Out of the loop, what changes made it ‘unusable’?

For what it’s worth, I recall some turd at r/graphic_design swearing at Inkscape because it was “communist”

Gentoo

I still can’t use it :( It compiles now, but when trying to set it all I get is this:

I got a HP Elitedesk 800 G4. This thing came with an integrated Intel card and a AMD one. With the Intel one it works fantastic. With the AMD one, bleh. I disabled in on the BIOS as I use this with a thunderbolt display, so it’s been like two years since I tried it.

Download it, cd to its directory, and do the standard procedure to compile a Cmake project:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo/doas make install

You’re right, thank you

If you’re using Arch and it’s in the AUR, I’d look into that. Otherwise you’d need to compile it by yourself.

If you don’t feel like compiling stuff, you’d want to file a bug against your distro so there’s someone willing to step up as a package mantainer to prepare a package for it and make it available for your distro.

Afaik the “original” Lightly was born as a fork of Breeze, which in turn was born a fork of KDE4’s Oxygen. So all of them are written in pure C++.

Now, I heard Luwx/Lightly was stalled so they forked it in boehs/Lightly, merged some pending patches and even did a new branch to port it to Qt6 - but last time I tried to compile it, it failed. Not sure if they’re still working on it, though. (From my part never liked Breeze but found about Brise, which I found much more torerable).

If I were you I’d try to get in touch with the mantainers of boehs/Lightly. If that doesn’t work, I’d go to ask the KDE VDG (I guess they should be reachable at discuss.kde.org); at least they should redirect you to someone versed in Qt C++ styling - which is very complicated, at least for me, 'cause C++ is no easy thing and it seems there’s almost no documentation at all about the subject. Pinheiro himself struggled to find someone with enough knowledge of C++ to help him with his O^2 theme.

If that doesn’t work either for whatever reason, which I doubt ever happens, I’d try asking Carl Schwan as a last resort, the guy that came up with Brise. He helped me with a stupid patch for it - of course he knows his thing and seems to be very cool.

Not an expert programmer whatsoever, and it’s been more than 15 years I’ve used Python for doing something GUI related (it was Python 2 and GTK+2…), but I do know you can do KDE stuff with Python right now. For example, there are Kirigami bindings for Python you can use to do a desktop/mobile app.

Still though I absolutely agree getting into C++ is a nightmare, to me is just a level behind Assembly and Brainfuck. I’d like to learn Rust and it’d be great to be able to contribute to KDE with it.

You can now place files in ~/Templates and they will appear as templates in the “Create New…” menu that appears in various places […]

That’s absolutely great! Last time I tried to put something to show up in those menus was a tricky process (and a bit frustrating, too, as I remembered at that time with Windows 98/XP it was easier than that) and in the next minor Plasma update they were gone, so never bothered again. It’s like at least 10 years too late, but thankfully they remembered about that.

Pretty sure that’s the kind of updates people would like to see more often

The miraculous solution to this bug so we can use a different wallpaper on each virtual desktop, like in the ol’ KDE4.x days

Karbon is even worse - it’s been more than 10 years without any improvement whatsoever. It’s in a zombie state. This very blog post reveals it:

Karbon didn’t received much change outside of the one affecting the whole platform

I wish Karbon (and Calligra in general) had much more support because it has so much potential and offline office suites are still a thing. Remember that Krita came out of Calligra/KOffice.

Not sure what do you precisely mean with “IMAP syncing is slow”, as in when you tell it to sync it’s slower than Thunderbird? Or that you’re being notified by Kmail about new mails later than you did with Thunderbird?

Because if it’s the latter, you may want to check under Settings -> Accounts -> Reception (or however that tab is called in english) -> Your IMAP account -> General tab -> Sync interval.

It’s great that since 5.x they’re giving attention to the tiny action icons. Pinheiro did an amazing work on apps, places and other icons with the Oxygen set in the KDE 4.x era, but its mini action icons were kind of lost and had too much detail. Though with 5.x they did some great improvement about consistency, the 1px thickess just didn’t help too much into readability.

I do icons and have done icons for KDE in the past so I can tell that indeed the work they have done is huge and the result is outstanding.