KDE 5 - How is it?

Message

paulj · Post by **paulj** » Mon Mar 28, 2016 9:32 am

I have been using KDE5 via the overlay for several months on my desktop machine, and based on the stable condition I recently moved my laptop from kde4 to kde5. I have noticed with the recent round of updates that there seems to be a lot of background CPU usage, and also there is a memory leak in QTDeclarative-5.5.1-r1. I came across a patch for that yesterday, and that seems to have resolved the problem (which reminds me, I need to go off and post a bug and the patch for everyone else...). The CPU usage seems to be related to Baloo and file indexing. I have a home directory with more than 100Gb (stuff like Virtualbox uses lots of space), and Baloo was busy trying to index it all. The Search configuration via system settings is virtually useless. If you have a problem in this area, read the information on the kde website (https://community.kde.org/Baloo/Configuration) , and modify the configuration file by hand - it seems to be the recommended approach, and is much more flexible. At the moment, I have also stopped using plasmoids for CPU usage etc. They seem to add more to the CPU usage than I care to allow...!

I am glad I moved over, but using kde4 on my laptop and kde5 on the desktop was actually no problem. If you want a problem free life, kde4 is stable and sorted, so stay with it. If you want to have the latest, then change to kde5, but remember it is still in development!

Edit: Bug submitted with patch: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=578438
Edit 2: Added the link to the kde information about baloo configuration)

billydv · Post by **billydv** » Thu Mar 31, 2016 9:51 pm

Since the latest round of updates, I now no longer have systray icons for apcupsd or vmware-workstation. Not sure if I am missing something. It was working last week.

Post by **asturm** » Thu Mar 31, 2016 9:54 pm

Have you read the relevant systray section in Plasma 5 Upgrade Guide/Troubleshooting?

billydv · Post by **billydv** » Thu Mar 31, 2016 10:17 pm

Never mind, after a reboot it's all working again.

Yamakuzure · Post by **Yamakuzure** » Mon Apr 04, 2016 9:40 am

steveL wrote:
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.

I have commented on the long standing bug reports about that issue. No need to file a new one, as I wasn't the first who saw it.

(Like this one)

genstorm wrote:
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.

Yes, but davmail is a java application. No idea why it somethimes shows up and sometimes not.

tholin · Post by **tholin** » Sat Apr 09, 2016 7:59 pm

Like many other members I got that eselect news item about Plasma 5 Upgrade some days ago.

"KDE Workspaces 4.11 has reached end of life and is no longer supported by upstream. It is therefore recommended for all users to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5."

The kde 3 to 4 upgrade was horrible so I was hesitant but I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to plasma 5.
I followed the upgrade guide without any major problems. Plasma 5 is unmasked but most of kde applications 15.XX are still ~amd64 so I use the old kde 4 applications for the time being.

The plasma 5 desktop doesn't retain any settings from the old kde 4 environment so it's like starting from scratch. The default widget style looks like windows 10 and is horrible. There are audio notifications and other annoying things by default. After a lot of messing about I got the desktop into an almost working state but there are some problems I just can't work around.

Old kde4 had a setting for opening new applications on the monitor with the mouse cursor. Plasma 5 opens applications on the monitor with the current active window. I can't find any settings for changing this.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351399

The systray appears to be broken in various ways even though I build plasma-desktop with legacy-systray, gtk2, gtk3 and qt4 use flags like the upgrade guide specified. The systray always has an invisible icon taking up a slot. This placeholder icon doesn't do anything and can't be removed. Some applications like akregator sometimes doesn't have a systray icon. If akregator is minimized to systray there is no way to get it back. Killing and restarting the process is the only way. Clicking on an icon in the systray might open the corresponding windows behind other windows and it's impossible to minimize applications to systray by clicking on the icon unless the application has focus.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350944
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340871

The number of entries in klipper is hardcoded to some small value and klipper doesn't close after selecting an entry.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343519
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347210

User Yamakuzure already described the problems of hotpugging monitors.

Akregator worked fine at first but after a few restarts it stopped fetching feeds. I got a broken link icon and lots of error messages about "Error loading kio-http" in the terminal. This has never happened with kde4. Dmesg showed that something called QThread had segfaulted. I assume that was some kde daemon for kio-http. Restarting the entire desktop worked but the same thing would happen after a while again.

The music player Clementine kept closing down (or crashing) all the time. I don't know why but it never happened with kde4. Might be related to that crashing QThread.

