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

[Martin Gräßlin]

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.

> 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.

> 
> 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

Cheers
Martin