KDE 5 - How is it?

gerard27 · Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 3:44 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your answer.
Only proves kde5 is not ready by a long shot.
You probably couldn't find any up to date docs like me.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Not sure that proves anything, with wacomtablet being an external application not even part of a KDE bundle.

What more documentation than https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE do you need?

gerard27 · Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 6:15 pm Post subject:

How to modify/write solid for instance.
It's not in your link.
I guess people using laptops will be fine,but I'm on a desktop.
Gerard,
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

What do you want to achieve? Not sure I can follow, I use desktops myself. Has there been similar documentation for KDE SC4?

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

Here is my (mostly negative) experience with updating to KDE5 from KDE4. I say "mostly negative" from the perspective of a user who uses KDE almost exclusively as a Window Manager plus a few applications (mainly konsole, kate, okular). I had to give up on the very nice korganizer a few years back after the "semantic desktop" nonsense, and nowadays this probably precludes me from using most other KDE applications.

For the record, i had been postponing the switch to Plasma 5 up until a couple of weeks ago, when a "world" update was asking me to set the qt5 flag for several packages, and even after that there were some nagging problems, so i put on my optimist hat and said what the heck, let's give it a try... Never again! What i find infuriating is that KDE developers stopped support of KDE4 while KDE5 is still at this immature state! Of course putting out new KDE5 versions for those willing to be beta testers is fine --as long as the stable KDE4 product is still supported!

My main issue: My workhorse tool, the konsole, crashes. As far as i can tell, it crashes while i type stuff inside the nano editor (called by mutt). But i don't know whether this is something due to nano (or mutt) itself or due to "lots of typing", which typically occurs inside nano much more than at the konsole prompt. This is a show-stopper for me. When konsole crashes, i sometimes lose the text i was in the midst of typing, but also whatever else was running in the various konsole tabs. Worse yet, when i relaunch konsole, most of the time it does not remember its previous state, and i have to relaunch all my tabs and cd into all the working directories! Considering the crash happens every now and then, this is completely unacceptable for normal use!
Inconsistency: As i said, when it crashes (but also when i close it) and i reopen it, the konsole "most of the time" won't remember its previous state --but sometimes it will! Similarly, when i exit KDE and restart it, sometimes it won't remember its previous state, but sometimes it will! I noticed that if i open a gtk-based application (deadbeef) that for some reason KDE cannot detect and auto-relaunch when it restarts, then any application that i happen to open *after* i started deadbeef is not remembered by KDE when it restarts. However, i have not done repeated experiments to be entirely sure --sorry guys, i did not sign up as a KDE beta tester, it is the KDE project that rudely forces me to become one by discontinuing KDE4 support, and this is not the best way to incite help!
When i click on the Application Launcher or the various other taskbar widgets (clock, kmix, ...), their pop-up window opens but closes right away, so i cannot do anything with them! That would also be a show stopper, except i found a workaround: switch to my second Desktop, and then the pop-up window remains open... Oh, and did i say inconsistency: "Sometimes" the problem gets fixed (during the same KDE session), then it may break down again...
I set the task manager to "Maximum rows -> 2" and enabled the option "Always arrange tasks in columns of as many rows". Tough luck: My taskbar still shows a single row. I even opened many windows to see whether this ever changes: It doesn't.
I tried to create an icon on the taskbar, so that when i click on it a script gets executed. It used to work on KDE4. No luck so far with Plasma 5. The closest i could find to this functionality is the "Show a Launcher when not running" option when i right-click on a taskbar tab. However, this seems to just recall the name of the application in question, not the parameters that i used when opening it.
The taskbar is unstable. Just minutes ago, i clicked on the taskbar Settings, i added a spacer, then removed it. Alas, removing the spacer had the result of removing *all* my widgets except the clock! Keyboard layout switcher, kmix, device notifier, all gone!
Debugging some of these issues has become harder since KDE now puts all its config files inside ~/.config rather than inside ~/.kde4 . I don't know if the intention was good (e.g., complying with some "common desktop" requirement) but the consequence is that i can no longer simply rename ~/.kde4 and restart a virgin KDE to see whether it fixes a problem. Worse yet, when i decide to get rid of KDE, i'll have to manually hunt down and delete one by one all the KDE files now peppered all over ~/.config ...

If there are no fixes to these problems, i will probably either have to go back to KDE4 and solve the "nagging problems" that made me update or look into an alternative WM...

This is just a list of my major issues, there's a number of minor ones, too. Just to mention one example, the minimum width of the konsole tabs is set to much wider than in KDE4. As a result, it only takes me opening 8 tabs before there's no more room for new tabs for the given width of my konsole window. New tabs can be added, but can only be accessed via the arrow. In KDE4, this arrow appeared only after many more tabs were opened.

