Kubuntu's Best Version?

[Don B. Cilly]

I agree, most of what I gripe about is eye-candy.
But.

. If I may insist: System monitors are not eye-candy. They are quite useful. To me, essential.
And, in reply to your question as to what did Karamba have over Conky, well, my Karamba monitor looked like this:
My conky one looks like this.
Much the same, you can say... but as network monitoring goes, the Karamba one...

. The Marble Wallpaper. It looked like this, but you could zoom, rotate and configure it to show more things. And the clouds were updated every six hours.
Boy, by having it there all day, I did better weather forecasts than the met office
So, not quite total eye-candy

. The Elegance clock:
On KDE4, it looked like this.

On KDE5:


OK, total eye-candy, but, it has its value, does it not? And, can you find a prettier clock than that?
And, how did such a beautiful thing turn so... well, not ugly, but, well...

Anyway, I'll get used to Plasma 5, and my clunky conky, (or I'll find a way to make it nicer) but... until someone brings the Marble wallpaper back, I'll be quite disappointed with it

[MoonRise]

Interesting Thread here.

Hmmmm... well, like most who already stated I've been here since I think 5.04? I started with Ubuntu first but really quickly moved to Kubuntu so kind of blurred when and which.

It was a great joy learning with the KDE3 series. When, uhmmmm, KDE4 came out I really did try to embrace it. It worked but had its idiosyncrasies. I grew with that and may have side tracked here and there on a few occasions when Ubuntu and Kubuntu had their "issues". I came back with 18.04 which is really solid. I only migrated past that recently because I did want the improved Plasma and other KDE features that I knew 18.04 wasn't going to receive.

So long story short I like stability but I also like improvements so it is always a mater of what I read here from most users of their experiences and usual general boredom of a system that is stable. I'll upgrade to give some "excitement" while still having stability. I'm at 19.04. Stable and I had a little fun in the upgrade and finding fixes to things that were just because.

So, no real Best/Favorite I guess.

[jglen490]

LTS, and the latest. I'm not necessarily looking for "pretty", but it must work!

Right now 18.04.2, but when 20.04.1 comes out, I'll be all over it ...

[oshunluvr]

If I may insist: System monitors are not eye-candy. They are quite useful. To me, essential.

I totally agree, but one small piece of trouble you're having with conky doesn't ipso facto make Karumba better. It might just mean you haven't learned all you need to know about conky yet.

The Marble Wallpaper. It looked like this,

I do remember that now that I see it. It this that? I haven't tried it...

The Elegance clock

The only difference I see is the hands. Is there more I'm not noticing?

[Don B. Cilly]

I totally agree, but one small piece of trouble you're having with conky doesn't ipso facto make Karumba better. It might just mean you haven't learned all you need to know about conky yet.

Oh, it was de facto better. Have you tried?-)
And it's not one small piece of trouble, I've asked everywhere, no one knows how to make a decent network graph or about the memory thing... and it took me months and quite a bit of luck to get the CPU line graph together.
With Karamba, less than a day, and it draws graphs that are, if not prettier, certainly more meaningful.

I do remember that now that I see it. It this that? I haven't tried it...

It's certainly similar. I'll have a look at it (and report back ;·)

The only difference I see is the hands. Is there more I'm not noticing?

No, the only difference is the hands.
Hence my gripe about "The Elegance clock has the hands hanging out of the dial."
Irrelevant? Well... yes. But (to me) not really. If we talk about pure eye-candy, and that was the best for me - as I've said, the Marble wallpaper wasn't pure eye-candy, because "by having it there all day, I did better weather forecasts than the met office" ;·) well, that clock was pure. And beautiful. With the hands hanging out...

[claydoh]

Should this not be called "Plasma's (or KDE's) Best Version?" That would be 5.15, for the moment I have used KDE/Plasma as my desktop since 2002, version 2.x. I can't pick a favorite version, as this does depend on the era. I always .like the current version, and never have looked back at previous ones. And that includes the notorious KDE 4.0.0 and Kubuntu 8.10.

I wanted to like superkaramba. I wanted to *use* it. But it was more of an "AyeCaramba" as it would regularly crash for me. We're talking Kubuntu 8.04 era KDE 3.5, the most reliable least buggy (and most patched/hacked) version of KDE 3. We are also talking every time I would try to set it up, or use it, or whatever.

I betcha that if someone were to ask on Reddit or KDE's forums, someone could point out what needs to be edited on the clock widget's svg image to fix the display.

