Staying with KDE-4

[steveL]

Just trying to gather advice in one place, before I do a big upgrade.

/etc/portage/package.mask

Code: Select all

kde-plasma/*:5
kde-frameworks/*:5
kde-apps/*:5

[post=7907372]from markus09[/post] (added slot 5 restrictions, due to [post=7989432]pkg-moves[/post].)

[post=7905006]From toralf:[/post]

Code: Select all

$ grep qt[45] /etc/portage/package.use/z_misc
app-text/poppler    qt4
app-office/akonadi-server  qt4 -qt5
media-video/smplayer    qt4 -qt5
media-video/vlc                         qt4 -qt5
net-analyzer/wireshark        -qt5
net-print/hplip                                                         qt4
net-wireless/wpa_supplicant   -qt4

Obviously I'm just setting USE="qt4 -qt5" globally in /etc/portage/make.conf.
And I am masking akonadi-server, since I [topic=938680]don't use semantic-craptop[/topic].

[post=7991704]asturm[/post]: You must also set:

Code: Select all

virtual/notification-daemon   -kde

For smplayer, qt flags must be set in package.use apparently (dalek's post, just after toralf's.)

If anyone has other tips or feedback in getting it to work, please do share.

Be aware of the [post=7905044]QtWebKit vulnerabilities[/post] if you do stay with KDE-4.
(As I stated further on, 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.)

No "but-but-but you are doing something (bad|dangerous|stupid)", please.
Negative feedback on the overall idea, is neither useful nor welcome.
It simply amounts to arguing with the premises of a decision that has already been made, and this is not the thread for you to soapbox (by all means, start your own to warn people off. It won't be off-topic, then.)

OTOH, alerting us to other vulnerabilities, in a constructive manner, is entirely welcome.
(Please don't argue with the premise of that, either: we are aware we're feature-freezing.)

Thanks,
steveL.

[krinpaus]

Personally, I'm waiting for dev-qt/qt*-5.6 to be released to the tree.

I remember reading that qt 5.6 fixed a number of issues with the new KDE Plasma.
(And 5.6 is a LTS).

Just my 2 cents...

SORRY, I misread your post, I see you're Staying with KDE-4....

[toralf]

Personally, I'm waiting for dev-qt/qt*-5.6 to be released to the tree.

me too, or 5.8.* ????

[steveL]

I've never had an issue with Qt; however KDE has progressively got worse and worse at hitting a decent release after a major version change; used to be X.1 was stable and X.2 was decent. Then it took till 3.4, then 4.7..

Essentially, whenever it hits "released", there's at least a year or two before it's actually worth using, if you don't want to beta-test your desktop; and that just gets longer.

Now, can we stop wondering when KF5 will be worth using, and just get back to keeping KDE-4 working, until it is? ;-)

[i92guboj]

I've never had an issue with Qt; however KDE has progressively got worse and worse at hitting a decent release after a major version change; used to be X.1 was stable and X.2 was decent. Then it took till 3.4, then 4.7..

Essentially, whenever it hits "released", there's at least a year or two before it's actually worth using, if you don't want to beta-test your desktop; and that just gets longer.

Now, can we stop wondering when KF5 will be worth using, and just get back to keeping KDE-4 working, until it is?

Mind, I'm a kde fan, when it comes to "desktops". But... for 3.x it took up to .12 to get usable (and even then people used to lose their whole mail accounts due to kdepim joyfullnes).

All for kde4 goes... well. It hasn't still. 4 might be stable by .33, 5 could probably be by .777.

[steveL]

Mind, I'm a kde fan, when it comes to "desktops". But... for 3.x it took up to .12 to get usable (and even then people used to lose their whole mail accounts due to kdepim joyfullnes).

All for kde4 goes... well. It hasn't still. 4 might be stable by .33, 5 could probably be by .777.

Heh indeed; for me 3.4 was stable enough to use (and everyone told me I was being a laggard for waiting til 3.2..) and 3.12 was indeed a sweet spot, as 4.10 was; but only because I'd got rid of kde-pim (and it really hurt to lose Kmail) and all the semantic-craptop stuff.
Removing the nubkit (the post linked in OP) suddenly made everything even quicker still.

I don't want "innovation" in my desktop; I just want it to look reasonable and work quickly, and most of the time I don't even want to be aware of it in comparison to the application/s I am using, to get work done.

Looking back at when I started using KDE, the only real work that needed to be done on the desktop, was to get devices to show up automatically. Since then we've had layer upon layer of utter tripe, with that use-case as an underlying pretext for all the other crap.
Crazy really, as we had CD-ROMs showing up before 2000, that I recall.

The "desktop search" (metadata-with-everything) approach remains ludicrous to my eyes. It feels like the desktop file-manager has turned into the application that all these libraries are in aid of, and I'm more interested in specific programs I like using.