The background on one of my monitors would sometimes go completely black. Going into the desktop settings showed that it had for some reason forgotten about all my background settings and decided to show a slideshow with no pictures in it.

The plasma applications and widgets lack a lot of configuration options and there are a lot of widgets missing.

After struggling for a few days I decided to go back to kde4. Perhaps plasma-5.6.2 works better but I'm tired of messing with stuff now. So that's my experience with kde 5.

BobWya · Post by **BobWya** » Sat Apr 09, 2016 8:55 pm

tholin wrote: ...
After struggling for a few days I decided to go back to kde4. Perhaps plasma-5.6.2 works better but I'm tired of messing with stuff now. So that's my experience with kde 5.

Not drinking the Plasma 5 koolaid then

You think you've got problems with Plasma 5.6.2... I've had Plasma 5 installed in Tumbleweed and Arch for a few months - to track progress. Damn it was so totally broken on release. Now, for me, it's just got a bearable amount of "missing bits" and papercuts... Latest problem is (of course) not being able to run any demanding GL-based games with compositing turned on...

Allofthezoo · Post by **Allofthezoo** » Sun Apr 10, 2016 12:54 pm

I just tried KDE 5 like the message said and I have to say I hate just about every moment of it. The "flat" iconography is as hideous here as it was back in the DOS days, the panel just flits open and close rather than smoothly opening and closing, KRunner is fixed at the top of the screen rather than having an option to have it float, the classic menu's completely abandoned forcing you to use the bloated Kickoff crap AND it doesn't want to launch right from LightDM. The issues are too numerous to list and that's just from the first hour!

I came to this forum looking to see if I could find any help with the issues, but from this and another thread, it's clear that this is just how KDE 5 is. I honestly don't know why developers seem to increasingly think "that would take work" is an excuse for removing features, but that seems to be the case with everything here. If they can't be bothered to implement anything, I'll just stick with KDE 4. At least that works from bootup to logoff.

Post by **asturm** » Sun Apr 10, 2016 1:03 pm

Oxygen theme still exists. Classic menu still exists. What's your problem with lightdm?

Allofthezoo · Post by **Allofthezoo** » Sun Apr 10, 2016 8:42 pm

There we go. It was a pain in the ass, but downgrade completed.

genstorm wrote:Oxygen theme still exists.

I don't use it. There's a dozen options for KDE 4 and three for KDE 5. Even after reluctantly choosing Oxygen, I couldn't get the panel to use icons from this century(it also had that configuration menu overlapping the clock when I put in the spacer for whatever reason).

Classic menu still exists.

Not that I could find.

What's your problem with lightdm?

It literally wasn't launching KDE; it just looped back to the login screen(and I didn't mean to blame the DM, if I came across that way). I had to manually reinstall startkde during the downgrade, so this just might be a package management problem. If I wasn't angry at it, I probably would've figured this out eventually.

All told, I didn't see anything worth upgrading for, even with the benefit of calm hindsight. I might be induced to try again when more themes and other customizations are available, but it ignoring the old configuration definitely gives me pause(especially since part of that configuration happens to be sticky notes; upgrading and finding those missing was a big case of "What the hell!").

orionbelt · Post by **orionbelt** » Sun Apr 10, 2016 11:57 pm

tholin wrote:Like many other members I got that eselect news item about Plasma 5 Upgrade some days ago.

"KDE Workspaces 4.11 has reached end of life and is no longer supported by upstream. It is therefore recommended for all users to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5."

I also got this eselect news item, however if "upstream" is the KDE project, i cannot find any announcement to that effect on their announcements page:

https://www.kde.org/announcements/

Could somebody point out the place where the end-of-life announcement has been made? Thanks!

davidm · Post by **davidm** » Mon Apr 11, 2016 1:07 am

orionbelt wrote:
tholin wrote:Like many other members I got that eselect news item about Plasma 5 Upgrade some days ago.

"KDE Workspaces 4.11 has reached end of life and is no longer supported by upstream. It is therefore recommended for all users to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5."
I also got this eselect news item, however if "upstream" is the KDE project, i cannot find any announcement to that effect on their announcements page:

https://www.kde.org/announcements/

Could somebody point out the place where the end-of-life announcement has been made? Thanks!

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release- ... 08835.html

Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for
2 years.

This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace.

Anyone has a strong reason we should keep doing kde-workspace 4.11.x releases?

