KDE 5 - How is it?

zoidie · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2010 Posts: 47

Hi,

I've been toying with updating to KDE 5 and was after some feedback from anyone who uses it. The upgrade process on the wiki looks relatively straight forward and whilst I appreciate it isn't marked as stable yet, it seems like it has been around for a while now and does look quite nice!

The forum is relatively quiet on the topic so either few people are using it or it works well. Is there any major reason against upgrading? Or does anybody know when it might be marked as stable and replace KDE4 anyway.

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Perfect Gentleman · Veteran Joined: 18 May 2014 Posts: 1246

colinxp · n00b Joined: 26 Aug 2008 Posts: 12

I have upgraded to plasma 5 without problem. It runs quite stable on my computer.

Yamakuzure · Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 2:01 pm Post subject:

Using the latest ebuilds from kde overlay, Plasma 5 works very well on my workplace laptop.

There are still minor issues and annoyances, and not all applications have been ported to KF 5 already (see KF5 Porting Status), but apart from that everything is fine.

The most important issues on my system are:

Some legacy system tray icons, like from davmail, do not show up reliably.
Switching the main monitor when plugging in/out a secondary monitor isn't done automatically like in KDE 4. I have to do it using the system settings. And then the panel does not alwys move automatically and has to be moved by hand.

Apart from these two, rather minor issues, everything is well. At least on my system. ;-)

_________________
Important German:

"Aha" - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck.
"Tja" - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house.

Perfect Gentleman · Veteran Joined: 18 May 2014 Posts: 1246

zoidie · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2010 Posts: 47

I think I'll give it a go then.... This may take some time!

steveL · Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 4:30 pm Post subject:

msst · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jun 2011 Posts: 259

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

HerbMillerJW · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2012 Posts: 37

Been my daily driver for about two months now. No more problems than you have with any other desktop.

BobWya · Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 11:44 pm Post subject:

Maybe nobody's posting because their Plasma 5 Desktops are all broken? :lol:

Posted from my Nexus 7 :wink:

_________________
system: G751JT (ASUS-NotebookSKU); processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4710HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz; memory: 32GiB System Memory; display: GM204M [GeForce GTX 970M]; disk: 2048GB Samsung SSD 850;BD-CMB UJ172 S;1024GB Samsung SSD 850

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

I've used it several times in the last year and a half or so. It's much better and is rock solid stable for me now where I can run it for weeks without a crash or freeze. It used to be different in the past where there were graphics issues and memory leaks. In my experience those are gone. I'm using ~amd64 without the overlay but I\'ve been considering giving the kde-overlay a try to some degree as I have in the past (for a few months I was even using all live 9999 versions).

I did notice Frameworks 5.20 hasn't made it yet to ~amd64. When it does hopefully (as usual) things are even better as I believe from the release notes there were many bug fixes. However there is always the risk of regressions. I'm not sure how it will be this time but in the past I've seen some bad regressions so if it is important you are better off having a test machine or waiting a bit to see what others experience before performing a major Frameworks/Applications/Plasma upgrade.

zoidie · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2010 Posts: 47

Well I've made it. Install went well and was greeted by the shiny new login manager only to be taken to a black screen on login! Appears to be some problems with egl/nvidia somewhere along the line. At the moment I've got round it by changing opengl to xorg-11. At least I can explore for a bit now!

BobWya · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2016 9:57 pm Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2016 10:02 pm Post subject:

Frameworks 5.20 is in ~amd64 as of today.

I did notice last week when the pure k5 Kaos (arch based) distro updated to 5.20 it seemed a lot smoother.

Currently updating my Gentoo installs- should probably see the same improvements as Kaos exhibited.

One thing was that with Kaos and the new 5.20 packages, I tested a kernel config. I've used make xconfig (qt version of make gconfig) for many years, but recently it wouldn't load my config file while in kde on Gentoo. I've been having to boot to xfce4 whenver I've needed to compile a kernel, where make xconfig does work. I suspected a qt and/or k5 problem, and Kaos seemed to confirm that. FWIW, here's my post on that problem. Hopefully, after the 5.20 updates, make xconfig will again work on kde Gentoo.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7886602-highlight-.html#7886602
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

BobWya · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:45 pm Post subject:

zoidie · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2010 Posts: 47

Disabling egl flag (and to do this gles) has got me working on Nvidia drivers/opengl. I'm not entirely sure why I had gles enabled anyway as appears to be for embedded systems (someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that).

Now I just need to fix the keyboard layout that seems to be determined by the login manager and try and do something about the ugly Chromium icon in the notification area.

BobWya · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2016 3:21 pm Post subject:

Oh no...!! Now I've noticed my little system tray music player notification icon thingy isn't working anymore... 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps backwards... :roll:

_________________
system: G751JT (ASUS-NotebookSKU); processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4710HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz; memory: 32GiB System Memory; display: GM204M [GeForce GTX 970M]; disk: 2048GB Samsung SSD 850;BD-CMB UJ172 S;1024GB Samsung SSD 850

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Self-inflicted pain by using overlay stuff.

BobWya · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2016 8:47 pm Post subject:

Anthony7E · n00b Joined: 18 Mar 2015 Posts: 10

Are you all on systemd or openRC with Plasma? Any differences?

BobWya · Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 10:53 pm Post subject:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

OpenRC works just fine with sddm.