Hi,
I’ve been using KDE5 (plasma) for a while now and I must say I’m surprised with how many applications are still based on KDE4 out there, even though there are already KDE5-based versions of them available (although not all of them are considered stable, I know).
I deleted kwallet4 in favor of kwallet5 (there were conflicts, when I tried to use them at once). I uninstalled KMail KDE4-based and replaced it with KMail KDE5-based. It’s been working nice so far.
Right now my main concern is a webbrowser. I’ve been using firefox, but I’d like to try something purely produced by KDE world and I wanted to start with Konqueror, but again: I have only the KDE4-based version installed and this time finding the KDE5-based version was much harder. In fact, I didn’t find it. Where can I take it from and how stable is it? If it’s too unstable yet, maybe I should use rekonq5 (but again: where to take it from?).
General question (I don’t mind if no one answers it): why openSUSE released Leap 42.1 with KDE5 included, but with most of the applications being still KDE4-based?
it’s not as simple as that, kde4 uses qt4 and kde applications 5 use qt5, there wore a lot of changes from qt4 to qt5 so porting an app is not as simple as it sounds, the thing is with kde5 things changed a lot and now there is not a single kde project but 3 separate ones: plasma 5 the desktop environment, kf5 the system libraries based on qt5, and kde applications that are a mix of qt5 and qt4 applications that use kf5 and the old kde4 runtime.
Konqy has been dyeing a slow death for some time now, ever since dolphin became the default file manager in kde4, and apple and google stopped releasing their khtnl code (Chromium and Safari are based on konqy code) and created their own html rendering engine, although I do like konqy gecko and blink are the only rendering engines that are getting any work done (Firefox and Chromium) khtml seams to be forgotten.
I understand the complexity of it. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to release a KDE5-based OS version yet?
Konqy has been dyeing a slow death for some time now, ever since dolphin became the default file manager in kde4, and apple and google stopped releasing their khtnl code (Chromium and Safari are based on konqy code) and created their own html rendering engine, although I do like konqy gecko and blink are the only rendering engines that are getting any work done (Firefox and Chromium) khtml seams to be forgotten.
Thanks for this information. What about rekonq? I read it was pretty good at a time, but now I can’t find it anywhere. Did it die out along with Konqueror? My point is that KDE on its own has an application for practically everything (or at least everything what’s most important), except for a webbrowser, which is really important nowadays.
It’s not that efficient and it’s unstable, too. I’ve been using it for a moment now and it crashed many times during simple actions like switching between tabs or opening new windows from within websites.
But you could try “qupzilla-qt”. I’m pretty sure that is KDE5 based and uses “kwallet5”.
I’ll take a look at it, thanks for the information.
Why go through all this (IMHO) breaking the distro’s integrity, when we have Tumbleweed, which comes with QA tested recent packages ? AFAIU from the recent blog post, TW now has the complete Plasma5 stack. Even Kontact ( kmail korganizer etc ) now uses Frameworks5. Leap wasn’t created to be bleeding edge, it was created to have a LTS release.
In this case I have to ask: I use openSUSE at work, so it’s important to me that programs like KMail, KRDC, webbrowser etc. are stable. Is that achieved in the Tumbleweed+Leap distro?
There is no such thing as a “Tumbleweed+Leap” distro. openSUSE is the distro, openSUSE 13.2, Leap 42.1 and Tumbleweed are releases, where Leap and Tumbleweed are the future. Leap as the LTS ( long term support ), Tumbleweed as the rolling release.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed get tested in openqa.opensuse.org, in the case of Leap this also concerns updates that come through Leap’s update repos. But …, this is not the case with the repos you added. So, to refer to you phrase on the need of stuff being stabe, that’s what you’re breaking. IMHO.
