HEADS UP

I’ll first say that this blog post very one sided towards KDE but I do like and love the work that every developer does for Desktop Environments like GNOME Shell, Unity, elementary’s Pantheon Shell and even Linux Mint’s Cinnamon. While I might get some names and descriptions wrong please do correct me.

Some Linux terminology:

• KDE – Core project
• Plasma – Desktop
• Kwin – Window Manager

Some people just use there computers the way the developers designed and make no changes what so ever (looking at you Windows and Mac OS X users), but us Linux or BSD users do not always feel this works for us. While some users of the above mentioned OS’s can and do move the panel around a bit, Plasma takes to a whole new Universe.

The Plasma Universe  

First let’s go though what my Plasma Desktop looks like – Hey I love pugs don’t judge!

With Plasma I get to have a desktop that is truly mine, from the widgets to panel placement and design.

Launchers

With the other Shell’s you launch your applications with well… a launcher but if your on GNOME Shell you have just a fullscreen launcher (which I do like a bit, I’m excluding GNOME Extensions out of this for a stock like experience). Unity has a similar setup but you can resize it a degree, both of which go with the “type to search” layout while Linux Mint’s Cinnamon goes with the old and truth menu layout.

But with Plasma you have a choice of which one you want (for the fullscreen one you need Plasma 5.4):

Keyboard shortcuts

I love the shortcuts that Unity uses:

• Meta + W for all the windows in all the workspaces
• Meta + S for switching workspaces
• Meta + A for the windows in the current workspace.

But I can make those shortcuts in Plasma as well!