Cheers,
Albert

orionbelt · Post by **orionbelt** » Mon Apr 11, 2016 1:29 am

davidm wrote: https://www.kde.org/announcements/

Thanks. I guess this corresponds to this announcement: https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.11/

However, they only say that version 4.11 "presents the last combined release of the Workspaces, Applications and Platform under the same version number". Are there no newer Workspaces releases under the 4.x series? OK, i see none on their announcements page... Does this mean that KDE Plasma 5 replaces the Workspaces 4.x series?

Also, if KDE Workspaces 4.11 reached end of life as of last August (when the above announcement was made), does it mean that we might have been exposed to possible security holes in an unmaintained package since then? Or did the GLSA folks monitor security updates and would have issued a warning if needed?

Thanks again!

tholin · Post by **tholin** » Mon Apr 11, 2016 3:12 am

orionbelt wrote:Also, if KDE Workspaces 4.11 reached end of life as of last August (when the above announcement was made), does it mean that we might have been exposed to possible security holes in an unmaintained package since then? Or did the GLSA folks monitor security updates and would have issued a warning if needed?

According to Michael Catanzaro, one of the developers working on the Epiphany browser, there are a lot of security bugs in qtwebkit and the software that depends on it.

"Many popular KDE applications use QtWebKit, which is old and deprecated. These deprecated versions of WebKit suffer from well over 100 remote code execution vulnerabilities fixed upstream that will probably never be backported. (100 is a lowball estimate; I would be unsurprised if the real number for QtWebKit was much, much higher."
https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016 ... plication/

"QtWebKit is still maintained in Qt and is getting some backports, but from a quick check of their git repository it’s obvious that it’s not receiving many security updates. This is hardly unexpected; QtWebKit is now years behind upstream, so providing security updates would be very difficult. There’s not much hope left for QtWebKit; these applications have hundreds of known vulnerabilities that will never be fixed."
https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016 ... y-updates/
https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016 ... y-updates/

A.S. Pushkin · Post by **A.S. Pushkin** » Tue Apr 12, 2016 2:12 am

Sorry, but I upgraded to Plasma on Sunday. I'm not running a Xeon, but the i7-4770K and 32GB of ram and a Nvidia Quadro k620 is acting like a Pentium I trying to run Windows 10.
It's so painful I feel like I'm trying to slog through molten lead.

A few years ago I began to move to XFCE due to problems with KDE and Kmail in particular. Frankly, the look I see of the desktop is not as nice as some of the simple desktops I use to use.

I may give it to the end of the week, but this is now in the way of my on-line course with the Linux Foundation. Running CentOS 7 in Virtualbox will probably be really slow, which I can not afford.

If some solution is not available, I'll have to say good bye permanently to KDE.

I applaud the effort of the developers, but I still have work I need to do and waiting a long time for a switch from one virtual desktop to another, as one example, is unacceptable.

Thanks just the same.

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Tue Apr 12, 2016 4:37 pm

A.S. Pushkin wrote:A few years ago I began to move to XFCE due to problems with KDE and Kmail in particular. Frankly, the look I see of the desktop is not as nice as some of the simple desktops I use to use.

I know what you mean; I loved KMail for over fifteen years, then it turned to crap with semantic craptop.

Thankfully you can [topic=963504]disable semantic-craptop[/topic], made simpler by [topic=938680]disabling nubkit[/topic] first, but it meant giving up [topic=945868]KMail for mutt[/topic] (only thing I found that would handle Maildir properly.) It works loverly with procmail via getmail for multiple accounts, and learning procmail is useful more broadly.

I've heard some people mention getting KMail1 working again, though the page on WebKit vulnerabilities isn't very encouraging.
Mostly it makes me shudder that people can be so cavalier about the idea of a stable API, the only way to give any sort of ABI guarantee.

Post by **asturm** » Tue Apr 12, 2016 5:17 pm

A.S. Pushkin wrote:Sorry, but I upgraded to Plasma on Sunday. I'm not running a Xeon, but the i7-4770K and 32GB of ram and a Nvidia Quadro k620 is acting like a Pentium I trying to run Windows 10.

Could you give a bit more precise information? Is there high CPU or IO load on your system?

Plasma-5 is actually much more reponsive than Plasma-4.

freifunk_connewitz · Post by **freifunk_connewitz** » Tue Apr 12, 2016 8:10 pm

Classic menu still exists.
Not that I could find.

