KDE & GNOME's Next Big Things, Kubuntu Release Managers
Jonathan Riddell's departure left Kubuntu without a release manager, until yesterday when Philip Muskovac posted of the replacements, plural. Allan Day today posted about GNOME's "next big thing" and Graham Morrison shared his look "inside the GNOME Foundation." On the KDE side of town, Sebastian Kügler posted some "wayland and libkscreen benchmarks" and Neil Rickert wrote a Plasma 5 review.
After the loss of their release manager Jonathan Riddell last month, the Kubuntu project had to act quickly to find a replacement. Today Philip Muskovac posted on the Ubuntu release mailing list that he and Scarlett Clark would now be acting in that capacity. Muskovac said he and Clark would have to apply for a position on the release team though neither is a core-dev. He added they would be working on that over the coming months. Riddell is still developing for KDE.
Speaking of KDE, Neil Rickert today posted a review of Plasma 5. He began by saying, "Plasma 5 is recognizable as a successor to KDE4. It does not make the radical changes that we saw going from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. The changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary."
Rickert liked the Breeze theme, but isn't happy with the new right-click Leave/reboot process, which now requires more mouse mileage. He mentions the new wallpaper handling, which doesn't seem to bother him but sounds like it will me. There was some business about the menus, but his biggest problem was with sound:
In KDE4, I might be listening to music. And, for some reason, a video is making sounds in my browser. I could click on the speaker in the tray. And there I would see a volume control for the music (with Amarok), and a separate volume control for the video.
I am not seeing those separate volume controls with Plasma 5. So I have a lot less control over the sound volume from different channels.
Rickert concluded even with the problems, he won't be going back to KDE 4. In other KDE news, Sebastian Kügler today posted some benchmarks of Wayland and libkscreen.
For balance, there is some GNOME in the news today too. First up, Allan Day blogged about GNOME 3 saying it's really come a long way since that first initial 3.0 release, but he really wanted to "draw attention to two significant developments that are currently happening." Application sandboxing is "significant for GNOME by enabling the OS to be more robust and stable, and by improving performance. It will also allow more flexible release cycles for applications." GTK+ Scene Graph "will allow interfaces that make greater use of animations. The introduction of more widespread animations could have a revolutionary impact on how we design and create GNOME applications." In related news, Graham Morrison spoke to Karen Sandler about the GNOME Foundation over at LinuxVoice.com.
In other news today:
* Did the FBI Pay a University to Attack Tor Users? (Tor blog)
* End the Ubuntu Community Council Entrenchment, Shuttleworth: Nominations