KDE Plasma Active Two released

[Posted December 14, 2011 by corbet]

The KDE project has announced the release of Plasma Active Two, the second iteration of its mobile device environment. Changes include a lot of user interface improvements, better performance, and "recommendations": "Plasma Active is now able to learn as you use your device. It uses that information to make recommendations as to what content, web sites and applications are likely to be related to what you are doing right now. This technology uses the power of the 'semantic desktop' efforts from KDE Nepomuk to make your device a more valuable adviser and helper. Future releases will build on predictive power as well as the breadth of recommendations."

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Nepomuk

Posted Dec 14, 2011 16:24 UTC (Wed) by danielpf (guest, #4723) [Link] (11 responses)

By many one of the first actions taken after installing a KDE desktop is to deactivate Nepomuk, as this application eats so much CPU and disk resources. Hopefully time will come when it will become clearer what can be done with the semantic desktop worth the invested resources. At least this announcement gave me a first glimpse.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 14, 2011 17:25 UTC (Wed) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link] (10 responses)

> Hopefully time will come when it will become clearer what can be done with the semantic desktop worth the invested resources.

I like to call this mentality "If you build it, the benefits will come"[1] mentality. The premise is that someone wakes up one day with a catch-all solution that will make everything in the future easier. He doesn't know how, but he's *sure* that once it's implemented, and everyone has spent inordinate amounts of time working on it, the benefits will start rolling.

Unfortunately, it never works that way. Most people will be skeptical, and the poor souls who buy into the idea end up with useless and complex systems that do mostly nothing.

Needless to say, I'm not a fan of Semantic {Web,Desktop,whatever}.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_Dreams

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 14, 2011 18:19 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (9 responses)

At least in Plasma, this is not at all the way we've approached it. If you try Plasma Active you'll notice that Nepomuk is, well, non-noticeable even though it is key to many of the functions of the user interface. We have/had a plan for how we wanted to us it and we have been executing on it.

I understand that if you've invested enough time and energy into making up your mind that you dislike something, that it can be difficult to accept someone is succeeding with that idea ... but I invite you to try Plasma Active on a tablet device and see for yourself how well it can work :)

There is also more to it than just Nepomuk of course, so you may well bump into a few other things you enjoy along the way ;)

Cheers .... aseigo.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 14, 2011 18:24 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

I like KDE in general. But Nepomuk? I just don't see WHAT it can be used for.

Are there any real compelling use-cases for it?

Except for simple document search, of course.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 15, 2011 12:10 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

read what Aaron wrote - Plasma Active is all about nepomuk. It uses it for bookmarks, locating files (it has no traditional file selector with folders etc), activities and the cool new 'recommendations' feature. basically PA wouldn't be what it is without nepomuk.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 14, 2011 18:59 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I have a tablet device but unfortunately it's Tegra 2 and not officially supported by any linux distro (there's an unofficial Ubuntu port but a lot of things don't work, including accelerated hardware). I realise that's not KDE's fault.

However -- I have used KDE on my desktop from 4.1 through 4.5 (before that I was a kde user from 2.0 to 3.x days). I gave up because it (and by "it", I mean plasma) was just too buggy for me. Ubuntu's Unity is annoying too, but not as bad as KDE. And I had plenty of goodwill to KDE -- it's what kept me going through 4.5. So I'm not in a hurry to try out Plasma Active.

I think the future, for me at least, is XFCE. In fact, I have XFCE installed on my tablet -- in a Gentoo Linux chroot (the tablet runs Android, and the chroot works surprisingly well) -- and it's quite usable, even though I view it with a VNC viewer and not a "real" X server.

Now, it's possible Nepomuk really is everything you say it is, and we will see the light a few years down the line. But I really doubt it. It looks like, not a solution in search of a problem, but a problem invented to solve a non-existent problem.

Just the other day I read an article bemoaning the condescension of user-interface designers: he uses a Windows 95 skin in Windows 7, and wishes it was possible to make Mac OS X behave like OS 9. I don't use either Windows or Mac, but I sort of see his point.