I also would appreciate a hint to where to find that config option.

Post by **asturm** » Tue Apr 12, 2016 8:22 pm

It's not a config option, it's a different widget.

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Fri Apr 15, 2016 11:26 am

Judging by the amount of fubar-reports in the desktop forum, currently, I'd say it's not ready for prime-time.

No surprise there. ;)

miket · Post by **miket** » Fri Apr 15, 2016 4:09 pm

As I did with the advent of KDE 4, and as is evident from the approach that a lot of Gentoo users are taking, I decided to try KDE 5 by running someone else's live-CD version. I got the Slackware version (no systemd, you know). For some reason it wouldn't run in a VM for me, so I booted it from a USB stick on bare metal.

Instant impression: that dorky flat icon theme that is so much in fashion nowadays. (The world today has not only too many lawyers, but also too many graphic designers.) Fortunately, it's not hard to switch back to Oxygen icons. Fixing the panel icons will take a bit more work--but I already have to do the same kind of thing in KDE4.

The very first thing I did was switch to the older, flyout-style menu. There's no separate context-menu selection to switch to the classic menu as in KDE 4 but rather a choice to choose among multiple alternatives. Here you look for Application Menu. (One of the nice things in KDE 5 is that the context menus of many of the widgets offer to let you choose a different implementation of the widget.) The new Application Menu is almost like the KDE3-like menu in KDE 4 except that 1) there is a column of icons that let you choose certain items quickly--but I don't see how you can configure it, 2) there is an entry field for a search (I guess to make it more like Windows), 3) no Run Command entry, 4) no Favorites entry (maybe that's what #1 is supposed to be--I never figured out how to configure Favorites either), 5) Leave is now called Power / Session (I like "Leave" better), 6) now you have to hover over Recent Applications to see the recent applications, and 6) there is a new Recent Documents item. Other than that, it's

just like the KDE 4 version.

I don't think that any of those changes in the menu are improvements, but maybe that's just me.

Bah! on their "cleaned-up appearance". It's now harder to find things. In general, you have to dig farther into menus to find the selections you need. On the other hand, it's not awfully easy in KDE 4 either.

Now the worst omen I encountered. This is where I started looking to the KDE bugzilla but the applicable search term was wayy to broad: "kde plasma frameworks 5 about kde no version". I refer to what you get when you select Help -> About KDE: it doesn't show you the version. The version! You know, the very reason why you want to go to the About KDE selection in the first place. The per-application versions of this (for example, About Konsole) will let you find the version, but you have to do another click to get to it. I don't know Slackware. How am I supposed to figure out what version of KDE I have? I came to the Gentoo Forums hoping I could find something about this because this is a thing I couldn't find in the KDE bugzilla.

Clearly, there are too many graphic designers in the world and nearly enough usability experts. This might finally be the break that makes me leave KDE.

Post by **asturm** » Fri Apr 15, 2016 4:35 pm

There is no version of KDE, there is a version of Frameworks, a version of Plasma, and a version of Applications.

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Fri Apr 15, 2016 5:24 pm

genstorm wrote:There is no version of KDE, there is a version of Frameworks, a version of Plasma, and a version of Applications.

So show "KF5.x.y on Plasma 5.a.b".

Does "Applications" refer to a specific part of KDE, or do you mean the various applications have their own versions?

Post by **asturm** » Fri Apr 15, 2016 5:50 pm

KDE releases three products with independent release cycles:

KDE Frameworks (formerly known as the kdelibs blob, libraries you can use for your Qt project)
KDE Plasma (anything related with your favourite desktop)
KDE Applications (applications that you can use on whatever desktop you prefer)

The versions tab of an application will show you the version of Frameworks (e.g. currently 5.18 or 5.21 in Gentoo) it was built with, as well as, of course, the version of the application itself. Most of the time the latter will correspond to the Applications bundle (yy.mm.x) it was shipped with but some applications still carry on with their own versioning (e.g. KDE PIM is at 5.1 currently which is shipped by Applications 15.12.x). If you want to know the version of Plasma, you'll need to open some binary that it ships, e.g. systemsettings.

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Fri Apr 15, 2016 6:00 pm

OK, so Applications is the bundle; thanks.

Can still show at least the first two in "About KDE" and the third if it's worth doing.

KDE 5 - How is it?

Kde5

Re: Kde5

Re: Kde5