Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live

I agree with that.

But, having accidentally installed Plasma Active on my laptop in updating to Kubuntu 12.04, I can somewhat relieve you of your fears: it's not the same. Going back to a more usual (useful on that hardware) desktop was not too much more than changing from an invasive theme to another that suited better. It left some niggles to clean (fonts, menu bars TOO LARGE etc.) Importantly, it still had all the keyboard shortcuts I had set.

So in the case of KDE Active, it does indeed seem to be a presentation layer that adds touch stuff, but does not remove other ways of interaction that are well established on pc hardware. I don't have a tablet to install it on, but had I a pc with a touchscreen, I might well reinstall it to try it out there.

We (KDE) don't.

Plasma Active is different to the contenders you mention in that we provide different UIs per device. The workspace and apps are not the same across devices, but adapt themselves to characteristics of a given device, such as screen space and input methods.

That means that on a desktop, you'll continue to use the "proven" workspace layout and features, on a tablet you'll be presented with a different interface (which still shares the large majority of its code with the desktop version). We achieve this with device profiles for widgets, layouts, for example, and different shell layouts and functionality per device.

I think presenting the same interface on different devices leads to dumbed down apps that only provide the lowest common denominator. Besides that, it only scales so far (what's a tablet anyway, 10", 7", 5" ... ?) -- so in the end will you run an app that is designed to also work down to 5" screens? I don't think this works at all, and it's not what the user wants. Devices are different for good reasons, the UI has to reflect that.

Plasma has been designed as a framework for UIs for different devices, and on our way, we improve the interoperability on the UI level across the device spectrum. You can compare this to the idea of the Linux kernel, which also adapts itself to a given device without sacrificing on the other end: Linux supporting big iron servers is not a problem for it also powering my phone, mediacenter, tablet, laptop or desktop.

> Please please please please please don't follow everyone else off this interface cliff.

Or, if you do, make it only a theme that I can change (and actually test the alternative).

I think there are two different issues: (1) there's a real difference between a laptop and a tablet, or, more generally, between devices with different sorts of input and output affordances; (2) a device may not fit exactly into any of yesterday's profiles. For that matter, even today's devices don't always fit into neat profiles or even stay the same. My laptop is a laptop, but a tablet, except when I'm eating a burrito, in which case its keyboard is less useful. When I've got my trackball plugged in, it's also a bit different, and sometimes I've got it plugged into a monitor and I'm sitting across the room, and it's a media center. When it's a media center that thinks it's a laptop, the text is too small to read comfortably.

The Unity mess is going in the wrong direction, obviously: different devices are actually really different, and it is wrong to treat them the same. But the status quo is also wrong: even the same device is sometimes different, and you need multiple UI configurations and the ability to switch between profiles based on context.

(For that matter, my laptop's headphones are too loud, and the speakers are just right, except when the air conditioner goes on and they're too quiet.)

> My laptop is *NOT* a tablet. My desktop is *NOT* a big phone. I do not touch the screen. I type and, when I can't avoid it, I mouse. One application should *NOT* take up the whole screen. Icons, titlebars, buttons etc., do not need to all be 64px tall. I have two huge monitors so I can do spreadsheets, terminals, browsers, IMs, and still have room for my task bar, date and time, notifications area, generous scrolling resource monitor, and separate 'start' / Applications / Places / System menus. (Still using Gnome 2 on Ubuntu Maverick.)

There is nothing wrong on having the same software on a phone, a tablet, a netbook and a huge ten screen desktop. The main issue is that the toolkit you are referring to is not able to provide a proper automated environment accross all different devices. That means a proper relayout of your application depending on a device theme. Taking into account the dpi to automatically scale the font and the graphics that need it without scaling the part that shouldn't. Taking also into account the variation in the input system (a finger is way bigger than a mouse pointer).

In fact, soon you realize that if your toolkit provide all of this for free, the same code will run on all your device and still feel good because it is designed to take your device into account. I believe that the main failure of Unity is that it doesn't take your device into account.

And this is not science fiction, the Enlightenment project has been working on that for years and the EFL already provide part of the solution. To make it properly work you actually need the window manager and the toolkit to cooperate...