Hi there!

Yesterday I moved from Plasma 4.x to 5.1 on my Archlinux install. Kudos to everybody! A major improvement on all aspects. I myself only miss a couple of configuration options, cpu/ram monitor widgets and kdeconnect, but I assume we will get those back soon.

I have a couple of comments on the initial experience, though:

-The sliding animation (kickoff, kicker, tray...) is nice, but I don't think the vanishing effect is necessary. At least not so soon. Halfway through the sliding it vanishes. I find it a little odd, and I don't think it adds any value to the actual sliding animation.

-The animation of what used to be the cashew is a little bit flickery. My computer is powerful, so it is not due to hardware limitations. Everything else feels very fluid.

-Size! Right after switching I felt everything was incredibly large. I admit that I like small fonts, but I had to reduce all the default font sizes by two. I think we would also need to design a more straight-forward way to adjust UI size. When I saw that buttons, window decorations, etc were very large, I didn't immediately think about font size, and I have been using Plasma for quite some time now.


Overall very solid, super smooth transition, and much improved elements ( I really like the vertical disposition for adding widgets, managing activities...)

I think one the VDG team can answer better than me, but part of the design is to use larger fonts instead bold fonts for headings such as in the systray.

I have to agree that it still doesn't 'gel' together in quite the same way as Plasma 4.

On the internet it's considered impolite to use all capitals as this is like SHOUTING. The large size of the headings and items such as the calendar are perhaps a little bit like this the first time you load up Plasma 5. Kinda 'in your face'!

P

pepedopolous wrote:I think one the VDG team can answer better than me, but part of the design is to use larger fonts instead bold fonts for headings such as in the systray.

I have to agree that it still doesn't 'gel' together in quite the same way as Plasma 4.

On the internet it's considered impolite to use all capitals as this is like SHOUTING. The large size of the headings and items such as the calendar are perhaps a little bit like this the first time you load up Plasma 5. Kinda 'in your face'!

P

I was referring more to buttons, window decorations and such. The system tray looks great IMO.

Other small nuisances are:

-When you launch an application from krunner it is unfocused. I am used to launching firefox and start typing. Now I need to launch, click on the window and type.
EDIT- It only happens with firefox.

-I find the clickable area of the close, maximize, minimize buttons too small. I would expand it. Probably to the whole height of the title bar.

pedrorodriguez wrote:-When you launch an application from krunner it is unfocused. I am used to launching firefox and start typing. Now I need to launch, click on the window and type.

That could be a problem with your settings somewhere, just tried it and everything starts focused without having changed anything in krunner.
Can't test Firefox though.

kdeconnect is ported and working, ask your distro to package it! (It is still not officially released though).

afiestas wrote:kdeconnect is ported and working, ask your distro to package it! (It is still not officially released though).

Since I am on Arch, I would probably have to package it myself, and I don't have the time to learn. Kdeconnect-frameworks-git from AUR crashes my plasma session, so I think I'll wait until it is in the official repos.

Or ask Andrea scarpino, I am sure he will package it