The desktop environment should be unobtrusive, until I actually want something from it.
(At which point I don't want to be insulted by a dumbed-down UI, designed for something the size of a TV remote.)

[i92guboj]

Mind, I'm a kde fan, when it comes to "desktops". But... for 3.x it took up to .12 to get usable (and even then people used to lose their whole mail accounts due to kdepim joyfullnes).

All for kde4 goes... well. It hasn't still. 4 might be stable by .33, 5 could probably be by .777.

Heh indeed; for me 3.4 was stable enough to use (and everyone told me I was being a laggard for waiting til 3.2..) and 3.12 was indeed a sweet spot, as 4.10 was; but only because I'd got rid of kde-pim (and it really hurt to lose Kmail) and all the semantic-craptop stuff.
Removing the nubkit (the post linked in OP) suddenly made everything even quicker still.

I don't want "innovation" in my desktop; I just want it to look reasonable and work quickly, and most of the time I don't even want to be aware of it in comparison to the application/s I am using, to get work done.[snip...]

And that's why any sane person does not use a DE these days. That is, unless you're into some other family of OSes.

But, as people say; Gentoo is all about Freedom. To answer the query, just try. It's just a couple keywords and one emerge away.

Don't pay much attention, it's just the dinosaur in me thinking aloud :p

[miket]

I've never had an issue with Qt; however KDE has progressively got worse and worse at hitting a decent release after a major version change; used to be X.1 was stable and X.2 was decent. Then it took till 3.4, then 4.7..

It's a symtom, I'm afraid, of trying to be agile. It's a thing I just don't get. Here's a message for them. If you want to work at a wild pace, go right ahead. Just please don't insist that your particular bright idea today is something that we should all pick up and use.

The sequence of version numbers is starting to converge to the sequence of build numbers. Folks, stop assuming that your every single build is going to be great and good stuff for your users!

If you've been programming a while, you learn some humility.

[steveL]

If you've been programming a while, you learn some humility.

++

Though I don't see it happening for Sievers, Poettering and Kroah-Hartman, any time soon.

[MMMMM]

Starting today KDE 5 wants to be installed. I tried to block it but had no success so far. Is there any documentation how to keep KDE4?

Regards, M

Edit:
What resolved it for me was blocking:

Code: Select all

kde-plasma/*
kde-frameworks/*:5
kde-apps/*:5 

And in make.conf:

Code: Select all

USE="qt4 -qt5 ...

Thanks for the help!

Regards, M.

[asturm]

You can open a separate thread with pastebin'd output where we can help you.

[steveL]

Starting today KDE 5 wants to be installed. I tried to block it but had no success so far. Is there any documentation how to keep KDE4?

No, that's what this thread is about. Don't listen to genstorm: I consider him hostile to the whole endeavour, as all he ever does is give [post=7907290]nonsense apologia[/post] for why everyone should beta-test KF5.
It's not stable except in the la-la-land of "developer" wish fulfilment.

Personally I'm simply masking things like kde-plasma without which the rest won't even install; but I can't comment too much until I get my toolchain sorted (which is about making the software to do that for everyone work.)

By all means, give us a pastebin url if you have copious output, or use a code tag if it's more specific (since pastebins tend to expire.)

@genstorm: Given our history, and your clear lack of interest in the topic, please stay out of this thread.

[steveL]

Added package.mask from [topic=1043030]this thread[/topic]; linking so others can help those specific users, too.

[asturm]

To illustrate the idiocy of your post, here's how I (probably) fixed MMMMM's issue, in case they even care to come back here: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.g ... 5761a8e2bb

Now, you might think I just did it to feed your rage, but while admittedly it is fun to watch, you are invited to compare timestamps. Then you can get off your high horse and learn some decency.

[Cyker]

Just chiming in to offer moral support

It should be perfectly possible to stick with KDE4, although you might want to think about creating a dedicated overlay for its various dependencies as stuff starts to drop off the tree.

I've been happily sticking with KDE3.5 since I realised the direction they were taking KDE was not one I wanted to follow. (And thank smeg for kde-sunset or it would have been a lot trickier!)

Despite still using it, I'm still able to take advantage of a handful of qt4 and qt5-based programs,so you might not need to mask out qt5 completely too.
That said, the KDE3 stuff was a lot cleaner than KDE4 and 5, where there seems to be some dependency crossovers, so it may be a bit more work to untangle things?

I tend to avoid new things like that as modern project teams don't seem to understand that underlying structures and frameworks have to be STABLE, not changed at a whim or thrown out and rebuilt every now and then because they didn't think the original idea through and are now running into stupid issues, where the easiest solution is to throw it all out and start again rather than fixing it...

