KDE 5 - How is it?

Message

zoidie · Post by **zoidie** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 12:06 pm

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 · Post by **Perfect Gentleman** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 12:14 pm

Is there any major reason against upgrading?

I see no reason not to upgrade.

colinxp · Post by **colinxp** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 1:22 pm

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

Yamakuzure · Post by **Yamakuzure** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 2:01 pm

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.

Perfect Gentleman · Post by **Perfect Gentleman** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 2:09 pm

Some legacy system tray icons, like from davmail, do not show up reliably.

it's java problem.

zoidie · Post by **zoidie** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 3:48 pm

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

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 4:30 pm

Yamakuzure wrote: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.

Have you filed a bug for that? This close to release, it's the kind of thing that needs polish.

Glad it's working out, generally. :-)

msst · Post by **msst** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:35 pm

Is there any major reason against upgrading?

For instance that it is still changing a lot from version to version causing small issues and sometimes bigger ones in the update process.

Currently okular is e.g. bogged for me. Still looking what causes it and recompiling the whole qt stuff atm.

And such things happen on and off. I guess it is years from beeing reasonably stable and settled. But it is nice to play around with.

Also some things seem to be simply unsupported as of know, such as a working session management with virtual desktops.

Post by **asturm** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 8:26 pm

mas- wrote:Currently okular is e.g. bogged for me. Still looking what causes it and recompiling the whole qt stuff atm.

What version of okular are you speaking of?

okular:4 is as stable as ever, and this is the one you will get through proper Applications releases.
okular:5 is only available as a live version, so problems are expected.

HerbMillerJW · Post by **HerbMillerJW** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 10:44 pm

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

BobWya · Post by **BobWya** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 11:44 pm

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

Posted from my Nexus 7

Post by **asturm** » Sat Mar 19, 2016 1:01 am

Yamakuzure wrote:The most important issues on my system are:
Some legacy system tray icons, like from davmail, do not show up reliably.

That should actually be fixed - not a single systray issue here since Plasma 5.5.5.

davidm · Post by **davidm** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:24 am

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 · Post by **zoidie** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 7:27 pm

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 · Post by **BobWya** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 9:57 pm

zoidie wrote: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!

Ah that's great!!

Not the black screen bit obviously...

If you can bear to wade through this forum thread... You're not the only one with the black screen of doom problem.

The tl;dr version is that:

Nvidia's egl/gles2 desktop drivers aren't ready to run KWin 5 (yet) - i.e. building the Qt 5 libraries with these USE flags. I've tested this configuration...
If you do change the Qt 5 egl,gles2 USE flags - don't rely on Portage to re-build the necessary frameworks and plasma packages ('cause it won't)
Currently Gentoo has a bit of dodgy way of switching GL libraries that may make the proprietary drivers a bit flaky - especially when you try to use EGL/GLES2 compositing. (So much so that I forked the eselect-opengl switching mechanism in my Overlay). [bug=572274]Heated debate on Bugzilla over that...[/bug]

Since I spent 2-3 weeks staring a black SDDM screen and experiencing broken compositing I can put up with having to manually a lot of the Qt 5.6.0 libraries just to get them to build... On to the new shiny

Bob

wrc1944 · Post by **wrc1944** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 10:02 pm

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-7 ... ml#7886602

Post by **asturm** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:03 pm

BobWya wrote:Currently Gentoo has a bit of dodgy way of switching GL libraries that may make the proprietary drivers a bit flaky - especially when you try to use EGL/GLES2 compositing. (So much so that I forked the eselect-opengl switching mechanism in my Overlay). [bug=572274]Heated debate on Bugzilla over that...[/bug]

You realise that bug is waiting for input? Copy+pasting your stuff sure is very helpful, but doesn't scale.

BobWya · Post by **BobWya** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:45 pm

genstorm wrote:You realise that bug is waiting for input? Copy+pasting your stuff sure is very helpful, but doesn't scale.

Well, I don't really want to discuss it any further here (i.e. someone else's thread)... I try not thread hijack if I can help it...

zoidie · Post by **zoidie** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 9:16 am

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 · Post by **BobWya** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 3:21 pm

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...

Post by **asturm** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 8:23 pm

Self-inflicted pain by using overlay stuff.

BobWya · Post by **BobWya** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 8:47 pm

genstorm wrote:Self-inflicted pain by using overlay stuff.

Heh, heh... It's just me laughing at myself for not installing that framework library from the kde overlay.

There are a number of real regressions with this version of Plasma - probably due to the qt 5.6.0 libraries. I've been seeing the odd crash - e.g. after playing GL-based games. I'll have to test how reproduceable this issue is... The occasional stability issues are genuinely annoying - I don't like hardlocks that require a magic SYSKEY "fix"...

Panel layouts seem to get restored when hot-pluging my external (HDMI) monitor. But this bug (356225) has simply gone more "underground" now and is slightly harder to reproduce... Luckly I've written a little script to workaround this problem - so I've got a "magic button" keyboard shortcut that resets my panel layouts and reloads the Plasma Shell for me.

At least Qupzilla now reconnects to the network after a suspend-ram/resume cycle (I never managed to back-port the qtnetwork library fix)...

Anthony7E · Post by **Anthony7E** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 10:00 pm

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

BobWya · Post by **BobWya** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 10:53 pm

Anthony7E wrote:Are you all on systemd or openRC with Plasma? Any differences?

Nvidia and Qt seem to be doing just fine - completely busting up my desktop experience...

Doesn't using openRC just make SDDM login a bit more fiddly?

Post by **asturm** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 10:53 pm

OpenRC works just fine with sddm.