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

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 04.07.2016 18:37, Martin Gräßlin 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.
>
Have you set up Cantata lately? Yes, it requires mpd, but it sets one up all by 
itself if you don't have one.
You tell it where your library is and it does the rest, not more complicated 
than any other music player.
We would not have included it in this list if it required setting up mpd manually.

>> 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.
>
This is a difficult issue, then. Is there any way we can help Albert with 
finishing the Qt5 port? Not
having a well-integrated PDF reader is not a good situation to be in. Of course 
the same is true
for the other areas where we don't recommend anything, but it feels like Okular 
would be the
easiest to get to a point where it could be recommended.

>> 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
>
I agree, KWalletmanager as it is now is _not_ a good password manager. The 
reason why we
integrated it in that list is that things like Plasma-NM only work automatically 
with KWallet, so
there is not really a way around that, and KWalletManager is the only practical 
to see or remove
passwords stored in KWallet.
The situation with KWallet is a huge problem for Plasma, which has to be solved.
KSecretService would have been the solution, but unfortunately Valentin has no 
more time to
work on it.
There are various solutions for this problem, but we have to take one, and we do 
need some
form of keyring to store things like wifi keys in an encrypted store.

I will open a separate thread for this issue, as it's too big to be discussed 
within this thread.

>> 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.
>
I've heard people using e.g. QupZilla as their daily browser and not being
unhappy with it. I don't think it's at a state where I'd explicitly recommend it,
but it's not so bad that I'd recommend _against_ it.

>> 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
>
Well someone had to do it ;)
I think it's also important to make ourselves aware of the situation we're
in with regard to basic applications, because that does also contribute to
people's overall impression of "KDE" (= desktop plus apps).