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

[Aleix Pol]

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.

>> 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.

>> 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.

Aleix