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Plasma 5.21 rolls out as one of the best looking Linux desktops available

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Love your PC to look flashy? The KDE team put in a lot of effort to be both beautiful and functional with the latest Plasma 5.21 release which is out now. Part of the ongoing work to make KDE Plasma look as good as possible, with lots of work big and small going into many areas in this release.

Plasma 5.21 from KDE brings in the brand new application launcher, featuring two panes to make it simple to find the programs you want to launch long with improved navigation for different input types. The older Kickoff launcher is still available too for anyone who prefers it. Plenty of improvements to the default Plasma theme with a refreshed colour scheme and header style, a new Breeze Twilight theme combining dark and light together, there's a brand new Plasma System Monitor for keeping an eye on your system, huge progress towards great KWin and Wayland support as part of their mission to have first class support for Wayland and much more.

Check out their release video:

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The team dedicated this release to Gustavo Carneiro, a KDE contributor from Brazil that died in January of COVID-19.

See the full announcement here.

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KohlyKohl Feb 16, 2021
Quoting: scaineI might have to give this another shot. Two things put me off last time:

1. The shoe-horning of the letter K into just about everything. On the few occasions Gnome devs do the same with G (e.g. gThumb), it annoys me there too. But in KDE, it's like a game of "every app is a bad pun". Thank goodness for Dolphin. Maybe others will help buck the trend.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

In the grand scheme of things, neither are show stoppers, but there were enough other paper cuts 18 months ago to put me off overall (one of which was that I used an Nvidia GPU). So yeah, ding ding, round 2, hopefully.

But I'll probably try Budgie too which might be a better fit for me.

I don't think they name new applications with a K anymore. The ones that I do have installed on my system I am okay with like Konsole and kRunner.

QuoteExecuting Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.
Good enough reason for me
scaine Feb 16, 2021
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Quoting: KohlyKohl
Quoting: scaine2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.
QuoteExecuting Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.
Good enough reason for me

Yeah, that was their "little joke" at the time - the user is an unfixable security vulnerability. Why are devs? Just... why? They can absolutely get in the bin with that attitude.

This has annoyed me all over again, so I'll spitefully not bother trying KDE after all.


Last edited by scaine on 16 February 2021 at 6:37 pm UTC
CatKiller Feb 16, 2021
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Quoting: scaine1. The shoe-horning of the letter K into just about everything.


The use of K for branding was dropped a long time ago.

Quote2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo.

You don't need to run Kate with sudo. If you really must, you can do the sensible thing and use sudoedit, but Kate will prompt for authorisation when saving a privileged file when run as a normal user anyway.

Not having an easy solution for privileged use of Dolphin is a pain: some file management tasks, particularly as a new user, are much less error-prone when done in a graphical file browser. But you wouldn't have been using sudo with Dolphin in the old days anyway: it would have been kdesu.
rcrit Feb 16, 2021
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[quote=scaine][quote=KohlyKohl]
Quoting: scaineYeah, that was their "little joke" at the time - the user is an unfixable security vulnerability. Why are devs? Just... why? They can absolutely get in the bin with that attitude.

This has annoyed me all over again, so I'll spitefully not bother trying KDE after all.

Oh Kome on sKain, what's the problem with a little joke?

For the most part I don't interact with any of the K-commands directly that I know of. I tend to stick with xterm rather than their console FWIW.
slaapliedje Feb 16, 2021
[quote=rcrit][quote=scaine]
Quoting: KohlyKohl
Quoting: scaineYeah, that was their "little joke" at the time - the user is an unfixable security vulnerability. Why are devs? Just... why? They can absolutely get in the bin with that attitude.

This has annoyed me all over again, so I'll spitefully not bother trying KDE after all.

Oh Kome on sKain, what's the problem with a little joke?

For the most part I don't interact with any of the K-commands directly that I know of. I tend to stick with xterm rather than their console FWIW.
I've been using Tilix for so long now, that Konsole and gnome-terminal seem last century...
Anyhow, just trying to give KDE an honest try. Wonder how long I'll be able to deal with it until I switch again. Usually lasts about a week ha.
kokoko3k Feb 16, 2021
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: scaine2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.
Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?
I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.
SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit <file>
smn Feb 16, 2021
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: scaine2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.
Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?
I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.
you don't need to run kate as sudo, you just do "kate path/to/file" and when you save it'll ask for the password, I think this was done to prevent any buggy code to be potentially used for privilege escalation.
slaapliedje Feb 16, 2021
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: scaine2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.
Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?
I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.
SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit <file>
Ha this would have helped when it was busted. Now I can use vim :)
denyasis Feb 17, 2021
Quoting: smnyou don't need to run kate as sudo, you just do "kate path/to/file" and when you save it'll ask for the password, I think this was done to prevent any buggy code to be potentially used for privilege escalation.

It didn't do that for me this weekend. I was trying to update my grub conf files for a hard drive switch. It would just give a "denied" error message.

I ended up just doing it in nano, at least the terminal allowed some cut and paste of UUIDs.


Also for those that thought the K and G brandings weren't so bad, I have one word for you.....

Galculator

Enough said.
Luke_Nukem Feb 17, 2021
QuoteThe team dedicated this release to Gustavo Carneiro, a KDE contributor from Brazil that died in January of COVID-19
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