April 2018 Presentation ideas

[cod3poet]

Jason changed the topic "After doing some research on PureOS, I discovered there really isn't much to it."  so rather than something paper thin I am glad to see some KDE love. I much prefer QT To GTK+

[Jason]

That's exactly right. Remember we talked about this a couple of weeks ago at Timmy's, Fox? If Bill isn't able to make it and you want to discuss Tumbleweed, there will be lots of time, I expect.

[fox]

I remember that you were experimenting with KDE, but not that you had proposed switching topics. At any rate, I'm happy to hear about KDE from you because it's a desktop I haven't played with all that much and I'm interested to see what you have learned. If I do end up demoing openSUSE Tumbleweed, I'll talk more about the distro than the desktop I tested it with (other than showing how one can customize KDE to look like gnome/Unity). As you know, I'm hooked on a vertical bar on the left side of the display in whatever desktop I use.

[fox]

.... I much prefer QT To GTK+

I don't really understand the difference, other than that KDE (and lxqt) use QT and gnome and Unity use GTK+. Maybe Jason can talk a bit about how these are used in desktops and the difference between them in his presentation? If not, maybe you can cover that in a future presentation?

[buster]

Looking forward to the KDE desktop discussion. I installed OpenSuse with Gnome and later with KDE. Night and day. To me KDE is far easier and complete. And Suse KDE ran much faster. Could just be Suse's implementation. Like to hear about the experience of others.

[fox]

In my case, I didn't try the gnome version of openSUSE (Tumbleweed). I purposely picked the KDE version because gnome is what I typically use. I have installed non-rolling release versions of openSUSE before, including KDE at least once, but never made an explicit comparison between KDE and gnome versions. However, I do have  Ubuntu 17.10 installed on one of my computers with the KDE desktop added. In that one I have switched back and forth between Unity, gnome and KDE, and I haven't noticed any major differences in speed between them. What I did notice, however, is that the KDE version of network access often loses my wireless connection after waking from sleep and it can only be fixed with a reboot. Also, KDE does annoying things to gnome or Unity, asking for KDE wallet passwords when I'm not even running KDE. While I like the greater flexibility of KDE, I haven't found it all that intuitive or easy to use, and it doesn't have any obvious advantages over gnome or Unity for me. But I'm coming from the Mac world, and default KDE is set up more like Windows xp or 7, whereas gnome shell and Unity are set up more like OS X.

[Jason]

AFAIK, Qt and GTK+ are just the framework libraries that the appropriate apps are based including the default look of widgets, background libraries needed for talking to each other and the OS and peripherals and so on. I think other than the default look, you'd have to be an application developer to understand the difference. Probably anything you'd find about them would be terribly biased unless they're a develop that uses both and can really objectively talk about how certain things are better in one than in the other.

I also understand that GTK+ was written in C and qt in C++, though I learned this in the past and may be out-of-date info. Performance-wise, the C might edge out in performance and certainly smaller code but C++ would be easier to write in (unless you hate OOP languages). GTK was around before Gnome, as well, it was the toolkit used to create GIMP long before both Gnome and KDE. Not sure about GTK+.

[buster]

Mike wrote: "KDE does annoying things to gnome or Unity, asking for KDE wallet passwords when I'm not even running KDE."

In my experience, installing multiple desktops on one install often leads to bizarre experiences. When the desktop wishes to do something, the whole family chimes in with suggestions about how to cook the meal. Clean Gnome or KDE seems better. 'Many cooks spoil the meal'. At least that's what my father said when he left the kitchen and turned on the football game. (Never got my mother's opinion.)

[fox]

So far, this has only been my experience with KDE. I have installed Budgie and Openbox in other Ubuntu installations and up until now, I've always installed gnome on top of Unity. None of these combinations have ever caused me a problem. But the reason could be that Unity, gnome and Budgie all use gnome-shell, or at least elements of gnome in the case of Budgie, and Openbox is a window manager, not a full desktop environment.

[buster]

If we continue with the KDE theme in June, someone might like to do a demo of Neptune 5.0, which gets a fair but not super review on Distrowatch. Primarily this distro uses KDE.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20180416#neptune

[Jason]

Thanks for the suggestion, Buster. I would certainly like to do KDE Plasma 5 in May. And I hadn't heard of this distro before. I'll look into it.