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

[R.Harish Navnit]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Martin Graesslin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
>
> 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?
Are there any known security flaws with Qt browsers ? I just tried out
QupZilla and I really like it. The interface is neat and it's not
taking much memory either. I'm really enjoying it to be honest. But
what I don't know is, how secure it is ?

I'm just being curious here. I'm definitely tilting towards wanting to
use QupZilla on a daily basis, and would be glad to receive any
heads-ups before I take the plunge :-)

In many ways, it feels like a Plasma/KDE browser and that's really nice.

Cheers,
Harish