[arch-general] [OT?] Which is most future-proof desktop environment?

[Moritz Bunkus]

Hey,

> Just answering this (I agree on the whole point being made) : this was
> an issue for me too, but it has been fixed for a long time now. Just
> do a right click on it, go to settings, and it should be the second
> checkbox right below “Show date” (or something like that). ;)

Ah, that's good to know, thanks. I have to admit that I haven't checked
the widget's settings since back in the day when I first encountered it
and found a corresponding bug in bugs.kde.org.

One more issue I'd like to point out as extremely annoying during the
transition phase: kwallet, KDE's password management facility.

There's a wallet subsystem provided to all applications that need to
store and access secret information in a safe way. Additionally there's
a management tool, kwalletmanager, which the user can use to look up the
stored settings and adjust changed passwords.

KDE's developers decided to create kwallet5, a subsystem that is only
available to apps already using KF5 libraries. This kwallet5 system
converts the existing kwallet4 library to a kwallet5 library on first
start. So far, so good.

However, all existing apps that still use kwallet4 (at that point most
of the old KDE applications like the whole of KDEPIM, nowadays still
Chromium for example) where still using the old wallet database.

This is fine as long as they don't diverge – which they do quickly, of
course. So a new KF5 app would be using an updated password while
e.g. kmail was still using the old one and vice versa. Do make matters
worse kwalletmanager, the user's only tool to actually inspect and edit
those passwords, hadn't been ported to KF5/kwallet5 yet. Therefore you
couldn't really fix such issues either.

On top of all of that Arch only ever provided one version of
kwalletmanager.

So now I've been running two separate wallet systems for a couple of
months, and at each point in time I've only ever been able to manually
inspect/change/fix one of them.

One of the reasons I'm incredibly glad that KDE4 is phased out in
Arch.

Anyway, I've always been and will most likely stay a hard-core
KDE/Plasma user (even though I've taken a serious look at LxQt, xfce
lately). But I understand every other user who's frustrated and switches
away.

That being said: I'm also a developer. I know that library transitions
require an immense amount of work, and I also understand that a lot of
issues in Plasma 5 weren't actually due to KDE but to Qt (I think one of
my aforementioned Alt+Space issues was one of those, as are several
multi-monitor issues that are still around). I highly appreciate all the
work the KDE/Plasma/Qt developers are doing. The same applies to Arch's
KDE maintainer(s) – thanks to you, too.

Kind regards,
mosu
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