and as a result gave an impression of being generally buggy and working rather slowly. This scared away many, such as myself, who appreciated a well-drawn desktop environment such as KDE version 3 in the past, but also get to need some work done, quickly and on time. The impression we have is that the KDE project team members have been hard at work making the KDE desktop as a whole much more responsive, and ironing out the various defects that plagued original releases of KDE 4; it certainly seems worth testing out the new KDE, and seeing what progress has been made on this front, and whether the new Kubuntu 15.04 can be used today as a general purpose desktop distribution as it has in the past.
KDE versions 3 and 4 The last version of Kubuntu that came with KDE version 3 (to be precise, 3.5) was Kubuntu 8.04, considered by many as a fairly advanced and stable desktop for the time. The desktop environment was organized in a way that users of other operating systems would find familiar, with a task bar holding an application menu, direct access links to programs, and a notification area – the whole located at the places one would expect, at the bottom of the screen. Graphical elements’ design, such as the icons, was bright and cheerful as well as informative. The icon representing a USB drive was a beautiful piece of work. Kubuntu 8.04 actually came in two versions, one with KDE 3.5 and the other with the new KDE 4.0 desktop. Then, in late 2008, out came Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE 4.1 as its one and only desktop environment. It was not much of a success. On the one hand, users were happy to see the KDE project not resting on the laurels earned with KDE 3, but, on the other, the general consensus was that version 4.0 was not yet quite ready for general use. Specific criticisms were levelled at the desktop’s perceived slowness, and the fact that some bugs had not yet been ironed out. Perhaps if KDE 4 had been released as beta software, still maintaining the version 3.5 desktop as an option, critical reception would have been better. In their defense, the KDE project members may have considered that working on a single version of their desktop manager was a better use of limited resources. KDE 4 introduced a new concept of working with the desktop. Although some elements were distributed in much the same way – the taskbar, for example, was remarkably similar – the desktop itself was converted from a mere backdrop that supported icons, to a more global work area in which active elements, desktop widgets, could be placed.
Furthermore, activities were introduced. These worked as separate desktops the user could switch among. Program windows of non-active activities would not interfere with the active pane, but run silently in the background until that activity was activated (brought to the front). Users could organize their workflow across different activities: one for work, another for play, etc. This is a different concept than virtual desktops – each activity could contain its own virtual desktops – although in practice both mechanisms can be used for the same purpose of organizing windows. This is also when the “Plasma” terminology was introduced, to refer to KDE’s user interface technology as a whole. The interested reader can still access the original distribution ISO images at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/. However, it is important to stress that these distributions are no longer maintained. Their use cannot be recommended in production environments, which naturally does not preclude testing on a spare (or virtual) computer if so inclined. When I tested them, Kubuntu 8.10 made itself noteworthy, among other things, by keeping one of the CPU cores (of an Intel Core i5) pegged at near 100% capacity - thus generating much heat and fan noise. This is the type of “feature” that early adopters criticized - and that has been slowly solved over the different versions. In any case, the KDE 3 series still lives on as the Trinity project (https://www.trinitydesktop.org) maintained by project members who saw KDE 4 as a step backwards in some areas. This just goes to show the beauty of open-source software: if you do not agree with the direction a specific project is going, just fork it and roll your own. Unfortunately, the Trinity packages are not directly available within the Kubuntu repositories. For those interested, detailed instructions on converting your existing setup to Trinity can be found here: https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/UbuntuInstall.
On to Plasma 5 Working with Plasma 5 should not give many surprises to users used to running KDE 4. KDE version 4.14 in Kubuntu 14.10 is much more refined – and stable! – than the original 4.0, and the new Plasma 5 environment seems to draw heavily on this now mature version of KDE 4. The first impression we have when running Kubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is that of color. The default desktop has left the traditional KDE world of blues, and gone towards a more harlequin-inspired set of colors. Application and other icons have evolved towards a flatter presentation, leaving behind the previous skeuomorphic tendency of icons with a 3D effect in their graphism. This is exactly the same tendency that is seen in Google’s web design, Microsoft’s Windows 8 Metro environment, and Apple’s IOS 7 and OS-X 10 Yosemite. In the beta versions of 15.04, some of the icons had not yet been updated, as is the case with Thunderbird in the screenshot. The new design is pervasive across the desktop environment. Besides the main (large) icon set used for files, the status bar, menu bars, the Dolphin file manager’s lateral bar, and various dialog windows, all share a second, understated and smaller version of the new icon set. This mini-icon set is based on pure line art, in black for informative icons and red for alerts, on a gray background. The lack of details combined with a very small base icon style can make for difficult reading at times. Perhaps the designers were thinking of higher resolution viewing screens, where the thin lines may be better rendered.
