Can we please have some indication of expectations that some regressions currently present in Plasma 5.8.5 will soon be fixed?

1. The System Tray

a. Akregator.
Akregator no longer shows the download status on the System tray icon. Whereas under KDE4 this showed a count of new (unread) articles, the current icon does not change at all. Although there is a sort of work-around (by setting the system tray icon to Auto) this is not of use to those who need the icon always available and who either do not notice or who disable the notifications. (Yes, that would be me.)

b. KMail.
KMail no longer shows the number of unread emails - although there is a change of icon if there is at least one. Better than Akregator, but not really there yet.

c. Other programs.
The Ksystemtray command has disappeared. Until the last update its call was added by the System Settings application. It did nothing, but even that has now disappeared. This leaves us dependant on a non-KDE/Plasma program (the excellent Alltray) to park other programs - except those few which handle this problem internally - in the system tray. Sadly Alltray does not play nicely with Wayland, nor does there seem any prospect that it will. And, frankly, if we cannot park programs in the sytem tray under Wayland then Plasma seems to be very broken, especially in view of the fact that KDE does not currently present a functioning browser.

2. Browser

There - I have already said it. No functioning browser. Really, KDE?

3. Menu

The menu has made a start on replacing the much loved Lancelot. But why stop after the first hurdle? We switch tabs by hovering but that is all. Why not complete the movement and control the rest of the menu by hovering? I miss Lancelot daily.

4. Semantic Desktop

It was such a good idea. And it quietly disappeared. By doing so it left us with the problems of Akonadi without the benefits. Surely, either replace Akonadi with a robust and reliable database (cf Evolution, Thunderbird...) or reinstate goodies like echoing KOrganiser entries in the desktop calendars. And Akonadi really does not work well. Several times each week I delete phantom emails from the intray. (Folder updating seems to be as much use as resisting the Borg.) And I have not even made a serious start to deleting the pages and pages of phantom Identities in KMail. (Try it and you will understand why.)

KDE/Plasma is great. But it could be even better - again. Soon?

Regards,

Bob

Akregator +1

Can you provide links to the related bug reports?

owdbob wrote:Can we please have some indication of expectations that some regressions currently present in Plasma 5.8.5 will soon be fixed?

1. The System Tray

a. Akregator.
Akregator no longer shows the download status on the System tray icon. Whereas under KDE4 this showed a count of new (unread) articles, the current icon does not change at all. Although there is a sort of work-around (by setting the system tray icon to Auto) this is not of use to those who need the icon always available and who either do not notice or who disable the notifications. (Yes, that would be me.)

It works for me. I see the number of unread articles (current Debian testing, but I've seen that on Fedora 24 as well).
Please note that Akregator is not part of Plasma.

b. KMail.
KMail no longer shows the number of unread emails - although there is a change of icon if there is at least one. Better than Akregator, but not really there yet.

If you enable the system tray and the checkbox which enables the unread messages in the systray, it works (same environment, current Debian testing)

c. Other programs.
The Ksystemtray command has disappeared. Until the last update its call was added by the System Settings application. It did nothing, but even that has now disappeared. This leaves us dependant on a non-KDE/Plasma program (the excellent Alltray) to park other programs - except those few which handle this problem internally - in the system tray. Sadly Alltray does not play nicely with Wayland, nor does there seem any prospect that it will. And, frankly, if we cannot park programs in the sytem tray under Wayland then Plasma seems to be very broken, especially in view of the fact that KDE does not currently present a functioning browser.

The support for the old XEmbed programs is part of the system try again:
http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xembed_back

If you have a specific 3rd party program which does not work (and which does not embed its copy of Qt), it may be an issue with that program. Alltray does not work with Wayland most likely because it implements XEmbed, so the application should move to the new systray standard (Qt application and Gtk application linked to libindicator already works out of the box.

2. Browser

There - I have already said it. No functioning browser. Really, KDE?

Handling and developing a browser is... complex, and anyway out of scope for Plasma most likely. Nevertheless, from KDE Applications 16.12, Konqueror is based on Qt5 and it uses by default QtWebEngine (based on Blink/Chromium).

3. Menu

The menu has made a start on replacing the much loved Lancelot. But why stop after the first hurdle? We switch tabs by hovering but that is all. Why not complete the movement and control the rest of the menu by hovering? I miss Lancelot daily.

The Lancelot author did not continue its development. See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/3 ... a/cwr9uhx/

Did you check if this functionality that you describe was requested already?

