 My opinion on KDE Plasma has soured a bit over the last two years originally when I first switched to Linux I was a KDE fanboy. I loved that thing and if you've watched my channel, you know why I am a Big proponent of being able to customize my desktop. I want to be able to do everything I want to be able to have an option to change literally everything and if that could be bottled into something It would be bottled into KDE Plasma because you can change Everything in Plasma. It's just the way it is and I think that the idea behind that is wonderful as someone who enjoys Customizing the crap out of everything Plasma is the dream right problem is is that the dream falls a little short Quite a bit and over the course of the last two years I've I have more interest in stability now Then I did when I first started using Linux back when I first started using Linux I was a distro hopper. I changed distros every two weeks if not, you know more often than that I switched back and forth between different desktop environments and eventually back in you know between window managers and stuff So stability was not important to me back then I wanted the shiniest features that you could offer me and then I would be happy and even then I'd only be happy for so often and then I'd go find something else You know, that's just kind of the way I was but now that I've you know kind of grown out of that I want my system to be as stable as possible Now KDE can be stable I had a fantastic experience on Redcore when I first switched for the six-month Linux challenge with KDE 5.26 and Then I had to I had to not as an I was forced but I in my mind I really wanted 5.27 because it supposedly had better multi-monitor support And I was having some multi-monitor problems and that's where when it went all went downhill, right? And you guys have heard me complain about KDE's buggy-ness and all this stuff before so what I wanted to do today though Is not talk about the buggy-ness so much but instead talk about five things that I think KDE Plasma could do better I forced myself to not include stability in this at all because I've kind of beaten that horse to death already I've talked about how I really hope wish that they would you know take a pause and Stop adding new features and try to fix as many of the bugs as possible But I don't need to talk about that anymore. Everybody knows my thoughts on that But instead I want to talk about actual on-the-ground features that I think that KDE Plasma could do better Not only for version 6 but beyond so first one is something that I've talked about before But I don't talk about enough and I think that this is something that a lot of people will agree on me on Is that because KDE has a ton of different, you know settings like they've crammed Thousands of settings into a settings panel They need to make that settings panel easier to navigate for not only new users, but for everyone now I will give them credit They have made it a lot easier to search for things with the search menu that is in the settings panel You don't you have to be very specific Just you know if you search for cursors the cursors is going to come up if you search for you know Display or monitors or whatever, you know the display settings will come up So they have gotten better But that needs to continue to evolve and become even easier over the course of the next few iterations of the settings panel because No matter how long they spend trying to perfect this thing I'm still gonna want it to be a little bit better just because there are so many settings in there It's never going to be easy enough for me. I know that that is it's an impossible bar to set So I'll freely admit that because no matter how much you improve if I can continue to move the goalposts You know, that's not fair. So I want to be honest and just say They've gotten better But it needs to continue to improve because there are just so many settings and they continue the thing is if If Katie was done, right? If let's just say they said that's it no more features Like ever right then they can they continue to make that easier and then the goalposts wouldn't change But that's not what they're doing instead They're gonna continue to add settings and features and all the stuff Over the course of the next versions and versions after that and whatever that settings panel is gonna continue to get more and more crowded And as you add more stuff to something the closer it gets to toppling over and not being functional at all So they need to really keep that in mind as they continue to develop that always put discoverability and navigation of the settings panel first and foremost out of anything I think that that is one of the most important things the second one that I want to talk about and I don't understand this Honestly K-Runner is one of the best features of Katie plasma. I've made a video about K-Runner It is awesome like everyone goes on if you're a Mac user people talk about how wonderful spotlight is like this Apple search functionality that you can get to via keybinding K-Runner is that for Linux It is wonderful and it is built in to Katie plasma But the number of people I've talked to who don't use K-Runner or have installed something like uLauncher or Rofi or something because they're looking for a way to launch programs and Documents and all this stuff in another way either they've never Used K-Runner or they've never heard of K-Runner or they don't know how to access K-Runner Or they don't know how to to change the settings of K-Runner to make it useful for them Katie plasma needs to make K-Runner not better because it's still it's already fantastic What they need to do is make it front and center make it discoverable now It's possible that in the new Katie welcome page that was