A window theme called Breeze replaces KDE 4’s Oxygen and replaces the light or dark gray gradients we know with wide, uniform dark window bars. Widget buttons show new OK and Cancel buttons with revised graphics based on thin lines, also similar in a way to Apple’s newest offerings. Notifications are rather low-key, appearing briefly in the low right-hand corner. Each individual notification can be managed on a granular basis: we can choose for each action whether we prefer a message, a sound, both or neither. Clicking on the notification message gets us, in many cases, to the relevant program to solve the problem; for example, from an alert concerning lacking packages, we can run the relevant installer directly. After installing the public release version of Kubuntu 15.04, the updater came up immediately with a request to install a security update. This is not quite rocket science as far as user interface design is concerned, but is certainly helpful in day-to-day system management. The driver manager is also there, ready to inform the user about the availability of specific drivers for the hardware.
Activities and virtual desktops work in the same way as KDE 4. So do the various types of desktop organization (“workspace type” in KDE terminology). KDE 5 includes two types of workspace that can be configured from the desktop settings window (right click on the desktop): • A “standard” desktop view, in which no elements are actually located on the screen. • The “folder” view, in which the contents of directory /home/<username>/Desktop are reflected on the desktop. This is the view that best corresponds to other operating systems. Previously, KDE 4 also had two further view types: • A “newspaper” layout, that organized windows and other desktop widgets in columns. • The “netbook” view, with a main menu that covered the entire desktop, much like tablet and phone user interfaces. These seem to have disappeared in KDE 5 for some reason; they can no longer be downloaded from the repositories, and the option in System settings > Workspace Behavior > Workspace > Workspace Type has disappeared. We are still not sure whether this is just a temporary setback that will be corrected later on, or a conscious decision to simplify the number of options in this environment. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Plasma 5 is the lack of specific new additions. Some changes have been made, such as the login display manager (the new SDDM replaced KDM), or the Baloo file indexer replacing Nepomuk. As for the rest, the systems settings configuration panel, the file manager, and other components of the desktop environment work much in the same way as KDE 4. In this sense, KDE 5 can be seen more as a continuation of KDE 4 than a revolution. There are fewer differences between them from a user’s perspective than between versions 3 and 4.
Speed is important As stated above, the final releases of KDE version 4 already gave better performance figures than previously. This tendency is confirmed by Plasma 5. We have tested the new desktop on two platforms. One was an Intel Core i5 laptop with an SSD hard drive, while the other was one of the original Acer Aspire netbooks, equipped with an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor, 1 GByte of RAM, and a spinning drive. Performance of Kubuntu 15.04 was good on the Core i5, as expected. The system comes up quite sprightly, and after some rather intense web navigation and the use of programs, reports a mere 1.2 GBytes RAM occupation (out of a total of 4 GBytes). The dedicated nVidia graphics processor on this laptop also helps get the most out of KDE’s desktop effects. On the other hand, I approached the small Acer with a bit of trepidation. I had abandoned all ideas of using a complete desktop manager with all the graphical bells and whistles on this particular piece of equipment; its purview was restricted to lightweights such as Xubuntu’s XFCE and MATE - where it did quite well, indeed. Rather to my surprise, the Kubuntu 15.04 (i386) software + small Acer hardware combination booted up in 1 minute 46 seconds. This may seem a tad slow at first sight, but is actually quite correct given the age of this (rather low-range) piece of hardware. Obviously, boot-up times are at a much faster 40 seconds on the Core i5 due to the combination of a more powerful processor and, most of all, the SSD hard drive.
