 Hello and welcome to my second video of the series. I'm going at war with Baby Vogue. This day we have these three videos, which is a Plasma 5.18 designed The Roots of Avel, which sounds interesting. We also have Gnomk Do That 2 and The Secret to Perfect Design featuring Plasma 5.20, which are all very interesting titles to say the least. So let's actually look into them. Number one The Roots of Avel Historically Plasma was a mess by design. Okay, okay, a mess by design, historically, beautiful. And I don't know why that was happening, but reading some discussions on fabricator the last year I developed a theory, because everything is a competition and don't even try to deny that. A competition? Sorry. I will include Gnome to the equation. So here's the weird thing. While Gnome has a much larger developer's community. A source? Plasma achieves more with less contributors. You've already guessed that's because KDE has better development tools. Do we? That's not even the half truth. Actually, a few times that I talked with Gnome developers about like development tools. The Gnome development tools seem to be pretty interesting, so I don't know what he's talking about. And as always, the anime characters don't get to each other is, let's say, cringy. The main reason that Plasma is faster development than Gnome, but at the same time design is a mess, is because Plasma is simply a more open project. Is it? That means for a designer even a new feature paths to landing Gnome. We have blood and tears in months of reviews. And lots of times designers decline huge work from developers. And Plasma the maintainers are way more accepting on patches. But that many times leads to not evidence-based design. I don't know about that. I mean, I haven't compared a review process of KDE Plasma and Gnome, but KDE Plasma Dress have a review process. And it happens very often, sadly, that people come by KDE and propose something. They do a merge request and everything. And after a lot of discussion, the maintainer just say, no, we can do this. And sadly, I mean, sometimes it has to happen because you can just accept everything that he's been proposed. So I don't know. And things getting into master without lots of debating and considerations. Oh, there is lots of debates. Don't worry about that. There is lots of debate. There was something that had made me a huge impression, but I can't find it right now. This is a nice preparation for the video. So I'm going to describe it to you. And forgive me if I don't remember super correctly. It was a discussion on Dolphin for adding a long press action on empty space. And that action would be customizable from Dolphin preferences. A really pro way to create inconsistencies with everything else. These long click would have anything like that currently, do we? No, we don't. I mean, there's touch, I guess. Not even that, because that's right click, what? Hatches were eventually refused. If Nautilus Maintainer had done the same, there wouldn't be any discussion at first place. Allende would have taken a shotgun, shoot him on the face, and everyone else would give him an alibi. But let me give you an example of something that arrived on master. Although it isn't something new. Here, Chrome is playing music, and we have this super tiny icon to turn sound on and off, that we can't even recognize unless we know already it is there. And it even remembers the last state if we close and reopen the app. I lost 10 minutes on this video trying to figure out what was wrong and resolved. Oh come on, that icon is so useful. I actually absolutely love the icon. Was it removed? There was the actual discussion to actually just remove it all together. I voted against, but maybe it was indeed moved. Mark applications that play audio. Look, come on, it's such a useful feature. You can just mute and unmute, just like from tabs. You see the playing audio icon? Fairlight wasn't out putting the audio. And don't think that it wasn't discussed. It was discussed a lot. There were discussions so long that I couldn't even follow them myself, so. So you're trying to minimize or whatever and happen you're actually closing the audio. And it is a million times worse than Firefox tabs. Oh, and by the way, Chrome was doing the same, but they dropped it. It was an obvious bad behavior. And instead they- Did they? Let me- I'm surprised to hear that they dropped. I thought it was- Hello? They do have an audio icon. I guess just- Yeah, looks like it's able to click it. Came with music control feature. So KDA people are introducing a feature that seems cool, but it is so poorly designed that ends up to be a problem. At least to me, because I bet Plasma users love such things. And I will come back to this in a bit. Of course, not everything is bad. Plasma is a worse desktop thing known, and that is an undoubted fact from the user base. Sorry, you've got a source for that. But it is also a more improved desktop thing known. At least the last year I followed the progress. And since- Yeah, I mean there has been so much going on in the last years that- I'm here. Check out these mockups for Dolphin. We're very close. Basically done. We only miss the fix for the outline view, and we are there also the highlight for the list, but that's kind of tough to implement, but almost there. Almost done. Which are clearly so inspired from Nautilus. And don't even pretend you didn't see that. But no matter how hard you'll try, it will never be- And don't even pretend you- These mockups for Dolphin. Which are clearly so inspired from Nautilus. They are not? No? And don't even pretend you didn't see that. But no matter how hard you'll try, it will never be as pretty as Nautilus because of the headerbars. Also true, the time to arrive to the original movie- I don't even know what to say about this honestly. The title. Why KDE community is so evil, and how they affect the design? It is very simple really. Contributors