I’m not the most knowledgeable on this subject, but I’m curious to learn more.
Why do various toolkits have major releases that seem to reset the features of the last one?
GTK 3 seems like GTK 2 but slower to me, and before the transition was even complete GTK 4 showed up, which just seems like GTK 3 but a bit different. Qt 5 works really well and is efficient on resources, so why are we switching to Qt 6? It seems like reinventing the desktop over and over again.
I understand updates for the kernel for compatibility, small to medium updates to all software for bug fixes and new features, and major updates to toolkits when there are big problems with the current release (X vs Wayland for example). Or if the current release was unreliable and bloated, which I heard was what happened with Qt 4 and why they switched to 5. But I also heard Qt 3 was really stable and lightweight, so why did they switch away from it?
Usually there’s big new features that accomodate more modern hardware better. As an example, Qt6 revamps support for Wayland, HDR, and scaling. Even these things on their own don’t seem like much, but if you go back to KDE 5 in 10 years time you’ll definitely feel like something is plain/dated (or completely not working if you’re on new hardware)
Gtk 3->4 made a lot of internal changes, and at least some were related to making wayland work. Wayland “worked” in gtk3, however it was very much an afterthought, and half the toolkit was useless under wayland. Other changes are usually required for changes related to rendering, gtk4 had vulcan rendering which may require some breaking changes. Another thing is just general breaking changes that are good, sometimes you realise some decision was bad, and a new major release is just a way to make these.
From the end users perspective nothing much changes, it maybe looks a bit different, but not much besides that. But a vulcan renderer and being fully wayland compatible are major improvements that also improve the user experience, even if you don’t notice directly.
Usually the problem isn’t that the changes are big, but that the new way simply isn’t compatible with the old way to do things, and you can’t just make a change that will break existing applications in minor versions (well, there’s nothing technically stopping you, and unintentional compatibility breaking bugs have definitely happened in the past, but people are gonna get real mad at you if you do that). Even if you break that change up into thousand tiny changes over many minor versions, the end result is that at some point, you break old apps.
The solution is to take note of all the things that are either badly designed or became obsolete and once in a while go “hey, let’s make a new major version and fix all of this crap”. With a new major version, you don’t have to worry about old applications and are free to improve your library in any way you wish, and you also get the option to keep updating the old major version with some maintenance bugfixes so that the old apps keep working well enough.
Yes, everything will be a folder in plasma 6, including applications, don’t worry, you I’ll love the new Firefox folder. Its the natural progression of things, don’t try to stop it.
Look forward to Plasma 6 where everything will be an application. Downloads folder? That’s an application now. A font you just installed? Application. The video you just downloaded? You guessed it
Errrm, could they please leave some memory to other processes? KDE already takes about 1.5GB of VRAM on my RX7600 8GB just running a desktop (dual head 4k + 1440p displays). Yes, things can get swapped out to main memory, but that becomes choppy. I’d rather run single buffered, get the odd screen tear, and have the VRAM back for real work.
It says in the article that triple buffering only activates if your GPU struggles to render the desktop. That means old and weak iGPUs are getting this. For your desktop card nothing should change.
The folder “Notes” and the folder “Library” literally could be anything. There’s no way you show that to any user and they guess the name correct.
And this is the problem I have with all of the icons used in menu’s throughout KDE. I don’t know what the hell they are supposed to be! Even more so as the eyesight gets worse with age.
invent.kde.org
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