The things you see re. KDE4 packages, i.e. some packages still being based on KDE4 technology, are intended. When the move to Frameworks5 and Plasma5 was initiated, kde.org decided to split KDE into Frameworks5 and KDE Applications. This allowed them to start the Plasma5 desktop without having to wait for the porting of applications from Qt4 to Qt5 ( Qt is the toolkit KDE is built on ).
On Tumbleweed we now see all KDE applications built on Qt5, so fully Plasma5. Leap may probably only see that at the next release.
Personal experience: both Leap and Tumbleweed are stable. Both have their pros and cons, IMO depending on use case. And the experience level of the user. But, if the user trusts him/herself enough to step away from the stock install and add extra repos, hickups like manual NVIDIA driver install on Tumbleweed shouldn’t be that much of a problem.
That’s wrong. Konqueror is still part of KDE Applications and released monthly, the current version is 15.12.1 with 15.12.2 being released in 2 weeks.
Ok, there haven’t been real changes to Konqueror recently, or actually the last real changes were probably being done many years ago.
But then, Konqueror is actually just a shell to embed KParts, so it doesn’t really matter much.
For web browsing there’s the KHTML KPart which is included in kdelibs4 (which still receives bugfix and security updates) and KDE Frameworks5, and there’s kwebkitpart which uses libQtWebKit (part of Qt, based on Apple Safari’s KHTML fork).
Konqueror has been mostly ported to KF5 with only minor parts still missing (the sidebars are still incomplete), and there are plans for porting kwebkitpart to use the new QtWebEngine (based on Chromium’s engine, which in turn is a fork and improved version of WebKit) instead of the deprecated QtWebKit.
I have no idea when the KF5 based Konqueror is going to be released though.
And I do use Konqueror (the KDE4 version) as my main browser here. If it is unstable, it could be because of evince-browser-plugin. So uninstall that if it is installed.
Other than that, there still will be KDE4 applications around for quite some time. And actually work has been done by KDE to make them integrate into a Plasma5 environment as well. Although the kwallet “solution” probably was not the best one. They should have done the same as kactivities, make the KF5 service also be used by the KDE4 applications, not have two separate wallets for KDE4 and KF5 apps.
I’ll nead to go with a Tumbleweed in this case, I think. You see I didn’t intend to update the programs like KMail or Konqueror for no reason. The KDE4-based version I had installed (and was unable to update any longer) in here (Leap) had bugs I needed to get rid of.
The outcome is that I broke the integrity of the distro (like you put it) and i.e. KRDC, which is KDE4-based and requires kwallet4 to store its passwords, doesn’t remember any passwords now for me, as I had to delete kwallet4 to install and use kwallet5, which I needed for KMail KDE5-based I installed.
I’m not new to linux, but I’m new to KDE-based environment and I must say this whole kwallet thing is something that I find quite odd. To me it’s an addition that doesn’t do as much good as it causes trouble. But it’s just my opinion I came up with after only 2 months of using it. Also there are many different applications that came with the Leap distro (multiple video and audio players, few applications to download files, many other apps that I don’t even know what they do). Is there a plan to release a version with only the necessary apps installed by default or this (having a lot of apps installed after installation of the OS) is the direction, where openSUSE (or KDE, if it’s a KDE thing) is heading and they don’t want to change it?
Thank you for your response. Tumbleweed it’ll be, then.
There’s no point in doing that.
The latest KDE Applications releases are being released as updates for Leap. And kmail5 is part of Leap anyway, just not (yet) installed by default. The next update will also switch people to KDEPIM5 automatically on Leap.
And as Konqueror and krdc have not been released as KF5 version yet, they are also KDE4 based in Tumbleweed.
There’s no way around it other than to install the unstable development snapshots from KDE:Unstable:Applications, but they are available for Leap as well.
Ok, then, where can I read about apps like Konqueror or KDE (as the websites that come up in Google search on the top don’t seem to be very up to date)? Is there any official forum of KDE where such information is shared? I’m interested in reading about planned updates and features.
