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

Tue Jul 5 06:06:52 UTC 2016

On Monday, July 4, 2016 10:52:12 PM CEST Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> 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.

ok, but that's then something which needs to be pointed out to distributions 
that they set up the packaging correctly.

> >> 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.

I don't know if there is a way to help with the port. After having seen the 
in-your-face warning I had a feeling that running the dev build is discouraged 
by the Okular developers. That makes it difficult to help as not even bug 
reports are wanted (given the in-your-face dialog). But we two already 
discussed that in private.

> 
> >> 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.

sounds like a good idea to start a new thread about that.

> 
> >> 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.

And from a security perspective?

Cheers
Martin
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