I have no clue what this info means

[Don B. Cilly]

Reporting back on the wallpaper... drum roll... er, afraid not. :·//
It's just what the screenshot shows.
Now, the clouds may actually update (I'll have to wait to be sure, but the fact that they're different on my screen from the ones in the screenshot bodes well :·).
But you can't scale it (the globe is bigger than my 1920x1080 screen) and above all you can't rotate it.
I'm not particularly interested in clouds over the Western Pacific/Sea of Japan... :·/
It's easy to try, just download as .zip and

plasmapkg2 -t wallpaperplugin -i plasmahimawari.zip

The clock:

I betcha that if someone were to ask on Reddit or KDE's forums, someone could point out what needs to be edited on the clock widget's svg image to fix the display.

Yay! Can someone familiar with those places do that for me?
Because I tried editing the .svg with Inkscape. Didn't work.
I tried replacing the file with the old KDE4 one. Didn't work.
I tried burning cashew nuts at the local Kubu-Kali-Devadistro temple (this is Ibiza, after all ;·). Well, you can guess the results.

Ok, OK, it's irrelevant. But it is was such a pretty clock... :8

[claydoh]

The clock:


Yay! Can someone familiar with those places do that for me?
Because I tried editing the .svg with Inkscape. Didn't work.
I tried replacing the file with the old KDE4 one. Didn't work.

They don't bite over there [emoji3]



Sent from my LG-H931 using Tapatalk

[Don B. Cilly]

They don't bite over there

Yeah, well... "I'm in love [with the clock] but I'm lazy"... --- Lennon/McCartney ;·)

About the wallpaper... hard to see if the clouds are changing when it's night in Japan

[acheron]

Well, for me, it's always been the one I'm using. Really, each version simply has gotten better and better.

For me, always the next one I am working on. Because if that won't be the best ever, then why bother?

[vinnywright]

For me, always the next one I am working on. Because if that won't be the best ever, then why bother?

That's the spirit , keep up the good work

VINNY

[Don B. Cilly]

Just a couple of notes on 18.04 vs. 14:

Discover was quite annoying (to me, yes) mainly because of update-checking at startup.
I had CPUs at near 100% with a top process of "update-apt-xapi..."... or something, after which it would almost always display the updates notification.
Which, if clicked upon, did nothing but tell me that updates were available.
If right-clicked upon, it gave me the option to actually install them.

And more often than not it had "unattended-upgrades" hogging the same CPUs at the most inopportune times.
Unattended upgrades? I want to attend! Sneaky friqqin' buqqers.
[SOLVED] by telling Muon not do do them, and using that for updates so I don't even see Discover anymore.

Another minor annoyance was that instead of simply doing sudo kate [file] I had to SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit [file].
Yeah, yeah "security". We've been through that already.
Now, I'm an old geezer. Bad enough for me to type sudo kate, I have to remember SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit, let alone type it.
[SOLVED] by making an alias in .bashrc.

[claydoh]

Another minor annoyance was that instead of simply doing sudo kate [file] I had to SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit [file].
Yeah, yeah "security". We've been through that already.
Now, I'm an old geezer. Bad enough for me to type sudo kate, I have to remember SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit, let alone type it

Well, you could simply open the file in kate, edit the file, and click save. THEN you enter your password when prompted. No need to invoke kate with any command line use at all. Nothing to remember, or to forget.

You could also just make a custom menu entry for the command, so it is sooper eezee to bung up one's system

Quite a few of us here are old geezers. I'd venture to say a significant percentage are in the get-off-my-lawn phase of their lives.......

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, that's an improvement (over 14.04).
In 14.04, it just said something along the lines of "The file could not be saved - puss off" and not offer to enter a password.
Good to know.

Still, I maintain that if I like to bung up my system, it's my choice, not the developer's.

[jlittle]

Good to see someone using sudoedit. (These days kate can edit root owned files and ask for the sudo password when writing, but using sudoedit is convenient if you have used sudo in the same shell session in the last little while, default 15 minutes.)

<random elucidation mode, importance=low>

I had to SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit [file]

[SOLVED] by making an alias in .bashrc.

XXX=yyy command is setting an environment variable temporarily for that command. IMO it's simpler to set it always with export SUDO_EDITOR=kate in your .bashrc. Aliases can be fragile, and it will work with sudo -e. I suppose I'm accustomed to checking environment variables.

Regards, John Little