Also, i did not mention any of the issues that i was able to solve, even though they took me hours and hours, including disabling Baloo. Indeed, how much brash does it take to have an option in the System Settings for every curl and festoon of window decoration but not have an option to disable freaking Baloo? For that matter, how hard would it have been to try to import as many KDE4 settings as possible rather than requiring the user to redo them all?

Gentoo is supposed to be bleeding edge, so i cannot expect from Gentoo devs to support KDE4 if it's no longer supported by the upstream. But i wonder how other distros cope with this. Do they have the resources to backport fixes (especially security fixes) to KDE4? Plasma 5 is clearly a half-baked product for which, as a user, i have so far seen absolutely no advantage over KDE4, but i got hours and hours of frustration and wasted time! Coming after the KDE3-to-KDE4 fiasco and a number of recent eye-candy-over-substance cases in the open source universe, it makes one wonder whether we have reached the limits of the "Bazaar" model of open source development. Clearly, we cannot force people to work on stuff they consider boring, such as fixing bugs or implementing useful features that may not look fancy. Most people seem to gravitate toward things they consider exciting (or perhaps help with their CV?) even if most users think otherwise. Short of having sponsors paying people to fix bugs in a systematic way, my only other hope was that these coders may actually use the stuff they write for their day-to-day work, which should guarantee a minimum of stability. What i see with Plasma 5 makes me wonder whether most KDE devs are young people who get switched to Microsoft Windows by their employer as soon as they get a "real" job and need a stable computing platform...

PS: It would be an omission not to thank here the Gentoo devs who took the time to write detailed instructions about how to move to Plasma 5; it no doubt saved me from even more wasted hours of bug tracking!

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

gerard27 · Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2016 5:27 pm Post subject:

@genstorm,
Wtf do you mean by saying wacomtablet is not part of the bundle.
What bundle?
Wacomtablet works and the latest version IS for kde5!
The problem is in system settings!
In "help about" you'll see it's date:2010!!
I can not set the curves because of that.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

KDE has 3 products:
Frameworks
Applications
Plasma

If you take a look at its category, wacomtablet is part of kde-misc/ - that means it is not, and was never, part of any official KDE product. So wacomtablet for Plasma-5 being only available as a beta does not say anything about the state of a KDE product. If it says 2010 in Help/About then for sure it is not the correct version for Plasma-5.

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

Xywa · Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2016 8:10 am Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2016 3:47 pm Post subject:

Here's the thread with the clean up cache tip, with the simple commands to easily get rid of the old cruft.

Worked wonders for me. After I did this, and refreshing my kde user config files, a full kde5 on ~amd64 systems has no more weird problems, or in my case on several Gentoo installs, any problems at all.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1043368.html
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Plasma-5.6.5 now in tree (~amd64) fixes lots of multiscreen issues/crashes on screen suspend, raises min Qt dependency to 5.6.1 for that reason.

gerard27 · Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:21 pm Post subject:

Noticed something else.
The GPU temperature runs at about 8 degrees centigrade higher than in kde4.
To be fair I ran the same programs in both.
Even when not doing anything kde5 runs at a higher temp.
I have no idea what program to use to find out what's causing this,
They are on separate partitions and the video card is passive cooled.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

I've heard that from a few people now, and I'm not sure what to make of it. For sure Qt-5/Plasma-5 is making more use of your GPU, and it may be that some GPUs are switching to a different mode then. Either way it is probably more noticable on a passively cooled part like yours.

Xywa · Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2016 6:25 pm Post subject:

gerard27 · Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2016 7:11 pm Post subject:

@Xywa,
I always switch off all effects because I hate them.
Same for baloo and semantic-craptop.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

Xywa · Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 6:09 am Post subject:

gerard27 · Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 2:23 pm Post subject:

You're right Xywa.
I discovered a lot more settings that eat GPU.
Disabled them all.

After that I made a test kde4 versus kde5:
Ksysgard:
memusage 0.58 Gib kde5 0.53 Gib kde4.

Nvidia xserver settings:
GPU temp 51 degrees kde5 45 degrees kde4.

In both cases fresh boot and only ksysgard and Nvidia xserver settings running.
This is not so good for laptop users.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

Xywa · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:46 am Post subject:

Yamakuzure · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 11:32 am Post subject:

For baloo being somethimes somehow independent from SystemSettings:

gerard27 · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:48 pm Post subject:

About the GPU temperatures in my earlier posts.
Kde4 doesn't use wayland, kde5 does.
Would that be the reason?
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

No, you're not in a Wayland session. Won't happen before, maybe, 5.8.

gerard27 · Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 12:42 pm Post subject:

I know,x11 is still alive and kicking.
But take a look at the kwin ebuild.
Wayland is a dependency!

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Yes, but the protocol is used for safe screen locking, nothing to do with compositing.

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178