[steveL]

It should be perfectly possible to stick with KDE4, although you might want to think about creating a dedicated overlay for its various dependencies as stuff starts to drop off the tree.

Agreed; I quite like the name kde-quatro -- not that the id matters too much, but what do you think?

I've been happily sticking with KDE3.5 since I realised the direction they were taking KDE was not one I wanted to follow. (And thank smeg for kde-sunset or it would have been a lot trickier!)

Ah good to hear; yeah kde-sunset is effectively Gentoo Trinity, afaict.

Despite still using it, I'm still able to take advantage of a handful of qt4 and qt5-based programs,so you might not need to mask out qt5 completely too.

Oh I'm not masking it at all; I just want to be selective about where I enable it, since it clearly ends up pulling in KF5/Plasma on some of the apps mentioned.

A kde5 flag would have been a very useful move.

That said, the KDE3 stuff was a lot cleaner than KDE4 and 5, where there seems to be some dependency crossovers, so it may be a bit more work to untangle things?

We'll see; we were going to do kde-lean anyhow (ie no semantic-craptop) so this is useful as an intermediate stage.
Means we can provide something that's useful to more people, while getting help staying on kde4 ourselves.

I tend to avoid new things like that as modern project teams don't seem to understand that underlying structures and frameworks have to be STABLE, not changed at a whim or thrown out and rebuilt every now and then because they didn't think the original idea through and are now running into stupid issues, where the easiest solution is to throw it all out and start again rather than fixing it...

Exactly: it's the thinking-through that doesn't happen. I'm all for "start over", but it's supposed to be done (twice, here) before you ever release.
From there on, you can start over, but you don't throw away what already works.
Quite apart from anything else, it means you always have an alternative implementation to test against.

Really though, what we're talking about is the over-enthusiasm of youth, coupled with the compelling if flawed notion that "more is better."
It takes at least a decade to realize that the comments you kept hearing about simplicity and modularity, really did have merit.
And then you have to admit to yourself that you are the problem.

This helps:

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of one's own making.

[elfenland]

Hi to everyone,

I am about to set up a brand new Gentoo system - after having missed out for 3 or 4 years using xmint with xfce.

To be honest, I like KDE4 visually but stayed a long time with KDE 3.4
To have it stable.

So all the fancy stuff and Effects is not that important. What KDE version will automatically come and what stable version can I get from portage nowadays?

Please, just give me some short and simple answers before I start installing.
What I am planning, is to have 2 Linux OS on my Thinkpad:
xfce and KDE. Either 2 times gentoo or Linuxmint and Gentoo.

Would it be wise to have the 2 windowmanagers separate in 2 LinuxSystems?


thanks a lot in advance!

[jesnow]

If you have an x86 stable system there are multiple issues right now. Do NOT upgrade to kde-plasma 5 unless you want to be stuck in front of your computer for a while. The upgrade guide if you follow it leads you down the road to hell.

1) It wants to rebuild mesa. mesa wants to pull in wayland now. You have to set the use flag -wayland to avoid emerging wayland.
2) the mesa ebuild in Portage had a bad checksum for many days, so dead in the water. That's fixed now.
3) glibc was recently updated, but if you have prelink, versions 2.22 and 2.23 break dbus in a very stealth way, so that KDE applications fail silently on launch.
4) All kde-plasma x86 packages are still masked by keyword. Plasma 5 isn't even stable on x86 yet, but the message went out to all x86 users to upgrade.

This is exactly the kind of mess people stay with old versions and stable systems to avoid. I myself stayed with kde 3.5.10 until the bitter end, and I still
don't like KDE 4. When the upgrade hell nuked my config (yes people do still tell you to delete ~/.kde/ and ~/.config/ just on general principle when anything goes wrong, oh and did you power cycle it? Sometimes the squirrels get confused), I found myself cursing fluently to get rid AGAIN of most of the crap KDE4 developers were so proud of:

sematic deskto: baaka.
akonadi: fml (oops, that's required. Have to keep a full blown data base running at all times).
window transparency: I can't see a damn thing until I get that turned off.
animations: I don't *want* to wait half a second for each animation to play, it's not fun for me.

Is it any consolation that gnome is even more annoying?
Will KDE 5 force me to have all those things turned on because "really, get with it old-timer"?

OK enough complaining for now. Genstorm did help me figure these issues out, and I'm now running again, but it all should not happen. Devs need to remember that the stable vanilla systems need testing too. It's been really good the last couple of years, but this is a major stumble.

Jon

[asturm]

What KDE version will automatically come and what stable version can I get from portage nowadays?

Answers are in Gentoo's KDE Guide.

Short version: For KDE SC 4, use a kde profile. For KDE Plasma 5, use a plasma profile.

[sidamos]

Thanks for this thread!