I’ll give it a try, then, but using it without the support for kwallet will be a little hard. I needed to update the KMail client, so unfortunately I needed the kwallet5 on board.
By the way. When I open any GoogleApp website (like search engine, gmail, etc.) in Konqueror, the layout is limited and in gmail there is a message on top saying that Google doesn’t support this version of safari. Anyone is familiar with this? I can open a separate thread for this case, if it’s more complex to explain, no problem. I just thought I might give it a try since I have your attention in here
You can perfectly well use kwallet4 and kwallet5 at the same time. There is no conflict, they co-exist nicely.
Only the wallets are separated, and won’t be synchronized.
kwalletmanager and kwalletmanager5 conflict with each other (unless this has been fixed already), but you don’t need them to use the wallet(s).
Btw, this conflict is only about the icons, so you should even be able to force the installation of both without problems.
By the way. When I open any GoogleApp website (like search engine, gmail, etc.) in Konqueror, the layout is limited and in gmail there is a message on top saying that Google doesn’t support this version of safari. Anyone is familiar with this? I can open a separate thread for this case, if it’s more complex to explain, no problem. I just thought I might give it a try since I have your attention in here
Well, I don’t use GoogleApps, but most if not all web pages should work fine with the WebKit engine.
The message that Google doesn’t support this version of safari is not a bug in Konqueror though, and can normally be safely ignored.
Or try changing Konqueror’s user agent settings, it can disguise itself as any other browser. Not sure if that would help in this case though.
You can perfectly well use kwallet4 and kwallet5 at the same time. There is no conflict, they co-exist nicely.
Only the wallets are separated, and won’t be synchronized.
kwalletmanager and kwalletmanager5 conflict with each other (unless this has been fixed already), but you don’t need them to use the wallet(s).
Btw, this conflict is only about the icons, so you should even be able to force the installation of both without problems.
I guess I’ll just downgrade KMail to the default KDE4-based version and wait patiently for the KDE5-based one to be released as an update in Leap.
Well, I don’t use GoogleApps, but most if not all web pages should work fine with the WebKit engine.
The message that Google doesn’t support this version of safari is not a bug in Konqueror though, and can normally be safely ignored.
Or try changing Konqueror’s user agent settings, it can disguise itself as any other browser. Not sure if that would help in this case though.
I read a little about it and it seems that Google considers Konqueror an obsolete version of Safari, maybe based on the fact they share the same ‘engine’, I don’t know. Who knows, maybe one of the Konqueror’s updates will change it?
Sorry, that doesn’t make sense.
KMail5 is included in Leap, since Leap has been released. The latest version released as update so far is 15.12.0 (i.e. KMail 5.1.0), with 15.12.1 (KMail 5.1.1) coming soon.
There’s no point in switching back to the KDE4 version and wait for the KF5 based version released as a future update, it’s already there…
Also, I wouldn’t recommend switching back and forth between different versions. In particular the Akonadi database format might have changed in the newer version, “downgrading” is not supported.
I read a little about it and it seems that Google considers Konqueror an obsolete version of Safari, maybe based on the fact they share the same ‘engine’, I don’t know. Who knows, maybe one of the Konqueror’s updates will change it?
I don’t know how Google exactly identifies the browser, but normally this is done via the “user agent” string sent on each request to the server.
And this can be changed in Konqueror to whatever you like. The default is something like “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux) KHTML/4.14.9 (like Gecko) Konqueror/4.14 SUSE” (on openSUSE), so Google might interpret the KHTML as Safari.
And no, an update won’t change that.
Although, they might also run some “clever” Javascript trying to detect the browser by its capabilities or something like that.
Sorry, that was with KHTML.
With WebKit, Konqueror sends this by default:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) KDE/4.14.10 Safari/534.34
The last part might be where the “outdated Safari” comes from, but as mentioned you can change that, even per website (in “Tools”->“Change Browser Identification”).
