René J.V. Bertin posted on Sun, 24 Oct 2021 12:19:21 +0200 as excerpted:
[Reordering to put the important discussion first.]
> My current system has (self-built)
> KF5 apps running under that same Plasma4 desktop but it seems I'm going
> to have to keep looking what to replace that with when holding out on a
> Kubuntu 14.04 foundation becomes untenable.
The **BIG** thing I'd worry about there is security -- qt4 has long been
out of support upstream, and kde4 went with it. They, qtwebkit in
particular, are *KNOWN* to be full of security holes by now. A still
supported version of a good distro may help with that to some extent, but
without a supporting upstream and with few other distros sharing the
burden due to the age of the software in question, their possible
security support is going to be limited by definition.
If you're not dealing with malicious local users (or kids old enough to
tinker just trying to avoid whatever limits you might have set), the risk
is generally going to be internet exposure. For the desktop, that's
primarily going to be qtwebkit-depending features like picture-of-the-day
fetching, etc. Be aware that even qtwebkit-5 has been deprecated with
usage *strongly* discouraged in favor of qtwebengine (which is chromium-
based, with an actively updated upstream), because the webkit security
situation was simply no longer tenable. Given that, qtwebkit-4 *is*
going to be a security nightmare by now, and no distro is going to be
able to do much to change that fact.
Put it this way. There's no way I'd consider it even close to tenable to
run on anything I control, but I understand that people might do so, and
given strictly limited with active security monitoring local-net-only
access or better yet, no network access at all, along with no malicious
local users (with no remote-user access at all), I could consider the
risk at least /somewhat/ managed.
With that covered...
> I hear you, but have some doubts about the meaning of the concept
> "improved" where the GUI is concerned. The Plasma5 desktop seems to be
> following the current fashion of levelling down the interface to mobile
> device design and interaction principles and that doesn't incite me at
> all to keep following updates... I came to KDE in its late Plasma4 days
> after observing it seemed to be headed to become a worthy replacement
> for Mac OS X (then still called like that) for me.
I've always said I never saw a default desktop environment that I liked
as-is. I always have to reconfigure, often majorly so, to my liking.
Of course the general problem with that is that the "defaults"
screenshots (and some of the descriptions) in various reviews, etc,
/never/ tend to be that appealing to me -- I actually have to try it
myself to see if it's properly configurable to something I can happily
and reasonable use, or not...
The thing about kde/plasma is that it tends to expose more
configurability than many of the other alternatives, and while "the
latest trend" comes and goes, kde continues to be consistently
configurable to a desktop I'm comfortable with. May it always be so! =:^)
(FWIW back when I first switched to Linux I picked kde3 over gnome1 in
major part because gnome didn't even have a GUI for configuring
individual colors, only the whole set at once along with some other
things via theme change. While individual configuration options have
come and gone since then, from what I've seen gnome has never changed
that "too many GUI configuration options only confuse the dumb user"
mentality... OTOH, I'm very glad gnome's there an option for those who
do have that mentality, because it helps to keep them away from
needlessly crippling kde/plasma's configurability and by extension
usability. =:^)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
