Kde 5

[<3]

It's been slightly over a year since KDE 5 was released and they are now at version 5.14, I am thinking about taking the plunge to move from KDE 4.x to KDE 5 but it still does not appear like KDE 5 has been marked stable in the portage tree, I'm guessing that there is a reason for this and wanted to see if anyone with first hand experience with KDE 5 and could give me their thoughts on it. Also looking at bugs.gentoo.org I see a lot of KDE bugs but most of them are for KDE 4.x and KDE 4.x runs fine for me, it's expected that a DM as large as KDE would have a lot of bugs.

[davidm]

If you're absolutely focused on stability I would probably stick with kde4 in the stable Gentoo tree for a while longer. If you want some progress and are prepared for a little paper cut here and there then consider installing Plasma 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 which is now in testing in portage. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE/Plasma_5_upgrade for how to do that.

If you are prepared for a little more breakage but a mostly fully functional desktop you might consider also enabling the kde-overlay and pulling in the KF5 enabled application releases. The newest stable is 15.04.3 I believe. 15.08 is due to be released later next month. But to go the route of using the overlay you'll have to know how to unmask and keyword (if using stable) the packages.

If you use session management or Activities note that in anything less than the plasma/frameworks live builds it is pretty much broken. Many applications -- both qt4 and qt5 will not restore properly from a saved session. Where they do restore they will tend to all go on the first virtual desktop and screen in the first activity. This is largely due to a kwin bug which is fixed in master/plasma 5.4. When using the live Plasma/Frameworks builds (*-9999) I have noted the situation is a bit better sinc ethe kwin bug is fixed. The QT4 applications seem to restore correctly to both the proper virtual desktop and activity. However the QT5 applications (right now you have to usually unmask these from the kde-overlay to use them) do not in my experience. I believe this problem is due to a qt5 bug which I'm not sure has even been patched in the master tree yet though bug reports and proposed patches exist.

Also while multi-screen support in Plasma 5.3 is a lot better than in the past (and it works pretty well for me), some people report it can be a little wonky at times still. I've seen upstream KDE developers suggest that things are a bit better for multi screen support if you use qt5.5 (available in the qt overlay) versus qt5.4 though.

Also honestly I have to say that it seems Plasma 5 exposes more flaws in the GPU and drivers. I've noticed more problems with that. However it also pushes that hardware a bit harder than kde4 did and this could explain it a bit. In my case I'm using a very old GPU and it might simply be failing or otherwise merely a corner case. I've yet to investigate and try things like swapping in another GPU.

Anyway If you do decide to test it out note that it's possible to switch back to kde4 if you decide it's not to your liking.

[<3]

You can't go back? how is that possible?

[davidm]

[<3]

OK, that's fine.

[thurnax]

This rises a few questions with me. I have tried the non-overlay version of KDE/Plasma 5 and find it to be fairly stable.

There are a few bugs, one prevents me to change the system/tray icons, the changes don't stick. When dragging gadgets/widgets on the desktop they can accidentally jump out of the screen and turn unreachable with the mouse. The Window manager usually crashes upon logout or shutdown.

These issues may already have been fixed in later versions of KDE5 so the KDE development team may not be interested in bug reports from this build. So the question is maybe it is better to go with the latest builds (which I'm guessing that overlay implies) and be more proactive in the bug reporting.

Not that I'm particularly gung-ho on bickering with system issues but I guess I can make some sacrifices in the name of science

[davidm]

I'm using plasma and frameworks live (-9999) packages from the overlay. The crashes at login or logoff thing has been fixed for me there. That part is pretty stable now in my experience. However if you are seeing something like this:

[adsicks]

[davidm]

[adsicks]

I saw that fix several places online. I think it is a bad intel driver in portage in my system. This was a clean install with the plasma/systemd profile. But I had used the 15.04/5.13/5.4 combo in portage. I changed all my symlinks to the live version of these files, unmasked the lastest non-9999 libva-intel driver, updated and depcleaned and now have a stable system. Minutes before I got the notification for this post I had switched over on vt-12 and I still have the segfault, but no hang, and some fifo underruns messages on my intel drm driver. I guess the underrun messages catch whatever was hanging before....

[bluehippy]

I have a similar problem with a mobile radeon graphics card (RV710) and posted it earlier here.

The mentioned downgrading doesn't apply, since the installed version is already 7.0.27

[adsicks]

Try putting a script in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/ to disable drkonqi. That would hang on mine whenever there was a segfault I found by doing a ps -aux |grep kwin_x11

[bluehippy]

Actually, I didn't have this problem until a recent update of kdeframeworks or plasma. I'm not sure, but it might happened after updating to frameworks 5.14. Can someone confirm this?


EDIT:
Just updated to plasma-meta-5.4.2 and the lock screen works normally again. I can do both, locking manually and automatically

[<3]

Any updates on KDE 5 since KDE 4 seems to be discontinued upstream and its been almost 1.5 years since KDE 5 was released?

[asturm]

KDE 4 development was stopped, If you wanted to say that.

[<3]

isn't that exactly what I said.

[asturm]

Oh, depends on how you read it. A bit of punctuation helps there.

Well, updates to KDE Plasma, Applications and Frameworks happen almost weekly.

[<3]

But that is my point, those weekly updates are for KDE SC 5 not KDE SC 4.

[asturm]

Yes, KDE SC 4 development has stopped. What's your question then, exactly? We are kind of talking past each other

[<3]

if development of KDE SC 4 has stopped when will portage support of KDE SC 5 begin.

[asturm]

KDE SC 5 does not exist.

KDE Plasma 5.5.2 is in portage.
KDE Frameworks 5.17 is in portage.
KDE Applications 15.08.3 is, for the biggest part, in portage.

[Helena]

I have been using KDE 5 in the unstable tree for some months now and it's getting better. However Gentoo does not keep its documentation up to date. The wiki articles are outdated; there is no need to unmask or use overlays any more AFAIK. Also I found out that some basic utilities are missing or hard to find.

As is mentioned in the wiki KDE 5 consists of three components:

• Plasma
  
• Frameworks
  
• Applications

The first 2 items are installed by

[asturm]

[msst]

And to add my experience - I recently tried out plasma5 git-master and later stepped back to qt/kde5&plasma5 testing - I would not consider it stable enough for unmasking, not to speak of making it stable or even the default kde.

There are still several - maybe not of the major things - packages not ported to KF5. Also it still happens that things simply do not compile (I manually masked the latest qt5 testing as the only available qt5webkit thing was lagging behind and causing compile trouble). kde5-pam bindings are not fully working neither do saved multi-virtual desktop session behave well. And so on.

It is apparently making progress but I would not be surprised if it would take another 1-2 years before it is really stable. I would rather be surprised if that happens already this year...

[asturm]

By your description you had apparently installed Qt-5.6.0 beta from qt overlay which totally breaks everything. That makes any compile trouble actually expected. Be careful using overlays, next time.