Sound and graphics work well out of the box on the Acer, as does WiFi. I was able to navigate the web and even view videos on Youtube with no hassle. Video reproduction is a bit choppy for any resolution over 400 pixels, which is perhaps excusable for the available hardware. The hardware manager immediately came up, and proposed the installation of the single proprietary driver applicable for this particular laptop (Intel CPU microcode). A specific tweak applied to this computer, that can be recommended for computers with slower hard drives, is to disable file indexing. The Baloo indexer can be configured to index only some volumes or deactivated altogether in the System settings > Desktop effects control panel. Otherwise, the user can expect some heavy disk usage, at least the first times the system is booted up. On the Core i5, Baloo’s activity resulted in one of the processor cores getting pegged at 100% capacity for some time, as it digested the contents of the hard drive. The overall impression is that much attention has been given to staying more-or-less within the general desktop design parameters initially drawn up for KDE 4, while increasing actual usability on a wider range of hardware platforms.
All is not rosy Unfortunately, there is still some scope left for making improvements. There was a noticeable leap in quality from Kubuntu 15.04 Beta 1 to Beta 2, and more bugs have been ironed out in the final release to the public. The apport bug notification application had nothing to do after setting up and booting the final release, unlike both betas. Perhaps it may be useful to remember that beta versions are not finished software releases, but must be considered as work-in-progress at best, and downright buggy at worst. However, by making them available to early adopters, more people will use the new software in a variety of situations and experience possible bugs. By reporting them to the Kubuntu or KDE projects, as appropriate, developers can get on top of them before the final release is offered up to the general public. The beta versions of Kubuntu 15.04 did contain quite a lot of bugs. For example, the installer simply locked for some testers, while, in my case, I got a system that went into sleep recurringly every two minutes while the installer was doing its job. Once the system was up and running, upgrading the kernel to version 3.19 did not work well for some, needing a reboot back into the previous version, 3.16. A noticeable quirk is that the kwallet application reported needing to migrate from a previous file layout to a more modern version. This happened to me even when performing a fresh install with the public release, which was a bit weird.
Perhaps the most obvious defect for the general user concerns the notification area in the menu bar. Although general operation is similar to KDE 4’s offering, the internal mechanisms seem to have changed a bit under the hood. This results in not playing well with many external software applications. Dropbox works well in the background, but with no status icon to inform the user about its state. It is difficult to know precisely what the program is doing, which can be a bit of a hassle - especially at the beginning, just after installation, when Dropbox needs to download some binary blobs and index files on the hard drive. Some versions of Plex also seem to have problems, refusing to start and complaining about not being able to access the notification area. Some computers, such as a low-cost Acer AO-722 notebook, had issues with the screen flickering and window borders disappearing as soon as multiple virtual desktops were enabled. This seems to depend on the graphical hardware present, and can be cured by installing specific graphical drivers or, obviously, by deactivating virtual desktops. More serious was a problem in Beta 2 that left the user looking at a blank screen. Rebooting did not seem to help, either. This seems to be related to a problem with the configuration files, that moved from directory ~/.kde to ~/.config/kde and ~/.config/plasma. The solution given in https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?67234-Black-screen-with-Plasma is simply to remove these directories (be careful!), and reboot the computer. This wipes out configuration items such as WiFi networks but makes the desktop come up once more.
Once again, let us remember that detecting such problems is precisely why beta versions exist. But there do seem to have been a lot of them in this version of Kubuntu, most of which were corrected in the public release of April 23. To end on a more positive note, some of us were wondering if the -admittedly major- system component change towards systemd would affect system usability. I am happy to report this is not the case for Kubuntu 15.04, at least as far as general desktop or laptop use is concerned. I would be more concerned from the standpoint of server administration, but, on the other hand, a KDE desktop would probably not be the system of choice by the people concerned, for that specific type of workload. Aside from the minor difficulties experienced, I would like to end with a general comment on this particular version of *buntu 15.04: that the user experience is just about what some of us have been hoping for from the Kubuntu project for some time now. We have a nice, colorful desktop with a lot of helpful automated actions going on under the hood to take the hassle out of basic systems administration. It is safe to say that this version should gain acceptance from users, and perhaps not only among power-users and staunch supporters of KDE but also among the more volatile regular desktop switchers such as yours truly. This distribution also impresses favorably for its speed on low-end and elderly computers, though it should be stressed that in such a case reducing the amount of desktop effects active can help avoid processor overload. In any case, as usual with KDE, if a processor with decent speed and a fast – preferably SSD – hard drive are available, the desktop environment can make good use of them.