KDE Ships Plasma 5.3 [LWN.net]

KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

Posted Apr 28, 2015 23:05 UTC (Tue) by oever (guest, #987)
Parent article: KDE Ships Plasma 5.3

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.

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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")