You (KDE) guys chose to abandon your regular users in pursuit of some nebulous dream. Now GNOME and Ubuntu have followed suit. Everyone wants to be the next Apple or Android. But the people who want that sort of thing have already jumped ship.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 14, 2011 20:03 UTC (Wed) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link] (4 responses)

I am still a KDE user, but I have been very frustrated by the resource consumption of all of the indexing. It basically locks up the computer for many minutes upon login. The bug reports say that this is all fixed in the newer versions, but for the last year at least working versions have not yet reached debian testing. Leaving aside the whole question of the semantic thing (maybe it will be useful one day), I really wonder about the wisdom of degrading users' working setups in this way for such a long time. Certainly there can be no recruitment of new KDE users under such conditions ("huh? the mouse doesn't even work, I'm returning to gnome") and I'm sure many once happy users simply moved to other DEs. Very few users will accept interruption of their work, especially for a new feature that they don't even know they need.

Several other changes have also been very intrusive in the workflow, notably in kdepim there seems to be a rather tangled mass of compatibility bridges that never quite work and it feels like it's been that way forever. How many people can afford to put up with semi-functional addressbook, misfiring calendar etc? Google is sooo easy in comparison I really wonder about my masochistic streak.

Even simple things like printing a page of text can become an exercise in frustration (lines are lost, margins are wrong, etc).

I do think that in the rush to the semantic desktop (and more generally with kde4), sight was lost of the fact that current users need a working environment.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 15, 2011 4:25 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't even necessarily care about printing and other stuff -- but am I the only one who had a problem with randomly disappearing plasma widgets, flaky network-manager, desktop/widget setup not being saved across sessions, etc?

I really liked kwin compared to the alternatives -- but that's about it. Some kde apps (eg okular) were nicer than the gnome equivalents -- but also buggier, so I don't miss them.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 15, 2011 8:09 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (1 responses)

In an earlier comment you basically said you stopped using KDE at 4.5. FWIW, I can say with confidence since 4.5 I have not experienced any of the problems you describe. That's not to say I haven't experienced issues, just not those ones.

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 15, 2011 9:22 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

I have to fully agree.
I stayed with KDE3 until KDE 4.5, then I switched.
Before it was too buggy for me, since 4.5 I love it.
I really mean it.

Alex

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 24, 2011 23:54 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

You realise you can use "KDE apps" like okular in Gnome and the other way round? I've gone back to fluxbox (I used KDE4.2 through 4.7 and strongly recommend it to normal people, but - for me - fluxbox is a better match) but I continue to use e.g. konsole.
As for the rest of your comment, find/make a bug report or go to slashdot

Nepomuk

Posted Dec 15, 2011 12:01 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Aaron, if you're reading this:

How would you rate the performance of Plasma Active compared to the 'standard' Plasma desktop? I ask because I use an Atom system as my main desktop machine, and though it's usable, Plasma is pretty sluggish. The more Plasma widgets, the worse it gets though; Amarok 2 for example, which uses Plasma widgets extensively, is completely unusable.

Is Plasma Active targeting more powerful machines than that, or have there been substantial performance improvements that would make it suitable for, say, a smartphone?

NB: I'm still using SC 4.4 since that's the version in Debian stable (and coincidentally also the first version of KDE4 which I found to be sufficiently bug-free for my daily use), so possibly you'll laugh and say 'Plasma's 25x faster than that by now'. Well I hope you will :P.

KDE Plasma Active Two released

Posted Dec 15, 2011 7:39 UTC (Thu) by timoph (subscriber, #71883) [Link]

I installed plasma active 2 to a exopc yesterday. I'd argue that it's currently the best open finger friendly UX out there. Unity and other alternatives are pretty much useless without a keyboard. When the webos code gets in the open it might offer some real competition to plasma active. Remains to be seen. In any case I like the direction where plasma active is going.