4. Semantic Desktop

It was such a good idea. And it quietly disappeared. By doing so it left us with the problems of Akonadi without the benefits. Surely, either replace Akonadi with a robust and reliable database (cf Evolution, Thunderbird...) or reinstate goodies like echoing KOrganiser entries in the desktop calendars. And Akonadi really does not work well. Several times each week I delete phantom emails from the intray. (Folder updating seems to be as much use as resisting the Borg.) And I have not even made a serious start to deleting the pages and pages of phantom Identities in KMail. (Try it and you will understand why.)

I think that there is a bit of confusion here. Akonadi is a cache for PIM-related resources, and it is not part of Plasma. The semantic desktop was based on the Nepomuk libraries at the time of kdelibs4. Right now, Baloo is a library (part of KDE Frameworks) for file indexing and search, used by Plasma, that allows you to search for files based on various parameters.

Thank you for your response, tosky.

Akregator.
Yes, the system tray icon showing the number of unread articles *was* there. I am using Akregator 5.4.0 on Plasma 5.8, and the indication appears to be missing, with no option to restore it, either in the system tray or in the Akregator settings.

KMail.
As above. The settings dialogue now contains a single check box for system tray: either on or off.

Other Applications.
Sadly the link you gave pre-dated Plasma 5. The package you refer to has now disappeared. My point, however, was not about programs (like KMail and Cherrytree) which contain their own system tray option and which behave well under both X and Wayland. My complaint is about non-QT programs such as Firefox, which do not have such facilities. The only way to embed Firefox and the others into the Plasma/KDE system tray at the moment is by using Alltray under X. That will not work under Wayland. So I reckon we need to get back to being offered a Ksystemtray type command. Users appear to have been asking for a long time with no success.

Browser.
Yes, point taken, but Konqueror is unusable at the moment. This has been reported and discussed elsewhere on this forum. There is no other offering available within the official Plasma/KDE sphere.

Menu.
Yes, I am painfully aware that Lancelot has been discontinued. And yes, this has already been discussed. My point was that the integration of hover activation into the new menu was only partially done, leaving a mish-mash of usage paradigms. It would be good to see the movement being completed.

Semantic Desktop.
Thank you. Yes, I was well aware of the semantic desktop components. The design of Akonadi was, I believe, based on integration with the rest - the rest which has now gone. That being the case, there seems little point in continuing to support a much criticised database engine unless some semantic desktop functionality is to be restored. (I am particularly sad about this, having been much involved in research into semantic desktops etc in the long ago!)

In all, I guess that I am a bit disappointed that, where a function has been lost in the transition from Plasma/KDE 4 to 5, the preferred solution appears to be to remove all reference rather than restoring it.

Regards,

Bob

There are many features from KDE 4.x that are no longer present in Plasma 5.
In the past 3 years, I have given up hope that Plasma 5 will ever IMHO reach parity with KDE 4.

The "Semantic Desktop" no longer fully exists, all that is left is just some of its remnants, like Akonadi.
Many desktop layouts are no longer available, like the "Search and Launch" one, and the "Newspaper" layout.
There used to be support for widgets written in different programing languages via scriptengines, there was even limited support for OS X "Dashboard" widgets, this functionality no longer exists.
Many native desktop widgets that were available in KDE 4, no longer exist.
Even KRunner has been slightly dumbed down, while ~99% of its functionality remains, there is still some removed functionality.
You used to be able to download new splash screens and apply them, NOW you have to download a new "Look and Feel" package to get a new splash screen. And the splash screens you get are only KsplashQML ones, no more KsplashX ones.

I believe that the only way for Plasma 5 to reach parity with KDE 4, is for them to implement all of the missing functionality, maybe we will se the return of some of this functionality by Plasma 5.10, but somehow I doubt it.

Indeed, I keep finding "missing bits". Just this morning I decided that it would be agreeable to change the theme for my panel, but only the panel. Used to be simple. No longer available. Yes, a silly example, but just yet another irritation. Then I received 3 "new" emails in KMail. All phantom. Two had already been "deleted", the third came from a storage folder.

What is going on?

I get the impression that there is a lack of overall direction or supervision for the entire project. Or is that just silly and paranoid? One is left with the feeling that different developers are going their own sweet way, without reference to anyone else. We seem to lack a co-ordinator in the mould of Linus Torvalds or Aaron Seigo who looks at quality control and parallel development and who listens to the users. Or am I being very unfair?

No news on this topic?

I have just upgrade to Opensuse Leap 42.3 from Leap 42.2 and the KDe applications (Kmail, Akregator, etc) are now Plasma 5 verisions. They are unusable on Leap, I am trying to install the 4.14 version of them, or I will have to downgrade to Leap 42.2. On opensuse they are still stuck with QT 5.6 that cause a lot of bad behaviors on kde applications

kmail is not part of Plasma so you are in the wrong thread.

Being stuck with Qt-5.6 is suboptimal indeed but only your distribution can change that.