released with the last version Maybe that's in there. I haven't actually been able to see that yet So it's possible it's in there But K-Runner needs to be something that is front and center in front of people so that they know how to use it and Access it easily because it is so good. It is such a It's a travesty that more people don't use it It's just fantastic and it's not even like out of the box It's like really really good but because it's KDE has a ton of settings and Extensions and plugins or whatever that you can add to it so that you can make it even more powerful and that's just I mean It's so good But not many people use it unless you're like a die-hard KDE fan You may not even know that it exists and that's something that they definitely need to do better The third one is discover now. I've given discover a lot of crap over the years discover used to be God awful It was slow the app pages were not good Like they didn't they had places for screenshots, but there were no screenshots half of them didn't have descriptions It was I mentioned that it was slow But it was like really really really slow that being said he needs to get better still I'm moving the goalposts again, and I can just hear the KDE devs like man. We can never make this guy happy I understand it's it's because I want KDE has Out of all the desktop environments KDE plasma has the most potential to be awesome Because of all the features and all the settings and all all the effort that they put into it but not only that but KDE unlike GNOME has a community surrounding it, right? And yeah, there's a GNOME community, but they're very Tightly knit and don't welcome new users easily where it's a plasma guys You know they're like come on in you know More the more the merrier and that's why I love KDE so much not you know, they have a community and They want input and they're very very transparent over what they're doing and what bugs they fix and what features They're adding and everything right and it's just has so much potential as a desktop environment That's the reason why I continue to want to be better, right? So I'm Criticizing with love that let's just put it that way so back to discover I want it to be just a little bit better just just a little bit better and By that vague sentence what I mean just is make it so that it is easier to discover things inside of discover the search functionality that is there now is Not as good as it could be it from my experience It doesn't always pick up the things that you're searching for now It could just be that I'm really bad at searching for things But it just feels like it's not as good at searching as it should be now That's just one thing about it But the other thing is is kind of similar to the last one we talked about is that did you know that if you go in to Discover you can find a lot of the KDE stuff there and by KDE stuff. I mean themes I mean widgets and stuff like that Different cursors and all that stuff The vast majority of the stuff that you can get in certain corners of KDE so like for example if you went to the settings panel then appearance and then Global themes or whatever it is and click click and then you click the button get more global themes All that stuff that you'd get in that panel there is usually in discover as well now Where are you which way of getting that stuff is better? I can't argue You know, I always use the separate one, but discover has all that stuff, too I wish that they made that more apparent promoted it just a little bit, you know Because it's really cool that you can go into discover and say had really like a new clock widget Show me all your clock widgets and it shows you the clock widgets, you know, that's really cool You don't have to go add widgets on the on the desktop and then add new widgets and whatever it is You know, there's multiple different steps in order to get to that You can just open discover and find that stuff there, which is really nice. I wish they made that more apparent Okay, so the the next one the fourth one is going to piss a lot of Katie you guys off I have a feeling and the reason I didn't always believe this But I think that Katie should become less windows like now for the longest time. I actually preached the opposite I preached that Katie was good because it was like windows and therefore it made it made it fantastic For new Linux users who are coming from Windows and there's still part of me that believes that But I was watching a youtuber today and I apologize. I don't remember his name but he was talking about why Genome was so good and The reason one of the reasons why he gave the that argument was because it was so unlike windows It forced people to think outside of the windows paradigm because when they see a windows like experience They expected to work like windows and Katie doesn't work like windows even though it looks like windows out of the box It makes it harder for people to think that they're using something different when it looks so much the same now I think that in some cases this argument is not giving the users a lot of credit Like I think that if you've managed to download a distro First you manage to choose a distro download a distro burn it on to a USB Manage to figure out how to get into the boot menu of your particular machine install Linux properly Get it set up to the point where you've chosen you've chosen everything you need to choose you got your applications You know chances are you probably are smart enough to know that you're not using windows But there's still going to be some intuitiveness there Where people are gonna think that because it looks like windows it should act like windows and that's usually not the case So I would like to see plasma to be a little bit less like windows just out of the box Maybe