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KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

KDE has announced the release of Plasma 5.3. This release features improved power management, better Bluetooth capabilities, improved Plasma widgets, a tech preview of the Plasma Media Center, big steps towards Wayland support, and more.

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KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 28, 2015 17:28 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (3 responses)

So, when is it coming to Debian testing?

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 28, 2015 20:54 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

As soon as you package it.

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 28, 2015 23:08 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

I.e. no one is packaging it yet?

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 29, 2015 7:33 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> So, when is it coming to Debian testing?

There is a trickle of packages named "libkf5*" coming into experimental. So it is coming, though all I know is from watching from the perspective of a humble user :)

More details here: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-qt-kde@l...

Note that Debian's KDE team made it clear that they are understaffed so any help would be appreciated.

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 28, 2015 23:05 UTC (Tue) by oever (guest, #987) [Link] (2 responses)

I've not tried 5.3 yet, but 5.2 from a live cd (kubuntu) felt smooth like butter. There were some animation glitches and some options have move but overall, moving from a KDE 4 desktop to Plasma 5 is a good change.

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted May 7, 2015 8:26 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (1 responses)

No, it is not smooth like butter and the fact that Kubuntu is now forcing all those who did the Trysty->Utopic upgrade to Plasma 5 (Utopic is close to EOL and Vivid is Plasma 5 only) is IMHO very bad.

I have opened something like 10 bugs in the first 3 hours of use, after having spent more hours just to have the system capable of logging me in.

Issues include:

- Kwin fails badly on nvidia hardware with legacy 304 driver (all users with legacy nvidia hardware are left in the cold, unless they manually install a known patch)

- Plasma frequently crashes (in many occasions works goes lost)

- The login manager does not support a guest user

- Hplip cannot dock in the system tray (all users get a nasty error at every login and then stay without HP printer support, unless they manually install a known patch)

- Plasma desktop crashes when adding an external monitor and switching primary output (so users with external monitors are left in the cold)

- The session manager is not able to restore applications to the proper virtual desktops (which is worse than not having session management at all)

- Some widgets once added cannot be removed because they make plasma crash when one tries to remove them (notably cpu load), so that one has to manually remove them one by one, otherwise users try to use them.

- Screen savers support is completely missing (so machines occasionally get confused for being switched off and unplugged)

- The system settings are incomplete wrt what was available in plasma 4

- and more...

Not to mention other various non essential functionality that was present in plasma 4 applications and that is missing now (tabbed interface in Okular, to say one).

The above issues are present both with plasma 5.2 and plasma 5.3 from the PPA.

The fact is that there is a huge difference from "nice to look at" and "production ready".

And another fact is that whenever KDE reaches a point where everything is (almost) working, it gets almost completely rewritten from scratch, and every time functionality is lost for years.

Now, every time the notification "A new version of Kubuntu is available" pops out, I feel a shiver under my spine, because July is very close by (utopic will stop being supported by the time) and I have to decide whether to reinstall every single machine that got updated to utopic back to LTS or try another desktop.

Incidentally, why should it be easier to migrate vivid from Plasma 5 to XFCE or Cynnamon than to Plasma 4?

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted May 12, 2015 22:01 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> Kwin fails badly on nvidia hardware with legacy 304 driver (all users with legacy nvidia hardware are left in the cold, unless they manually install a known patch)

I was having problems even with pretty current nvidia hardware. Can you point me at the known patch?

> Plasma desktop crashes when adding an external monitor and switching primary output (so users with external monitors are left in the cold)

it also crashes when removing a monitor. You have to boot with the monitor layout that you want to use (and then fiddle with it) and it will keep working.

> The session manager is not able to restore applications to the proper virtual desktops (which is worse than not having session management at all)

What I thought was worse is the response (paraphrased as "you shouldn't be using virtual desktops, you should be using activities instead")

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 29, 2015 0:59 UTC (Wed) by Kayden (guest, #89093) [Link] (3 responses)

Plasma and KWin 5.3.0 are a lot more stable for me than 5.2.2 was. I'd highly recommend upgrading if you're on an earlier 5.x release.

If you're still running KDE 4, I'd still recommend holding off for a little while longer - it's still pretty bleeding edge, and there are some rough corners. It's definitely shaping up nicely, though.

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 29, 2015 3:55 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

so how would someone running Kubuntu (released just a few days ago) go about upgrading? is there a PPA for this?

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 29, 2015 4:45 UTC (Wed) by hrogge (guest, #100012) [Link]

Yes, there is... and it works well:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Pl...

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted May 7, 2015 10:36 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

I definitely agree.

I am sure that Plasma 5 will be very nice once it is completed, but so far it still has a non negligible number of problems and, most important, it misses a lot of functionality that existed in Plasma 4. Note: this is by no means as bad as the 3 -> 4 transition, still Plasma 5 will probably need another year of work or more to be on feature parity with 4.

So, if you are on 5.2 moving to 5.3 is a good idea. If you are on 4, stay with 4 for the time being... /if you can/.

The real issue is that Kubuntu has chosen to be Plasma 5 only for Vivid. They say, that they give you the option of staying with Plasma 4 with the LTS, but this is not a real option. Who updated from the LTS to Utopic last October is now forced to Plasma 5, that - at the current time - is still a big regression against Plasma 4. There is no Plasma 4 PPA for vivid (for some reason it is indicated as 'socially' unacceptable) and there is no infrastructure for downgrading to the closest LTS.

All this is very unfortunate for KDE because Kubuntu (which is one of the largest KDE distributors) is actively making easier to move from Plasma 5 to other desktops (from people I know and work with, cinnamon is the usual destination when coming from KDE) than from Plasma 5 to the full featured Plasma 4.

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 30, 2015 17:32 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Plasma 5.3.0 should be what Fedora 22 ships with (if you get the KDE spin or install it yourself via the stock Fedora repos) when it is released at the end of May (or maybe early June). I'm sure they will follow the 5.x series over the lifecycle of Fedora 22 just like they have done with previous releases.


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