Which applications does the Plasma team recommend to use with Plasma?

[Martin Graesslin]

On Monday, July 4, 2016 11:06:05 PM CEST Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 4, 2016 at 6:37 PM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> > Am 2016-07-04 14:43, schrieb Thomas Pfeiffer:
> >> Hi everyone,
> >> every now and then, distributions approach us asking which
> >> applications they should ship by default with Plasma, or they complain
> >> about us not providing such information.
> >> Although the Plasma team of course does not have to provide such
> >> information, it may still be helpful also for us because we can try to
> >> make sure that these applications work well in Plasma.
> >> Choosing such applications is not an easy task, but to get things
> >> started, a group of people who were stranded in Bielefeld waiting for
> >> their trains after a meeting sat together to come up with an initial
> >> suggestion. Here is the result:
> >> 
> >> File manager: Dolphin
> >> Music player: Cantata
> > 
> > I think Cantata is unsuited as it requires an mpd running. Given that it's
> > out of scope for simple usage.
> > 
> >> Video player: VLC
> >> Document viewer: Okular
> > 
> > Here we need to be careful given that there is no release based on Qt 5
> > (note that some distros ship with it but master has a terrible and
> > annoying
> > warning in your face dialog about that) and Qt 4 is EOL. Given that
> > viewing
> > pdfs is something which has been exploited in the past and is network
> > attackable in worst case, I think it's not a good choice. As long as there
> > is no Qt5-maintained release I would say it needs to be evince or none.
> 
> That's absurd, if anything we can say it's none and set it as a
> priority to have Okular ported.

Why is that absurd? Currently KDE does not have a pdf viewer which is 
suitable. There is a Qt 4 version - that's no-no, and there's a Qt 5 version 
with a big fat in your face warning - that's no-no-no-no.

evince does a good job and I'm using it regularly.

> 
> >> Software center: Discover
> >> Communication: Konversation, KDE Telepathy (cautiously, because while
> >> it works well at the moment, it is also looking for a maintainer)
> >> Password storage: KWalletmanager, kwallet-pam
> > 
> > While KWalletmanager gives a good integration in some KDE applications
> > it's
> > nothing I would recommend as a wallet manager. It is not well integrated
> > into Plasma, it is not secure, it has a terrible first run experience with
> > recommending to use a GPG key and then telling you that you don't have one
> > and does not have any concept of synchronization. In the area of password
> > storage there are way better solutions available in the FLOSS world
> > 
> >> Hardware support: Skanlite, Print manager
> >> Utilities/system tools: KCalc, KDE Connect, Konsole, KSysguard, Kate,
> >> Kamoso (if a distro wants to ship a webcam app at all)
> >> Office suite: We do not recommend one at the moment
> >> Pim suite: We do not recommend one at the moment.
> >> Browser: We do not recommend one at the moment
> > 
> > for browser I would turn the recommendation the other way: let's
> > explicitly
> > recommend to not use any of the Qt browsers.
> 
> That's just negative speech, not something we want to be responsible
> for. I'm sure KDE could have a good web browser.

KDE might be able to have a good web browser. Currently we don't. If we 
explicitly recommend software we need to be honest first of all with ourselves. 
Just because there is a tool which does job foo, doesn't mean it's a good 
tool. 

> 
> >> If an applicaiton does not show up in this list, this does of course
> >> not mean we don't like the application or the team behind it, it just
> >> means that we _currently_ don't feel confident to recommend it to
> >> users.
> >> 
> >> This is our initial proposal, now we'd like to get the input from the
> >> rest of the Plasma team!
> > 
> > Thanks for starting that thread, very important
> 
> Let's remember that communicating is important.
> Team building is important.
> Community building is important.

Being honest to ourselves is important. Yes I see that a "this software is not 
good enough" can be discouraging for the developers and work against community 
building. But having good recommendations which we can actually recommend to 
our users is more important. We shouldn't be afraid of saying that a software 
is not good enough for a recommendation. If we recommend bad software this 
also directly reflects on us and our community.

Cheers
Martin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20160705/ed96a17f/attachment-0001.sig>