Install presence

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Sunday June 20 2021 20:53:55 Jeremy Whiting wrote:

Hi again,

>All of the above is based on the idea that yes, we want KDE applications to
>work well on MacOS. I'm not sure if that's the consensus or not.

I just remembered an episode a few years back. I was discussing a Mac tweak of on of the plasma components on the plasma-devel ML (could have been DrKonqi, could have been the platform plugin, or ) and one of the key plasma devs said something tell-tale like "I think I'm going to break that, just because I can". I presume it's still easy to elicit a knee-jerk reaction there by invoking the idea of supporting a relevant set of KCMs on other platforms...

On Monday June 21 2021 17:18:23 Ian Wadham wrote:

> Getting some KDE apps to run and look the same as on a Plasma desktop is not so easy.

There is somewhat of a consensus that "this should not be" and while I put that under "more catholic than the pope" I don't entirely disagree. Bringing the (almost) entire Plasma desktop to Mac could be justified if Qt5 would be more trivial to build targeting X11, so users who want could have a best of both world set-up where the Cocoa/Aqua and Plasma desktops could be swapped at the touch of a shortcut. But for the native Cocoa mode there's no point in doing this, and a hypothetical KDE installer for Mac (like exists or used to exist for MS Win) should indeed not attempt to set up things so applications follow the default breezy look and feel.

That said, users should be the ones deciding, ultimately, and if they want cross-platform applications to look the same everywhere that should not be thwarted, I for one use the same (Mac-inspired) QtCurve theme and colour palette on Mac and Linux, and am quite happy with how it allows me to optimise screen real estate (and spare my eyes).
And here's the thing: Qt and esp. KDE applications don't look good when you use the standard Mac widget style and standard fonts. You can see very clearly that they're rendered using an automated layouting engine, and the result looks cheap, thrown together and possibly done with the visuo-motor impaired in mind (because there's way too much waste of space, and too little use of smaller font sizes). Improving this is possible, but ... it requires a platform theme plugin.

R.