KDE Gear 23.08 is coming

It’s not hit the Arch repos yet, but The updates have now hit the Arch repos (thank you @BS86 ) and the KDE announcement is here:

Also, Haruna has been updated to 0.12.0 (this update is in the Arch repos):

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Nothing super exciting in there for me but the applications seem to be moving in the right direction.

I used to barely use any of the KDE applications outside of dolphin, konsole and kate but I find myself switching to them more and more over time as they have improved.

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they are already in stable for about 5 hours?
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/dolphin/
https://archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/kde-applications/

I checked at the same time I created this topic, but that’s great news :smiley:

Yes, I’m finding that for many things the KDE app is good enough (or even better) compared to the alternatives.

As much as I’m a sucker for Vim, Kate is one of those superlative GUI editors that just hits the sweet spot so well, particular with the sheer scope of plugins. (Will never get used to the new icon though… :slight_smile: )

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Funny thing is: As good as the apps get (and they get VERY good), some old habits never die. I am still on tbird for mail, and I still install notepadqq - which I find still way above kate. Kate never did it for me…

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With the new development wind behind it, I can’t see myself giving up on Thunderbird, and I’d prefer not to have akonadi running on my system.

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:point_up_2:

This is the same for me.

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I’ve tried, and tried, and tried for years to work with Akonadi, whether it’s Kmail, Kontact, Korganiser, Kalendar, - or now Merkuro, the experience has never been consistent or guaranteed to work. In principle, Akonadi sounds great, but the experience has sadly been hit and miss.

I’ve stuck with Thunderbird and just added the caldav/carddav sources i need, alongside an imap resource, and I’m done. Everything just works without frustration.

I should give kde a spin again soon. It’s been a while.

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You should :wink: I’ve done test installs of Budgie, Cinnamon, Gnome & Xfce so far this year, but nothing beats KDE for me right now.

I feel exactly the same way. I could use Vim and be perfectly content with it, but Kate is just excellent.

I’ve never gotten into Emacs, but I should probably force myself to learn it. I just never found it attractive, probably because I hated LISP, but now that I’ve been programming in Scheme for a while, I’m starting to enjoy it. I feel terrible that I like it :rofl:

But Kate is just too good, it created a comfort zone for me and now I’m lazy to explore other text editors.

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If there was ever a reason to use Emacs, and you’re happy to fall down a rabbit hole that’s deliciously rewarding when it “clicks”, - I highly recommend jumping into Org mode…!

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Two things kept (or keep me) from going back right now:

  1. I can’t center the date/calendar on the taskbar without it moving, or without an incredible amount of work to get it to stay in almost the right place. I want it centered like in Gnome/Cinnamon, it’s always been there for me, and I don’t want it anywhere else.

  2. The wayland gestures for worspaces are backwards to gnome and I know eventually I’d figure it out, but for now, I feel like an idiot going the wrong way everytime I swipe my touchpad. I use this so much on my laptop - this is what took me from kde in the first place. Gnome 40 with wayland gestures was a complete game changer for me. I’ve been here since.

I prefer the date/time in the centre, but I can live without it :person_shrugging:

My main laptop is so old, that gestures don’t work anyway :joy: but yes, when switching DEs the different keyboard shortcuts, for example, take a few days to settle in for me.

The main Gnome irritation for me is how tracker deals with second drives. I have a 500GB SSD which I use for the OS and /home, and a 2TB HDD which stores music & video files, and backups. Folders from the HDD are symlinked to my Music and Videos folders in /home.

To get these folders/files to show when searching in Nautilus, I have to edit /etc/fstab and add an entry for each top level folder with bind, mount & hide.

However, even though tracker can now see & index them, they never show up in the dash/overview search, which makes it much less useful for me.

By contrast in KDE, baloo works great for me now, and I can type “eutrophication” in the app launcher right now and it immediately lists the five documents that contain this word.

I also find many of the Gnome apps inadequate (particularly when compared to their KDE counterparts) and replace them with others. Even with using the adw-gtk3 theme, there are still visual inconsistencies between the libadwaita apps and others, and many GTK apps are unlikely to switch to libadwaita.

Finally, I like the default Gnome workflow, but still need a few extensions, and there’s the familiar problem of waiting for extensions to be updated to work with the latest Gnome, and the risk that the extension developer gets so frustrated with Gnome changes that they throw in the towel.

When looking at the developer blogs etc, KDE seems more focused on improving based on user feedback too.

But, different strokes for different folks, as they say.

EDIT By all means check out KDE now, but it would be worth trying out Plasma 6 when it has been released and has settled down early next year :spiral_calendar:

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I turned of extension verification in dconf. . . and pretty much every single extension went from broken on 44 to working (except 1).

I like the KDE apps a lot better too.

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Me too! I use thunderbird also and can’t see ever using anything else either. I mean i do use gmail too but i could add that to thunderbird also.

Tried out all the updated apps now, and can confirm. Will save my excitement for Plasma 6.

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I had to react with the broken heart due to goolag mail, sorry :frowning: