[ubuntu-studio-users] ubuntustudio and KDE

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Hi Ross,


On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 1:27 PM Ross Gammon <rosco at ubuntustudio.org> wrote:

> Hi Erich,
>
> I apologise for top posting, but I wanted to ask a quick related
> question. Maybe I missed it, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned is
> the upgrade path.
>
> It is clear to me that if you stay with 20.04 for the supported 3 years,
> you will keep whatever desktop you have (e.g. XFCE which is default for
> Ubuntu Studio).
>
> It is also clear that if you do a fresh install of Ubuntu Studio 20.10
> you will get Plasma.
>
> But what happens if you upgrade Ubuntu Studio from 20.04 to 20.10 (or
> from 20.04 to the next LTS release 22.04)? The announcement mentioned
> likely breakage? Personally, I would prefer that either I kept the same
> desktop, or I was smoothly migrated over to Plasma.
>

Not sure if you're aware, but Lubuntu has already forged this path for us.
When they switched their desktop from LXDE (no longer actively developed)
to LXQt (the merging of the LXDE and RazorQt projects) in 18.10 (and for
20.04 LTS) they had to make a tough call, and that was to not support any
direct upgrades from 18.04 to anything later, but to encourage clean
installs. Basically, since this seems to have been met with success, this
is the route that should be encouraged.

The biggest problem is that, due to the changes that had to happen in the
ubuntustudio-default-settings package, if one upgrades from 20.04 to 20.10
they *will* end up installing pretty much the entirety of the Plasma DE and
might end up with a crippled Xfce. Unfortunately, there's no real way
around this.


> I have always wondered what all the fuss is about with the "desktop
> debate". I use Ubuntu Studio on two machines. One is standard Ubuntu
> Studio (XFCE), and the other is standard Ubuntu with Ubuntu Studio
> installed on top with the installer (Gnome).
>
> The most important thing for me is being able to find the applications,
> and then learning the tricks to arranging the open windows the way I
> want them. It has never taken me long to work out a new desktop (but I
> am a very basic user).
>
> Maybe we should publish a guide to help people migrate from XFCE to
> Plasma? What are the tips and tricks to carry on recording in the new
> environment without embarrassing yourself in a professional scenario?
>
>
I'm assuming that, based on this, you haven't tried one of the daily Groovy
ISO images. If you boot it up, you'll notice the desktop is nearly
identical in layout with one exception: no desktop icons unless ~/Desktop
has items. That's easily mitigated with the file manager (which is all the
desktop icons would open anyhow). Any number of shortcuts can also be added
to the desktop, and the user can customize it however they see fit.

The other exception would be the menu, but as Len pointed out to me, is
functionally similar to the Whisker menu in Xfce. If one wants a more
"classic" layout, a right-click on the launcher, then a click on "Show
Alternative" shows three other choices, including Application Menu, which
is more similar to the Xfce menu of old. I actually tried to get it to
default to that older menu, but it ended up being less customizable in
terms of default favorites, so I left it to the user to switch.

In any case, the menu items that we have laid out for the "Audio
Production" etc. menus carried over perfectly.

The learning curve really isn't all that steep, and if you have trouble
finding something, i.e. a setting, you can easily search for that in
"System Settings" as it's completely indexed and searchable. Another nice
thing is KRunner, which acts as a launcher similar to Apple's Spotlight on
macOS in that it will search just about everything, and even act as a
calculator. It's accessed via alt-space.

I guess there are a few menu shortcuts that differ, such as the
aforementioned alt-space being KRunner and not the window menu. The window
menu, by the way, is accessed via alt-F3.

So, yes, there are some differences, but I've done what I can to minimize
the learning curve. I think the best thing users can do is try it out and
play around with it. Especially in the live environment, don't be afraid to
try new things, and don't be afraid of breaking stuff since, unless you've
installed it, nothing is permanent.

And just for the record, the overall reaction from the Linux community has
been positive about this transition. It has been the very vocal and few "my
way or the highway" critics that have been upset with this decision, which
took us the past two years to come to. Most of those critics haven't even
looked at Plasma (formerly known as KDE which is now the name of the
development community) for upwards of a decade when the extremely buggy and
heavy Plasma 4 was what people knew then as KDE. That was their impression,
so they automatically assume Plasma 5 is the same way, when that couldn't
be further from the truth.

As for a guide, I'm not sure what I'd write other than what I just wrote
there, but to be honest, I don't have much time to do documentation. I hope
others could step-up and do some of that.

Thanks,
Erich
----
Erich Eickmeyer
Project Leader
Ubuntu Studio

ubuntustudio.org
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