We are not doing any such thing.
Ever since the beginning, the KDE desktop environments — now called Plasma, as of version 4.x — have always allowed for flexibility and customization, and this flexibility has only increased as the desktop environments evolved from one generation into the next.
Granted, some of the themes you’ll find at store.kde.org are outdated — some of them going back to Plasma 4, even — and are no longer being maintained. As such, these themes will no longer be compatible with the current iterations of the desktop. But the rest of them still are, and the takeaway here is that these themes are as such fully compliant with the flexibility in configuration as provided by the software and as intended by the developers.
Quite often, it’s the global themes that cause problems in plasma 5, and specially if they were conceived for Plasma versions before 5.12. But that is not the case for myself, because my global theme is set to Breath, which is the Manjaro-specific variant of the default Breeze theme. I do use a different Plasma theme (i.e. the theme for the panels and widgets) and I am also using a kvantum theme (i.e. the theme for qt-based applications) with a matching window decoration.
Oh, and a different icon set, and cursors that used to come as a default set in the repos but are now in the AUR. Other than that, I am using my own layout for the panels and a custom wallpaper.
The bottom line is that there’s nothing really exotic going on here. The widgets I use are all from the standard offer as supplied by KDE, with three exceptions: Window Title, Window Buttons and Win7 Mixer.
I have 12 virtual desktops — Plasma supports up to 24 — and 2 activities. I have 6 “hot spots” of the 8 that one can define…:
- Top left: Application Dashboard
- Middle Left: Activity Switcher
- Bottom Left: Show Desktop
- Top Right: Desktop Grid
- Middle Right: Desktop Overview
- Bottom Right: Present Windows (current desktop)
As I have already stated elsewhere, telling people that they should stick to the vanilla settings as it comes out-of-the-box is beyond silly. If one were not to use the flexibility of the Plasma desktop, then why is that flexibility even provided?
You also don’t tell a McLaren, Lamborghini or Ferrari owner that they are to use their supercar only for a single trip around the block at a maximum speed of 30 km/h, just as you also don’t buy an Unimog for driving around in the city.
You know what I call tinkering? Running Windows applications on GNU/Linux. Yes, you can do it — to a certain extent — by way of wine, but wine is a translation framework for running Windows binaries on a UNIX system, and as such, those Windows binaries are not native to the underlying GNU/Linux system, and the translation isn’t perfect, simply because it cannot be, given how very different MS-Windows is from UNIX. But, we here at the forum offer support for it nevertheless.
And then there are the gamers. People running games that were originally designed for Windows but have been ported — more or less — to GNU/Linux via a gaming engine that itself also stems from the Windows world. And we offer support to those people as well, even though that’s not what GNU/Linux was designed for.
Why should the — pardon my choice of words — ignorant newbies who don’t understand versioning numbers or the principle behind LTS releases get preferential treatment over the people who actually know the software and have been using it for well over 20 years?
Either way, even said newbies were not left at a disadvantage, because there was a way for them to run 5.25.5 on their systems while the rest of us could continue running the perfectly functional 5.24.6 LTS release. But now there is no way for the rest of us to continue running 5.24.6 without exposing ourselves to potential breakage as a result of choosing a partial-upgrade scenario.
We, the seasoned users, are the victims of the selfishness of the vocal newbies who demanded — yes, demanded — that Manjaro Stable would adopt the badly coded 5.25.5. And the Manjaro developer who made the call to push 5.25.5 into Stable is himself not even a Plasma user — he uses XFCE.
Once again I will apologize for the tone of my post, but if I first have to read that being a moderator somehow exempts me from having an opinion and I then have to read that I am supposedly clamoring preferential treatment, then I am experiencing a slight elevation in blood pressure.
for me. And I don’t have any extensions installed. The only thing I have that’s not standard Plasma, is GLX Dock. And that’s only because I’m too lazy to bother with learning, or figuring out Plank/Latte dock.
