 Okay, so throughout the years, one of my main efforts has been making sure that catapult plasma panels are as powerful as can reasonably be. I've implemented floating panels, but also adaptive transparency, margin areas and lots of other features. However, it's not surprising that other desktops have taken different approaches and it's really useful to give a look at what they are doing and sometimes say, hey, they beat us. What happens? Spoiler alert, plasma panels in this video will be completely destroyed by Cosmic and XFC. I really want to make this comparison firstly with Cosmic panels, even though currently Cosmic hasn't been released yet. However, there's a blog post by System76 that explains how they're going to work in super details and some things are genuinely better than what we currently have in Plasma hands down. You want an example? You can stack multiple panels on top of each other. Plasma can't do that. If you're out of the loop on Cosmic, by the way, it means that you don't know about the newsletter. In fact, this video is sponsored by the TechEd newsletter. I'm actually the primary writer for this newsletter, so if you like my content, you're going to like it. We come out with one weekly covering the latest in Linux open source and tech news. First in our last publication, we covered all about these new Cosmic panels, but also Thunderbird goodness and more. You can subscribe with your email for free or if you're not into that, you can also use the RSS feed or just bookmarktechEd.tv and see all the latest news, but also guides and articles. Make sure that you check out the first link down below in the video description and subscribe. It is worth it and there is absolutely no conflict of interest in me saying that. Anyway, the other system I want to compare is XFC, mostly because I've tried their panels recently and I've realized that they actually beat plasma panels in many areas. As an example, as we'll see, they're able to freely float on your screen something that plasma panels can't quite do. Can they? Well, we'll get to it. Position Let's start off by talking about positioning of the panels. PD Plasma panels can simply be drag and dropped on any side of the screen and just like that, they are already more powerful than Windows 11 panels. And you can also drag and drop them between screens. If the panel does not feel the full width or height of the screen, you can also move them around whilst keeping them attached to the screen border. On Cosmic, on the other hand, you don't drag and drop things around. You can however open up the panel settings, which live inside system settings, and you can change the screen side in just a combo box. Just underneath that, you can also have the option to choose which display to show the panel in. And this is the important part. You can choose to display the panel on all displays, meaning that the panel will be in multiple places at the same time. This is not something that's offered by Plasma panels, and it's actually a quite requested feature. Most importantly, when you set multiple panels to have the same screen side of the same monitor, you will end up having them stacked one on top of each other, which looks really great and is probably what the user would like to see. Instead, in the Plasma world, having panels on the same screen side will simply draw them one on top of the other, which is just going to look like a glitch. Let's make wins this one like hands down. So let's switch to XFCE. Ok, they have this dialogue to quickly customize the panel without having to open up settings. However, as I mentioned in my other XFCE video, I found the dialogue to be really messy and hard to understand. You can switch the panel between horizontal and vertical, kind of, there are two different kinds of vertical, to make it switch between screen sides. But the cool stuff begins when you untick the tick by default lock panel option. This allows you to drag and drop the panel anywhere on the screen, even if it's not at the screen sides. You can position it anywhere in any orientation and move it around as a normal window instead of having it always fixed in the same place. Most importantly, you can create multiple panels and place them one on top of each other to replicate the cosmic setup. Multiple panels cannot do that. Kind of. So this is actually pretty funny. All the necessary code to make panels float around is there already and we do use it for when you drag and drop a panel. However, we don't really allow any customization where the panel isn't attached to the screen side. So yeah, we do not offer that. And yet again, I feel like XFCE easily wins this one. So let's switch to size. So the thickness of the panels can be customized in all of the systems. And it's kind of the same. But what we are really interested in is the width or height of the panel and how it change. In fact, when it comes down to size, Kali Plasma has it big. Kali Plasma allows you to customize not only the size of the panel, but you can also set the minimum and maximum panel sizes. The panel will then resize to be within those values. Depending on the size of the widgets within it, which I think is pretty cool. However, there's a pretty big issue with this approach. I see so many people not understanding how this is done at all. And to be completely honest, every time I have to drag and drop the panel size handles, I always pick the wrong ones. Always. So let's look at Cosmic. You cannot set a custom size for the panel. You can just set the thickness. However, what you can do is tackle the option called expand panels to the screen edges. If it's on, the panel will always fill the available width or height. If it's off, it will just have the same size as the applets within it. This is something you can do in Plasma. You just have to change the alignment to center and then drag and drop the correct size handles to be as small as possible, whilst keeping the other ones still. However, Cosmic option covers the use cases of the vast majority of people and it's so much easier. I've seen Plasma people without a clue that this way of doing things was even possible. Again, I think Cosmic approach is straight up better compared to ours. So hear me out. I've decided to change our approach. I will hide the weird ruler by default and simply have an option called like panel type with three options, full width, which is going to maximize the panel, dock, which is going to fit the size of the applets inside of it and custom, which will make the rulers appear. This way, it's still super powerful for everyone, but it's much simpler to handle by default. By the way, all of my development work is not paid by KDE, but it's actually only thanks to all of these amazing people around me that sponsor my work. So if you really want to see Plasma panels improve and you haven't yet, feel free to throw some spur change at