use your floating panel so that it looks a little bit different I mean it doesn't have to be completely different just a little bit different So people don't go into it thinking that yeah because this looks like windows it should act like windows when it really doesn't That's just going to lead to disappointment. So probably not ever going to happen. They've kind of kept the same paradigm forever But it would be nice to see them change it up a little bit because I think it would I hate to be the kind of guy It says Katie you should be more like genome. I'm not saying that Don't don't be don't don't go full don't go full. Good. Oh, you know, it's just not it's not that's not what I'm saying Just be a little bit have the default look a little bit different And I think that it would lead people to explore a little bit more like because for example You guys have floating panels. They're not I just mentioned them if you had floating panels on by default You had your bottom panel floating by default people would know that thing exists a lot of people probably You know brand new users until they get the urge to start experimenting Probably aren't going to discover that floating panels are a thing because they're buried off into a corner somewhere, right? So by having them enabled, you know, you show off that one feature and you add on to the benefit of you know, not Emulating windows so much that people think that it actually is windows Now the last one is not going to be for everyone, but I'm a keyboard centric kind of guy I'm a tiling window manager guy, you know, I prefer to use the keyboard as much as possible shortcuts in Katie Plasma Could be easier to find and they do have a section in the top-level menu of the settings panel called shortcuts but once you get into there you get into the weeds and that's because the Shortcuts are all over the place like for example close window is in at least three different places and Which one you change? How are you supposed to know does it if you change it in one spot? Does it change it in all three? I don't know I haven't actually check went to check but I'm assuming that it changes at all in all all three places And that's not the only one a lot of the K-1 stuff is in multiple different places a lot of the application Things are in a lot of different plate in multiple different places because they have these the shortcuts in several different places you you don't know which one to change and Finding them in the first place can be a little bit difficult because you get in I mean Calling K-1 K-1 for new users is a little bit confusing if you're a brand new user to Plasma Maybe not even to Linux, but just a plasma You have to know what K-1 is in order to know that a lot of the shortcuts that you probably want in order to manipulate Where your windows are, you know how to close windows how to move them around all that stuff is under the K-1's Category, but if you don't know K-1 is how are you supposed to know that's where they're supposed to stuff Where the stuff is that you're looking for right? So streamlining the shortcuts so they're better organized not in multiple places and are better described I think is super important Now like I said, it's not super important for everyone because the vast majority of people are mouse centric users But for people who are keyboard centric users the shortcuts panel is a mess and it definitely needs to be cleaned up a little bit So those are the five things that I think Katie could do better I could probably come with five more if I thought about it from for a half a minute and I would I don't want this to come across as I'm criticizing Katie because I'm really not I think Katie is fantastic I do think it has some stability problems But most of those are just down to me and my hardware a lot of people don't have the problems that I have with Katie So I I'm done telling Katie to stop being buggy because chances are it's just me or My hardware or something that doesn't like Katie So all that stuff is more of a me problem that it is a Katie plasma problem Yes, they have some stability problems, but they're not as bad as I make them out to be often times So I don't want to come across as I'm saying Katie is bad because I think Katie is excellent I think between Katie Katie and GNOME Katie is by far the better desktop environment bar none I don't think that it is even arguable for the vast majority of people now That's gonna piss the GNOME guys off, but you know, I think Katie is fantastic I think that more distributions should use Katie as their default desktop environment though I don't think that it's ever going to happen But that doesn't mean that it can't improve and that's really what this all this video was about I just wanted to you know You criticize the things that you love and that's what I'm doing today So that's it for this video if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on master downer odyssey those links to be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast links for libera pay and YouTube will be in the video Description if you'd like to support me on those platforms instead Thanks for everybody who supports me on patreon and YouTube because they're all absolutely amazing without two of the channels There should not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much. I truly do appreciate it guys are all awesome. I Think that's I You ever had one of those things where you just completely forget what you're gonna say It's like I do this every single day I've done it three times a day and I've completely forgotten I guess the end of the video How do you forget anyways? Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time Why do I always mess up the end of the video? like It's nuts. Thank you. I'll see you next time