Kügler: Plasma’s road ahead [LWN.net]

Kügler: Plasma’s road ahead

Posted Oct 19, 2016 10:28 UTC (Wed) by callegar (guest, #16148)
Parent article: Kügler: Plasma’s road ahead

Please, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix before anything else, without assuming that the KDE upstreams (xorg, Qt, nvidia, amd or intel drivers, etc) must be "perfect" for plasma 5 to be usable. Having KDE work even when these components are merely "good enough" to let the other major desktops work would be very much appreciated.

For instance, as of today, it is still impossible to use the Konsole reliably on systems that require the legacy Nvidia driver 340 because of some weird race, when all other major desktops do not have issues with this legacy driver. Furthermore, on intel dual screen keeps having problems...

Kügler: Plasma’s road ahead

Posted Oct 19, 2016 10:50 UTC (Wed) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link] (1 responses)

> For instance, as of today, it is still impossible to use the Konsole reliably on systems that require the legacy Nvidia driver 340 because of some weird race

I hope you see the problem here: one needs very specific hardware to even reproduce the bug. I would not be able to work on it as I don't even have a system where I could install such hardware. Now it gets tricky, we need the intersection of devs with the knowledge to fix it and having access to the hardware. In your particular case I think it's the empty set. This is the main problem with hardware specific issues. It's not like we don't want to fix these things, but mostly that we cannot.

And completely unrelated: KDE Konsole is not part of KDE Plasma. So you are not reaching the right devs here anyway.

Kügler: Plasma’s road ahead

Posted Oct 20, 2016 13:35 UTC (Thu) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

> And completely unrelated: KDE Konsole is not part of KDE Plasma. So you are not reaching the right devs here anyway.

It's not always easy for the uninitiated to find out where to report a bug. Especially anything related to graphics depends on a lot of layers of software. If using Kicker causes the desktop to lock up under Wayland, is the fault in Kicker, Plasma/kwin, KDE libraries, Wayland libs, libinput, Qt, Mesa, Nouveau, some other driver, or the kernel in general? I still haven't reported this, but I'm planning to do so once I find the time to investigate a bit which component to blame. It also makes it harder to find out if a problem is known already, if you don't know which bug tracker to search.

Another example is that I can't write my name in non-XWayland applications, because dead keys don't yet work. I was told Qt is to blame for this, but this would have been quite hard to figure out that without a clear picture of how the input events are routed and processed up the stack to the application. (As an aside, I hope the Qt guys are aware of this problem.)