[KDE/Mac] plasma-desktop on other environments (bis)

[René J. V. Bertin]

<< David Edmundson wrote:


> In Plasma, we don't support OS X and we supposedly are completely separated
> from applications, so we are absolutely the last people in KDE who should
> be telling you how applications on OS X should be acting

Thanks :)

> Macports does seem to fall into a somewhat different use-case to the the
> applications being packaged for OS X standalone.

That isn't really so different from applications installing all dependencies in 
their individual install location on MS Windows. In both cases we're dealing 
with directories, even. 

That kind of install method does indeed make it much less evident to use a 
"global" settings application, because there are no more shared settings. (That 
isn't necessarily true though.)
But it will still be possible to use the KCMs via a dedicated, standardised way 
of presenting them to the user.

> Could you make a list of what features you need rather than what you don't
> need.
> It's hard to read but more importantly it's hard to see where we have
> overlaps with these other problems that we need to solve.

Sure, that's what I always planned. If it wasn't clear, I never intended to 
present my current patches for review. At the very least I plan to proceed via 
elimination to come up with the KCMs I'd like to provide. That will take some 
time though, AFAIK I'm currently the only KDE-Mac member who's (still) trying to 
keep things moving on OS X.

I still think it'd be useful in general to put the KCMs in their own repo, or 
else repackage them with the (or a) component that they allow to configure. That 
doesn't only seem logical, it should also take much of the emotional venom out 
of the Plasma vs. the others aspect of this discussion.
For example: the colour, font-choice and application style KCMs could go with 
plasma-integration (and thus my osx-integration) because they also make sense 
when you want to make all those KF5 applications you use fit your Gnome or 
whatever non-Plasma desktop. The font installer KCM could however remain as a 
Plasma desktop utility and the desktop theme KCM should, even more so.

<< Martin Graesslin wrote:

> So far we haven't seen any KCM which would not be desktop specific. The things
> you listed are workarounds for apparently issues with the OSX QPT plugin.
> Needs to be fixed there, not worked around.

Supposing that you refer to my Mac KDE platform theme plugin with the GPT 
threeletterword:

Not entirely. The fact that no GU interface exists to configure settings 
supported by the GPT is not an issue with the GPT ... at most an omission of me 
forking the corresponding KCMs and shipping them alongside the GPT.

There are issues with the native platform theme:
- widget misalignment (*possibly* related to font choice, and likely an issue in 
Qt rather than KDE code even if I've only seen it in KDE applications). This is 
something that ideally should indeed be fixed at the source.
- something which is probably an unhappy choice of font types used my standard 
KDE widgets which means KDE applications end up using the same (huge) font for 
almost everything, even more so than non-adapted cross-platform Qt applications 
do. And that is on top layout that is even more (much more) spacey than it is in 
Breeze.

The font thing is not in itself an issue with Qt because its font type/role 
choices aren't unreasonable. I don't really see a solution except for making it 
as easy as possible to install and use an appropriate platform theme plugin 
which does what mine does:
- tweaking each and every application so that it uses the appropriate typeface 
is evidently not the ideal solution
- changing the underlying library code so more appropriate font types/roles are 
used may cause problems on other platforms (or else introduce lots of platform-
specific code too)
- designing a common library to be used by everything and that replaces the 
platform theme plugin for mapping font types/roles to typefaces is against all 
current KDE (what I call) dogma.

I could of course change my theme plugin to serve just an appropriate choice of 
fonts (which would have to depend on the OS version because 10.11 no longer uses 
Lucida for everything) and maybe a colour palette. But why would I if it can 
just as well serve such a mapping with an appropriate but modifiable default, 
also for the widget style? 

Why would you not exploit the fact that the KDE family of applications is not 
only cross-platform, but can also benefit from a consistent cross-platform look 
if that's desired, so that the underlying OS becomes something that's almost 
completely transparent?

> 
> 
> I only expressed my opinion. Of course I'm not taking away any freedoms. Of

Of course you did, but if a handful of developers have that same opinion and 
control what gets accepted, it still comes down to making your opinion law ...

R