This week we landed a significant visual improvement for Discover: the app lists have been re-implemented using a new “cards” style in Kirigami. This was a lovely collaboration between Marco Martin, Aleix Pol, and myself. And best of all, this pretty “cards”-style list is also available to other Kirigami apps!
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug that could cause Discover’s “active tasks” view to not show any progress (KDE bug 391760, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Aleix Pol)
UI polish & improvements
- Discover’s list items look much prettier now (KDE Phabricator revisions D11316 and D11625, and commit 29a1228f67b8b65e866128df0d8aa85a72345f5b, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Marco Martin Aleix Pol, and me, Nate Graham):
- The Proceed dialog no longer shows a redundant close button in the corner (KDE Phabricator revision FFFF, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by me, Nate Graham):
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Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Wonderful !
That’s why I’m very much in love with KDE-NEOMN.
Go on and on with this wonderful work.
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Thanks, glad you’re enjoying it!
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Great work again!
Unrelated to this post, but will Kubuntu 18.04 have a minimal install option where all packages except the bare minimum are removed? It would be great to have such an option.
The default Kubuntu install does not recognize my touchpad (synaptics) but KDE neon recognizes it perfectly. Maybe some packages are missing in the Kubuntu iso?
Same with suspend/resume on my laptop, Kubuntu just freezes while kde neon works perfectly.
Same with the stablity of the shell. On Kubuntu it kept crashing, but kde neon has never crashed on me.
These are not very reports, but I hope Kubuntu can work the kde neon team to see how they achieve rock solid stability and what packages they include to get touchpads, suspend/resume to work perfectly.
Looking forward to this week in productivity post!
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Yes, it will have a minimal install option!
Which version of Kubuntu has the issues you mentioned?
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Awesome! Looking to forward to trying out the minimal install!
I was using Kubuntu 17.10.
Touchpad, suspend/resume work perfectly under gnome, so it’s unlikely to be a hardware issue.
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Kubuntu 17.10 uses libinput by default. Are you saying that if you switch to the synaptics drivers, that your touchpad is recognized?
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I like the new “card” effect. Very classy and timeless. However, I do sorta miss the nice big category header images. I’m sure it wasn’t the most efficient use of screen space, but it added a certain amount of flair to Discover. And there’s always room in my world for eye candy!
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Our thinking was that the app icons and screenshots should be providing the eye candy!
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Would be nice to change install/remove buttons colours to recognise easily which one do you want to install/remove while viewing apps in list.
Anyway, awesome job!
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Yep, that’s on the to-do list, but we’re waiting on support from Qt.
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At first a big “thank you” for your ongoing effort to keep us informed about the development and bring usability and productivity to the next level.
I like the new card effect but i noticed a little inconsistency in your screenshot: Freeciv and 0 A.D. have no category displayed and therefore the separator line moves very close to the install button. This is a) too close and b) inconsistent to the other elements.
My proposal: If an item doesn´t has a categroy then just leave the line blank but don´t remove it. Thus it is in line with the other elements.
I quickly made a little mockup showing the effect and also added another suggestion: Add some colored background to the category labels so they look like the labels used e.g. in Gmail. I would picked a decent color which does not grab too much focus.
Mockup:
https://imgur.com/a/muRaW
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Thanks for the kind words! The inconsistent category issue is something I’m working on. I like your mockup, but I’m leaning towards just removing them entirely from the list views. I’m not sure what value they really bring. Thoughts?
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I also don’t think they add much useful information. Removing them from the list view seems to be the right thing to do.
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Here, have a patch! https://phabricator.kde.org/D11842
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Good job – looks much better without those categories, but please add a little bit spacing between the install button and the spacer line beneath it.
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Yes, I plan to, as soon as I figure out how without redoing the whole layout!
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