[Discuss] Desktop Managers

[John Blomfield]

On 08/02/2014 10:41 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
> On 08/02/2014 05:46 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> By the way, it appears from that review that KDE5 is already available
>> for opensuse.  So do you plan to give it a try as well? 
> I've only seen Unstable versions of the KDE 5 Framework and Qt5 
> available so far on OpenSuse in order to "ease the transition" to KDE 
> 5 desktop, so I don't plan to try it yet. Nor have I investigated Qt5 
> to see how much impact that upgrade will have on Qt4 applications. 
> That is, will wholesale re-writes of the applications be required or 
> will it apply to new apps only? My guess is that a move from KDE4 to 
> KDE5 is probably a year away, perhaps on version OpenSuse 14. The 
> latest OpenSuse is currently 13.1 and there are likely to be a 13.2 
> and 13.3 out first. 


After further reading I realize that I had not understood the changes 
that are occurring in the new KDE release. It seems that under KDE 4 you 
downloaded and installed all the components required to produce a 
Desktop Environment, namely, Qt4 libraries, KDE4 libraries (KDE4 
Frameworks) and KDE4 Plasma Desktop plus some basic Applications. The 
KDE4 Frameworks and Plasma Desktop were bundled and referred to as KDE4 
Plasma Desktop. Qt4 has always been separate and could be used on any 
Desktop Environment.

Now with the latest version of KDE, KDE5 Frameworks and KDE5 Plasma 
Desktop are quite separate entities. Plasma of course depends on KDE5 
Frameworks and KDE Frameworks depends on Qt5 but KDE5 Frameworks does 
not require that you download Plasma 5 Desktop. So I guess in principle 
we may see Desktop Environments and Applications built on KDE5 
Frameworks other than Plasma.

To date there are stable releases of KDE5 Frameworks and Plasma 5 
Desktop but not KDE5 Applications as far as I can tell. This may explain 
why there are no Distros that have released a Plasma 5 Desktop version. 
It may be initially that we will see KDE4 apps running on Plasma 5 
Desktop with a KDE5 Framework wrapper. Although the changes required in 
Qt4 code to migrate to Qt5 are "minor" they still require a lot of 
digging through the source and tracking down bugs. One blog suggested 
that some of the changes could be automated with a script.

John

-- 
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Notes http://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com