In T7863#126135, @ngraham wrote:

OK. Is there anything we can do to help that process along? It seems somewhat stuck, and it would be a shame to ship another release with ugly icons for people who use these high-profile apps and the Large Icons task switcher.

OK. Is there anything we can do to help that process along? It seems somewhat stuck, and it would be a shame to ship another release with ugly icons for people who use these high-profile apps and the Large Icons task switcher.

Thanks for your kind words, @ach. I want to stress here that I'm not trying to bash the feature or claim that it's useless, but rather that it doesn't make a good default setting. Folks like you can (and will) change your defaults and could easily turn this on, but most people won't, and it's up to us to think empathetically about them.

I'm used to the 'blue' screens now and it's sort of unique. Some times I start thinking it's 'the' KDE blue (like Ferrari red). And then I'm proud ;-) Nevertheless using the default upstream wallpager is also okay.

As open animation: maybe like the unminimize animation with the origin wherever the click (or return in krunner) happened?

I turn it on and the frist window I closed, 'vanished' into a icon in dolphin that was behind the window. That was quite irretating.
The current animation is IMHO also not very nice (personal impression)

Despite that I disagree here with Nate, I want to say: a big bold thank you Nate! I'm really impressed by the great job you do in public relation and usablility! Thx a lot!

a big bold -1 from my side IMO. I use the effect every day when placing windows relative to each other that overlap.

This is entirely up to ubuntu to either fix or not.

Let's forget about this and just increase the sizes a bit instead: https://phabricator.kde.org/T7864

You know what though, Noto Sans 11 is fine. It's a huge improvement over 10. We don't have to do Ubuntu.

FWIW, from https://design.ubuntu.com/font/

No problem!

I will add comments to your email. I wanted to check out all the links before doing so.

Great! So what are the next steps for these tasks? They're all basically packaging tweaks; do we get the Kubuntu packagers involved?

I have those setting already, and I think I set them after reading someone crab about the defaults. I don't know that these are the best settings for the most people, so I guess am a very lazy +1 on this.

Now that I have compositing turned back on, I see the glide effect. I had missed that; I think we used to have it on by default.

This is a truly cool widget, and I did miss the ability to do that easily when leaving my computer. So +1 for this suggestion as well.

Aha, now I see the difference. And while I sort of like it is no professional, as you say.

Probably! That's the "toggle compositing" keyboard shortcut. You should see shadows and translucency now to make an accurate evaluation regarding whether we might want to turn off the translucency.

They do come back indeed. I wonder if I turned that off sometime by mistake.

If you hit Shift+Alt+F12, do the shadows come back? This isn't really my area of expertise, but it sounds like there's something fairly seriously wrong with your configuration!

I have nvidia which I imagine supports it, but I rarely meddle with settings. How would I know if compositing were on or off? I don't think I see shadows.

You'll only see it if your graphics hardware supports it; do you run with compositing off? Do you normally see window shadows?

So what's the formal process here? Or should I just step into the role like I've been doing?

Turning that effect on and off for me shows no difference when resizing or moving windows, so I have no opinion. On the other hand, turning off effects seems sane unless there is wide-spread support for having them.

How does regular old Ubuntu handle the international character issue with their default font?

Clicked send too quickly. I would support this if our international users were behind it. If not, I'd rather stick with Noto.

FWIW, I sparked a big discussion in VDG today and we all came to the same conclusion. So this is probably coming anyway from upstream, though I don't know what the timeline is for that. It probably wouldn't be in time for 18.04

As far as I know, it does not. Look at the choices you are offered if you want Noto, in contrast to what you are offered if you choose Ubuntu.

This is *great* looking. I would support this, although the previous wallpaper I thought was pretty bad. This one is just awesome though.

I have to imagine that Ubuntu has similarly good coverage, no? It really is a world-class font.

I followed the discussion in KDE which led to the adoption of Noto, and it was based mostly on their coverage of the world, in particular Asian font families, and right-to-left fonts often used in west Asia and some places in Africa. This really is a huge advantage around the world.

@kpiwowarski That is good too. I think it makes sense for Kubnutu to use the same font as its parent distro, but I might be interested in a discussion about changing the default KDE font size and face a bit. Noto Sans 10 always feels too small and light, and is a bit hard to read if you don't have perfect eyesight.

What about Lato font? http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/

I really hate the Ubuntu font, but I guess it's not about my likes and dislikes!

FYI this subject repeatedly comes up in Igor Ljubuncic's reviews of KDE Plasma. For example: http://www.ocsmag.com/2018/01/27/plasma-5-12-long-term-sweetness/

FWIW, we've battered the Flatpak backend into really good shape for Discover 5.12. I would be in favor of including it along with the PackageKit backend. It should not be made the default backend yet, though.

I would be okay with Telegram as the default IM choice--or even Matrix, which is up-and-coming, and which will be used on Purism's phone.

I am interested!

I am no longer a Kubuntu Devel, have any say in it's development or wish to make comment on decisions regarding the project. Therefore please don't sub me to topics/discussions regarding it.

I am not an expert here, but for me slight hinting makes things worse too.
I achieved the best results with RGB sub-pixel-rendering and hinting disabled (Acer Aspire VN7-792G-70MJ, Arch Linux, fontconfig-infinality).

What kind of display are you using? Every laptop and desktop LCD I've ever used with a Kubuntu system (and I install a lot of these) had fonts that looked lousy and blurry with the default settings, and marvelous with Slight RGB font hinting.

I have not had a problem with the current defaults, and trying to change it on my systems to RGB slight gave some really horrible artifacts ins applications like aggregator where some content is now rendered with web engine. This was even worse when I tried with newer freetype.

This got KDE Neon some bad press in http://www.ocsmag.com/2018/01/27/plasma-5-12-long-term-sweetness/

In T6350#125184, @vanessadeagan wrote:

My biggest gripe with KDE:

The KIO subsystem (I think that's what it's called?). If I access a password protected share using Dolphin (e.g. smb://192.168.0.100/Media), and then try to play an MP4 file (as an example), it will not play. From what I have read, this is because of the KIO subsystem. This does not occur with Ubuntu and their file manager (Nautilus). There are workarounds, but it would be nice if it just worked as expected (i.e. smb://192.168.0.100/Media, then double click the .mp4 file you want to play, and it just plays - as it does in Nautilus).

I've been using KDE since Kubuntu 15.10, and absolutely love it.

Oh gosh another competition. Please no. On the other hand, it would be cool if people felt so inclined that they could contribute wallpapers with the proper licensing. That could perhaps be done through store.kde.org with a tag of Kubuntu?

Committed to git and uploaded:

We do blacklist it: http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/kubuntu.bionic/desktop

Package now called network-manager-config-connectivity-ubuntu

Another option might be to ship PIM on LTS releases, as business/institutions etc are more likely to use those, but excluded it from our interim isos. Make our releases with support for 9 months more lightweight ones.

We removed the gtk3-nocsd hack, so this is no longer relevant.

Anyway, I've been using the Flatpak backend in Kubuntu and there are some bugs that would make me not want to ship it or make it the default backend without more testing, bugfixing, and polishing. It's really promising though, and I encourage folks to try it out.