After 3 days with the now stable Plasma 5, I have had enough crashes and problems. I'm back to KDE 4. Luckily, downgrade was doable.

The upgrade to Plasma 5 was easy, thanks to the nice Gentoo guide, as always.

But those issues...

* crashes of the lockscreen because of segfault in libqt5sql (lots of bug reports, no solution) and a text written over itself to use some systemd tool to unlock after the crash
* crash of plasma workshell
* window contents suddenly destroyed (with Compositing enabled)
* the return of the problems with ALT-TAB (multi monitor)
* questionable usability (launchers, etc.) and look
* sddm with less features than kdm regarding multiple sessions
* no easy VNC solution

Seems like "early" (first 2 years) KDE 4 all over again. And 99% of the KDE developers are using systemd, so when will issues be fixed because of OpenRC?

I will wait some months or maybe a year, before I try again. That is, if I'm not forced to do it earlier. But then again, I could always go nostalgic with Mate.

[elfenland]

Thanks Jon and genstorm.

Jon - for a couple of reasons, you mentioned some of them, I have contented myself with a very simple xfce environment for 2 years now..

[BobWya]

Personally I've grown to get comfortable with Plasma 5 and enjoy the day-to-day experience it offers. Until I play a fullscreen game or plug in an external monitor. Thankfully I've got a plasma shell restart on a global hotkey (when global hotkeys are working)... So long story short there are still quite a few bugs in the current release versions. Got quite a few subscriptions on the KDE Bug site now I just watching Martin's spiny cube desktop to relax myself after getting DE rage

It always surprises me how many people use a KDE desktop with Gentoo... Interesting choice??!! Seems like it's the equivalent of i3 in the Arch world

[elfenland]

It always surprises me how many people use a KDE desktop with Gentoo... Interesting choice??!!

Mkayyyy,

why so doubtful? Which Desktop would you use rationally? ..what would be wise?

Greetings,

da Bo

[davidm]

Personally I've grown to get comfortable with Plasma 5 and enjoy the day-to-day experience it offers. Until I play a fullscreen game or plug in an external monitor. Thankfully I've got a plasma shell restart on a global hotkey (when global hotkeys are working)... So long story short there are still quite a few bugs in the current release versions. Got quite a few subscriptions on the KDE Bug site now I just watching Martin's spiny cube desktop to relax myself after getting DE rage

It always surprises me how many people use a KDE desktop with Gentoo... Interesting choice??!! Seems like it's the equivalent of i3 in the Arch world

I've heard a few times that QT 5.6 should significantly improve the situation with multi-monitor and external monitor support. It's available in the Gentoo qt overlay although I don't know how well it works or if it does even at all. I keep meaning to try it one of these days but have yet to do so (also my dual monitor set up is pretty much working perfectly atm). I'm surprised I haven't seen someone else talking about using it yet here.

Are you sure your full screen issues aren't related to a GPU driver bug more though? I used to have a heck of a time on Plasma with my old Quadro FX 570 card and nouveau. It would freeze or crash a lot. I switched back to kde4 in order to get around it and then I found that the same bug was present in kde4. It was just that it happened more in Plasma 5 due to the gpu being used more heavily. That was finally fixed many kernel versions ago.

[BobWya]

I've heard a few times that QT 5.6 should significantly improve the situation with multi-monitor and external monitor support. It's available in the Gentoo qt overlay although I don't know how well it works or if it does even at all. I keep meaning to try it one of these days but have yet to do so (also my dual monitor set up is pretty much working perfectly atm). I'm surprised I haven't seen someone else talking about using it yet here.

Are you sure your full screen issues aren't related to a GPU driver bug more though? I used to have a heck of a time on Plasma with my old Quadro FX 570 card and nouveau. It would freeze or crash a lot. I switched back to kde4 in order to get around it and then I found that the same bug was present in kde4. It was just that it happened more in Plasma 5 due to the gpu being used more heavily. That was finally fixed many kernel versions ago.

I'm running Qt 5.6.0 and have been since it came out... Actually the bug got worse with the newer version of Qt (the behaviour is more random now). On my system I can quite happily unplug and re-plugin my HDMI monitor - not too many issues. But xrandr invoked changes bork plasma-shell (it crashes, panels disappear, etc.) The Upstream bug for this is now very well subscribed.

I'm rolling with the latest Nvidia blob... It's fine - generally "stuff works" (unlike some earlier releases that borked basics like display-port monitors - like the builtin display on my laptop - and suspend-to-ram). Plus the Upstream bug report is not confined to Nvidia users!!

Sadly Plasma 5 is very far from prime-time. If kmail eats my email - well life sucks. But a DE with an interface that's unstable is really quite a significant problem... It's no doubt some obscure bug in the Qt libraries...