Plasma 5: first impressions

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2015-01-30 at 14:29 +0100, Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> On Friday, January 30, 2015 01:17:01 PM Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > I just installed Plasma 5 from the COPR repo. A fairly easy process (had
> > to remove a few packages but no big deal). A couple of issues at first
> > glance:
> > 
> > 1) My carefully-tuned KDE settings are all gone, e.g. Dolphin, Konsole,
> > virtual desktops, lockscreen behaviour etc. Can these be recovered
> > easily (I have backups)? Why does this happen anyway, especially to apps
> > which are independent of Plasma?
> 
> Dolphin and Konsole should still use their KDE 4 configuration, the only 
> change being the looks (i.e. using the Breeze widget theme instead of Oxygen).
> 
> Plasma 5 configuration (and all KDE Frameworks 5-based applications 
> configuration for that matter) are now stored in ~/.config. ~/.kde is no 
> longer used, so you can recover everything from there.

They certainly seem to be very well hidden. .kde has
share/apps/<app-name> but there's nothing similar under .config. Since
my test Konsole configuration is being preserved across logins it's
clearly being stored somewhere, it's just not obvious exactly where.

> > 2) Speaking of virtual desktops, I can no longer see how to configure
> > how they look in the panel. In the old system I had each one labelled
> > with a name, but that no longer appears except when I hover the cursor,
> > which slows down switching.
> 
> Right-click the pager applet in the panel, select "Configure Desktops" to name 
> your desktops, then right-click the applet again and select "Configure Pager", 
> and select the "Desktop name" Display option there. That will show the names 
> you set.

That worked, thanks.

> > Plasma is shiny and fast, so I'm generally positive so far, but these
> > details are going to annoy a lot of people.
> 
> The partially (or not at all) migrated settings is indeed annoying. However 
> upstream has realized they neglected this and will work towards improving this 
> in next updates. This will obviously not affect people who already upgraded, 
> but will make the initial experience better for users who update from KDE 4 to 
> Plasma 5.3 (or 5.4, who knows how long it will take them ;-).

Definitely a priority IMHO, or all hell will break loose. You don't want
the KDE4 wars all over again.

poc