How's KDE 5 coming?

I'm just curious about good KDE 5 is in its current state. I had to wipe the Linux partition off of my hard drive recently so now I'm going to install openSUSE Factory to a 16gb flash drive for development purposes. It bugs me that Cinnamon isn't an option during install so I was wanting to know what'd I'd get from switching over to KDE. Did kmag improve by chance? I can't stand the fact I had to use a separate monitor on KDE 4 for magnification. Thanks guys.

I installed KDE5 a few days ago but have since reverted back to GNOME. I'm liking the redirection in terms of UI design, they've made it less overwhelming by toning down the constant stream of questions regarding options. I'm running an Arch setup so all I managed to pull from the official repositories were Plasma Next, which is basically a base KDE5 setup. I didn't even get a terminal for KDE5, looks like there's still lots of work to be done when it comes to application porting. Other than that, I'm loving the new UI design.

 

I think I'm going to try it today. One slight issue I'm having is that after SUSE installs the firmware isn't loaded. My chip set is the BCM4313. AFAIK, the driver isn't open source. I've downloaded broadcom-wl and fwcutter but I'm not sure what I need to do after that.

One question: can I use compiz, but still get the effects of plasma?

I believe the Plasma effects are tied into KWin, but I haven't played around enough to figure it out. I mostly stuck to the default compositors (e.g Mutter, Metacity, Kwin).

Update: Plasma is awesome. You can customize so much... Unlike gnome and cinnamon. I've been using it for a month, and it's the best.

Joke's on you. Cinnamon is a customized GNOME Shell and everything can be scripted with JS and designed with CSS.

I was talking about in the GUI. I shouldn't have to go through fifty configuration files to change the look of a GUI. Provided the time, maybe, but I don't have it.

Not if you want to change the entire color scheme.

I'm not saying you couldn't. I used Cinnamon forever before circa a month ago. Both are great, but I find it easier to tweak to tweak KDE. That's all really.

Yeah, I largely agree.

Plus, plasma 5.2 is just awesome. I will be honest, I have always outright hated KDE. It looks like crap out of the box, and making it look pretty is a pain.

I liked using cinnamon for a more windows-ish feel, and then gnome 3 for a more OSXish feel, but plasma 5.2 can really mimic both systems very easily and even the stock configuration is pretty damn beautiful in its own right.

After changing the animation speed to instant and enabling full screen repaints, the system is stupid fast and butter smooth.

I had lots of issues with window decorations

i'm running frameworks 5.7 in arch on my test rig that pulls from testing and community-testing and it is stable and usable, but it is still a bit terse. it is easily configured, but that's me. not a lot of desktop widgets as of yet and i'm not one to compile them and when i tried to compile the latest dolphin from git, i quickly found i was a bit lost or running in circles. not like putting cde together. however, the version of dolphin that is available works fine. if you want to change themes, colors, and decorations they are mixed in with old ones and some will not work. like my favorite color theme is stone orchid and it did not work last time i tried it. I don't use kmag, but it's listed as a pre-release version 14.12.2 and 14.12.3.

on my main system, i'm still using the default 4.14.x, while under the hood packages are being installed. some are configuring pacman to keep their installs as 4.14 pure as possible. I have had no issues with the new versions of kate, konsole or gwenview.

I can't get the magnifier working in plasma 5.2. I hope its fixed in 5.3, and SDDM won't enable. I will just wait for SUSE 13.3 I guess. Right now I'm rocking nodded KDE 4.12.

i know this thread is almost a week old, but i installed the kde-unstable kdeaccessibility-kmag-15.03.90-1 package and it seems to work. it follows the cursor and uuhh zooms in on the desktop. as soon as frameworks 5.8 hits stable in arch repos i'll probably try a jump. my color profile 'stone orchid' a solaris color theme for the unix masochist has been ported and works... nice!