Layman's Explanation Of Plasma

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Layman's Explanation Of Plasma
by cirehawk on Monday 21/Apr/2008, @23:43

I love KDE and have followed KDE4 development with great anticipation. I have a pretty good understanding of all the other core technologies of KDE4, but plasma eludes me a bit. I'm not a programmer at all, so that could be a big part of it. So far the major plasma news seems to revolve around plasmoids. However, since the stated goal of plasma is to revolutionize the desktop and how we view it, I know it has to be about a whole lot more than plasmoids. So my question is, can someone give a general description (or example) of how plasma will fundamentally change the desktop experience? I realize what I'm asking may be difficult to do since I admittedly am not a programmer. If so, I have no problem waiting until the plasma vision becomes more of a reality. I'm sure it will be very clear then. :)

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Re: Layman's Explanation Of Plasma
by bsander on Tuesday 22/Apr/2008, @00:20

I found the Wikipedia article on it to be quite useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(KDE)

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Re: Layman's Explanation Of Plasma
by Anon on Tuesday 22/Apr/2008, @01:14

There's an interesting piece here by a fellow Anon:

http://dot.kde.org/1197522021/1197543708/1197546904/

It sounds like he or she is not a developer, though, but it's still worth a read. I'm not sure what the actual Plasma Devs think of it, though.

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Re: Layman's Explanation Of Plasma
by Lee on Tuesday 22/Apr/2008, @04:49

Basically the idea is to unify the panel, kicker, and desktop into one seemless entity that widgets (aka "plasmoids") can be moved around on and change configuration as necessary depending on whether you put them into a panel, on the desktop. It's also trying to integrate ideas from superkaramba, Mac OS X's Dashboard, etc.

Now, that doesn't sound so great. And, in fact, it's not really. It's a little nicer, and more polished, I suppose. The thing I like best about all this is the scalability and standardisation of ways to add desktop widgets/panel applets to KDE.

That's especially true if plasma is going to fully support Kross (development in any language) anytime soon, but it sounds like it only supports things like Javascript, C, and python directly right now.

Anyway... the claim to revolutionise your desktop comes from the fact that these things are only *currently* setup to emulate a typical desktop with panels, etc. They're more flexible than that. The plasma panel is actually a specific kind of "containment". Containments are generic things which you can put plasmoids into.

Then there's the concept of "zooming" your desktop. This is still very up-in-the-air, as far as I can tell, in terms of how it'll actually work, what the benefits will be, etc. Aaron seems to have a firm idea of what he wants it to do, but I haven't yet seen a good explanation. This zooming will let you move out of normal desktop view, and see your applications or data in new ways, I guess.

I don't think any one thing in KDE 4 is hugely spectacular. Together though, they make a great platform for future apps. Things like arthur & svg; webkit; kross (only useful to me if it allows everything for rapid development of plugins AND **apps using plugins** that the C++ api allows); akonadi; phonon; kitchensync; and, last but certainly not least, Soprano/Nepomuk

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Re: Layman's Explanation Of Plasma
by Lee on Tuesday 22/Apr/2008, @04:51

OOPs, didn't mean to exclude plasma itself from that list of great tech :)

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Re: Layman's Explanation Of Plasma
by cirehawk on Wednesday 23/Apr/2008, @08:46

Thanks for all the input. I'll check out the links you all gave.

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