my people, Patreon or LibraPay or Kofi. Do you want to hear another sizing issue where Cosmic straight up beats Plasma? Okay, so let's say that you have a vertically maximized panel on the left screen side and a horizontally maximized one on the top of the screen. So question, what's going to happen in the top left part of the screen? In KDE Plasma, the panels simply overlap and you will see only the last one that you clicked, which feels like a glitch and it is really on the other hand, a lot of thoughts was put into this during the design stage at Cosmic and there's actually two rules for corner priority. The panel will always take priority on the dock unless it's floating, as the non-floating panel always has priority on the floating one. But at least they won't overlap. Another point for Cosmic. So let's switch to XFC sizes. So finally Plasma holds up here, since you simply have a slider that customizes the width or height of the panel. They however do have a setting called automatically increase the length, which addresses the issue of fitting to the size of the outlets. But if you really want to go with this approach, I'd actually prefer the idea of having a minimum and a maximum size and not so clear to understand the checkbox. Note, however, that you do have rows in XFC panels, which is something that initially I wanted to implement in Plasma panels too, but then we decided not to. It's an interesting feature that basically allows to do what Cosmic is doing with double panels but just using one. For this reason, I'm still going to give XFC a full point here. Eye candy. So let's talk eye candy and let's immediately start off with opacity. One loves a good transparent panel, right? Well, not quite, but in KT Plasma the user can change the opacity of the panel, either by changing the Plasma theme or by switching between the opaque and transparent options. However, that's kind of it. If you're using as an example a third-party theme that does not support adaptive transparency and you do not want to edit theme files, you just cannot change the opacity. This is actually for technical reasons, by the way. On the other hand, Cosmic gives you a full slider that goes from completely opaque to transparent and you can fine-tune it to be your liking. And this would be another easy win for the desktop, but thankfully Plasma has a very neat feature that Cosmic hasn't, adaptive opacity. KT Plasma panels can change their transparency depending on whether a window is touching them or not. Personally, I believe this setting is actually extremely important, as I do want my panel to be transparent if I have some floating window, since the panel will blend in with a background nicely. But if I have a maximized window instead, there is no background to blend with, so it doesn't really make sense for them to be floating in the first place, in my opinion. The same exact thing applies to floatingness. Both KT Plasma panels and Cosmic panels support floating panels, and they call them having gaps between panels and a screen border, fair enough. However, Plasma panels are adaptively floating, meaning that, again, they will defloat whenever a window touches them. So I think that in terms of ICANN, the Plasma is actually at least competitive, especially if you consider that you can completely customize the colors and look of the panels too. It's a very similar story with XFC, so let's start with opacity. Yet again, they have a very nice feature that's simply impossible to understand without reading the documentation. Basically, you can set different opacities for live and for enter. Now I will give you 5 whole seconds to think and try to guess what these two different values do. Go on, editor, insert 5 seconds of silence here. Okay, here's the solution. Hover is the panel opacity when you're hovering the panel with a mouse, whereas live is the opacity when you're not hovering the panel with a mouse. Now, come on, how many of you actually guessed correctly? Like, it makes no sense. Regardless of the name, though, it's a super, super neat feature, and I'm now envious of it. Again, I wouldn't call this a full win for XFC because I also really like adaptive transparency, but still, it holds up real good. XFC also has hints of customizing the look of the panel too. You can choose any background color and you can even use a background image. Nothing that you cannot do with plasma themes, but it's nicely exposed for once. To be honest, the option being called style none feels like a self-burn if anything, but whatever. As far as floating panels go for XFC, well, you can manually make them floating using the feature that I've showcased earlier, though you still have nothing like adaptive floatingness. Still pretty cool, if you ask me. So, uploads. I haven't talked much about uploads or items, that is, the little components that you can add to the panels and move around. This is mostly because all three desktops support them, and I haven't seen significant differences. However, I want to highlight one last thing that I'm not completely sure about. Caddy plasma panels have a bit of an issue. All uploads, even third-party ones, live in the same process as plasma. This means that if any third-party plasmoid crashes, the entire plasma desktop is going down. Personally, I don't see this as much of an issue since it's extremely rare for an upload to actually crash, but it's something to keep in mind if you're trying out third-party uploads. On the other hand, according to the System76 blog post, we have that cosmic uploads do live in different processes, meaning that you'll have one process for each upload. I'm not sure if this is only for the third-party ones, or if it's one for each upload, actually. This might have possibly a certain impact on performance as well, but it's probably negligible, and it does come with added stability for the shell itself. So yes, this is another free fall point for cosmic. So to wrap this up, yes, I haven't really talked much about some nice things that plasma panels do, however, I did talk about all the most important things that people will reasonably look for in panels. And even though I haven't kept count of the points, maybe the editor did? Yes, I did. It's pretty easy to see that plasma hasn't really clearly won any comparison with either XFC nor cosmic. I still think that plasma panels are extremely powerful and really good to use, but I cannot deny either that both the cosmic and XFC projects have done great things, and we do have a lot to learn from them. And again, if you'd like me to improve plasma panels, given what I've seen other desktops do, I'd really appreciate it if you threw you through through my donation, a donation at me, and I will do my best. So thanks, everybody, for following. I hope that you still like plasma panels, even though there are clearly lacking in many areas and long life Latino. See ya.