Kubuntu Close-up

In July 2014, KDE announced Plasma 5.0, a visually updated core desktop experience that was user friendly and familiar. Plasma also introduced a new major version of KDE's workspace.

The new "Breeze" artwork concept introduced cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central workflows were streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns were left intact. Plasma 5 improved support for high-DPI displays and added a "converged shell," able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood included the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL ES scene graph. Plasma is built using the new Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

The changes ushered in with Plasma 5 have finally reached the Kubuntu LTS series with Kubuntu 18.04. If you're new to Kubuntu, or even if you're upgrading now from a previous LTS edition, this article will give you a brief introduction to Kubuntu 18.04 and show you some highlights of the Plasma 5 desktop.

Transitions Take Time

Long-term Linux desktop users will remember KDE 3 and 4. These major platform transitions brought stunning improvements to the KDE framework and the underlying Qt ( say "Cute" ) libraries. These transitions were an enormous undertaking, which was particularly burdensome for KDE – not only was the core desktop ported to the new Qt toolset, but it also required KDE Frameworks and the full set of applications. KDE applications represent a considerable portfolio of software, all of which must be ported to the new frameworks at each major release transition. Of course, users found such transitions frustrating, which resulted in a drop in the user base. However, with each transition, the KDE community delivered improvements that helped with recovering the lost user base.

Plasma Active Desktop

The Plasma desktop in Kubuntu blends together the dark and light breeze themes to create a beautiful and modern-looking desktop (Figure 1). Plasma uses vector-scaling graphics throughout, which provides smooth scaling on all displays. The ethos behind Plasma is one of an active desktop. Active means that the desktop should both embrace and assimilate your day-to-day workflow. This active desktop is achieved through the use of widgets (aka plasmoids ) – small configurable desktop applets that offer a huge range of functions.

Figure 1: The default Kubuntu desktop.

One of my favorite uses for Plasma widgets is to create specialized active desktops that are configured to a specific workflow. Recently, I have been working on the #100DaysOfCode challenge. To support this activity, I configured a selection of widgets on my desktop consisting of the Notes, Timer, and Browser widgets. These tools enable me to have the PHP documentation sitting directly on the desktop, alongside my notes and a countdown timer, which enables me to configure specific blocks of time to work on coding.

To set this up for your environment, begin by right clicking on the Plasma desktop and choose +Add Widgets. A panel on the left will slide out. The Add Widgets panel contains the default set of widgets shipped with Kubuntu. Deploying these widgets onto your desktop is as simple as dragging and dropping. Additionally, a vast array of widgets are available through the Get New Widgets button at the bottom of the panel.

Each widget carries its own specialized configuration, resize, and positioning functions. To access the configuration panel, hold down a long left click on the widget (Figure 2). The widgets scale smoothly. You can drag them into different locations across the desktop and organize them neatly to match your specialized workflow.

Figure 2: CPU Load monitoring widget, with its configuration menu activated.

Plasma Activities

Activities are an often undiscovered and underutilized Kubuntu feature. Activities allow you to set up desktops that are specifically tailored to your work environment. You can think of activities as something like virtual machines or Docker images for your desktop. Activities have independent widget sets, wallpapers, and application separation. You can configure activities for software development, blogging, photography, and gaming. Access each of these activities with a simple click to switch.

As an example: Say you're working on a new KDE application using Qt Designer, and you've just kicked off a large compilation. Instead of opening another application to work on your blog, simply switch to your blogging activity. All your work continues running in the software development activity, leaving you with a clutter-free desktop to work on your blog. This feature becomes even more useful when you create multiple activities and configure them to match each of your workflows.

Suppose you would like to create a Kubuntu Community activity and add some useful widgets that are connected to community resources. Just right-click on your desktop and click Activities from the menu. From the Activities panel (which slides out from the left ), click on Create Activity. Name the activity Kubuntu Community, and click Create. Your new activity appears in the activity panel. Click on the activity to switch to it.

Once you are in your shiny new Kubuntu Community activity (Figure 3), you can configure the desktop, wallpaper, and widgets, and these settings will remain with this activity. Now you can add some suitable widgets that give you access to the Kubuntu community [1]. Use the Get New Widgets button to install the RSS widget by MirceaKitsune. Then add 2 browser widgets and one RSS feed widget to your activity. Use each widgets' configuration to set the RSS feed URL to http://kubuntu.org/feed/ and thebrowser widget URLs to https://kubuntu.org/community/ and https://community.kde.org/

Figure 3: The configured Kubuntu Community activity.

Personalizing Your Plasma Desktop

Kubuntu is all about being configurable, providing you with a wide range of configuration settings. With these options, you can configure almost any desktop paradigm.

By default, Kubuntu comes with three different Kickoff menus (the Plasma icon on the bottom left that launches the application chooser ) To see the different styles, right-click on the Kickoff icon. Click on Alternatives, and you will be presented with a switcher that contains three choices:

• Application Dashboard: Provides a full-screen application chooser.
• Application Launcher: Enabled by default.
• Application Menu: An option familiar to all KDE aficionados.

Next you can change the bottom panel, making it a little smaller, shorter, and centered. This option is useful for getting a little extra screen real estate. On the very right of the bottom panel, click the hamburger menu (three horizontal bars ). This option opens the configuration settings. On the right, you'll notice two arrows (left and right). The arrows allow you to shrink or stretch the panel.

On the left, you'll notice a double-ended arrow, which allows you to move the positioning of the panel from left to right. Shrink the panel a little (to suit your taste) and then position it (central is nice and rather OSX-like ).

You can also add an activities launcher to make it easier to switch activities without having to right-click on the desktop.

From the panel configuration menu, click on +Add Widgets, and click and drag the Activities widget (which shows the activity manager) down onto the bottom panel. You'll notice that the icons slide around as you choose a position. Once you are happy with the location, left-click to drop the widget onto the panel. Voila! Now you have an activity switcher on your panel (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The OSX-inspired menu panel with an activity switcher.

You can add many more widgets to the bottom panel using the same technique.

A Few Final Funky Features

So far I have only scratched the surface of what is possible with Kubuntu 18.04. I'll finish this article by presenting some really funky new features.

When you first install Kubuntu it runs a background process called Baloo. Baloo's job is to provide a Luciene index of your home directory. This index is used by the global menu to provide super-quick access to your files and directories.

To access the global menu, click Alt+Space, and the menu will appear top and center.

Type anything you like into the box, and the global menu will show you some intelligent results – whether it be launching an application, locating a file, or finding a contact. In fact, the global menu will even present you with potential applications that you might want to install from the KDE Discover Software Center. Now that's pretty funky wouldn't you agree?

Finally, I want to share a hidden gem with you. You might want to add extra items into your launcher menu. An example might be if you have downloaded an application from the Internet, and perhaps installed it yourself, and you find that there is no entry in the Application Launcher. Use the global menu Alt+Space and type kmenuedit into the search box. Click on Run kmenuedit. The KMenuEdit application (Figure 5) will let you add additional Application Launcher menu items with icons.

Figure 5: Configuring additional menu entries using KMenuEdit.

The Author

Rick Timmis (http://www.ricktimmis.com) is a charismatic, optimistic, and sociable geek. He is an active participant in the free software and open source community, as well as a founding member and former CEO of the UK Open Source Consortium. He is currently a community manager, council member, and developer with the Kubuntu flavor of the Ubuntu linux distribution.