come out from the users, and so Plasma developers are more or less guys that do like what I think of as a design catastrophe. And since they like what they see, and therefore they're using it in their- You should see just how many extremely talented designers who are having KDE Plasma. Seriously, you should join the visual design group and just see how many extremely talented designers we have. And sometimes they do come as users, yes, but they're actually really good at doing designs. It's the fact that most of the code is actually done by developers, and sometimes developers aren't the best designers. And that's why we do mockups, and then developers try to stick to the mockups as much as possible. I think that the range of skills of design of developers varies a lot. There are some that are extremely good, some that I personally disagree with a lot. And to say that since the designers come from being users to designers, and they're really bad and do a catastrophe, it's completely out of place. You should see how many beautiful design we've got. And KDE Plasma is getting incredibly pretty over time. Like seriously. They're super happy with it. I assume it makes sense to leverage it rather to actually change it. Let me demonstrate to you what I mean. This is Tile Menu add-on, and it is one of the most popular things on KDE Store. It kind of tries to mimic Windows 10 menu, but if... I've used the Tile Menu a lot. It's very nicely done, and it's very customizable, so you can follow the design that you prefer. If Windows had a menu, it would be actually something even worse than their updates. Tile Menu score is 83 on Store, but on GitHub is only 25 stars, which I'd say is a more... What does that even mean? The stars on GitHub are less compared to the score that it gets on Plink. What argument is that? Representative rating. In any case, I don't want to review on Tile Menu. I just want to show you how it works, because when Plasma users, and therefore Plasma contributors too, are so addicted to such stuff, I won't... What? I've only seen a handful of people actually using the Tile Menu. Most people just use Kickoff, the default one. It won't be quite optimistic that lots of things can really, really get changed, and I will discuss that shortly in the end. Anyway, let's do some demos, because that video is mostly me talking rather showing. So, here is the simple menu I'm using, and I'm going to replace it with Tile Menu. First I'm going to see it's what you get. From the top right corner we can resize it, but that doesn't work to me in Plasma 5.18. But we can do something better. We can make it full screen. Yes. It's super customizable. Of course, out of the box it won't look super good, because you have to customize it to make it look good, and it doesn't fit very well with Breeze. In theory, you should use this with Windows 10-looking themes. There are plenty of them on the store, but it does look very good. You can customize it in a very nice way. You can change the colors of the backgrounds of the elements. You can do whatever you want. What's the point? And moreover, you should be a KDE criminal mind, because even the biggest gnome kingpin would never be doing such stuff. I mean, if you customize it wrong, then it's on you. But I saved, and I highlight that. I saved the best for last. Suppose after one million years you fixed your tiles perfectly, so you're closing your menu, and you just want to try a different add-on. So before it does this, let me tell you that the tile menu does have an entire page on its settings on how to backup your configuration. And you can also share it with other people. So if somebody else wants to have your exact look, you can just copy-paste a string and send it over. And if you want to change menu, port it to a new computer, you can copy-paste a string, and then, you know, you can copy it and then paste it on the other computer, and it will just work out of the box. When you switch from one applet to another, you're throwing away the old applet and taking the new one. Which means that if you switch away from the tile menu, you're throwing away the old tile menu applet, and you are going to use the configuration associated with it, unless you actually go into settings and copy the string to apply it later on. If you care so much about customization that you actually get the tile menu and spend hours customizing it, you will want to actually backup your configuration and copying that string is just one way. There's also stuff like Plasma Config Saver. There are various ways. You won't just change applet and lose the configuration like that. The next time you will use tile menu, everything will be lost. Yeah, but you should always, if you're switching away from an applet to that applet again, you should backup the settings of that applet. Everything and that issue affects all Plasma add-ons. So because you're throwing away the old applet, that's how it works. Plasma guys, stop making fun at shell extensions. At least all those save their settings on G settings. Having said all these things before, there are people in KDE that want to change stuff. There are passionate people that contribute a lot to improve the project. But if you're asking me, Plasma should be doing what GNOME 3 did. Completely drop Plasma and start working on a new desktop from scratch on the top of Kwin. I won't hurt with that. And keep your apps. That is the hardest part anyway. Actually, you know what? It's been 15 minutes of agony already. So let's end it here. Sorry about that. I'll do another video days from now. Let's try to recover. And no, seriously, follow my channel for more baby Evogue making fun of Evogue videos. And again, I don't feel guilty because half of the things that he says about KDE Plasma are just as completely wrong and out of the blue compared to what I could ever say about him. So see you soon with another video in a few days.