KF 5 & Plasma

mouseman · 2015-04-03 17:45:26

For some reason the Application Launcher menu won't open. Well, actually it opens but immediately closes again so I just see a blip. Every once in a while it stays open but it can take several dozens of clicks so its extremely annoying.

Any tips as to a solution would be great. I've not had this before, it appeared after I reinstalled (fresh install, clean home dir).

Edit: I think it may have to do with the kwin compositor settings. I had set it to full screen redraws for vsync and when I reverted it the issue stopped. Funny thing is, I can't replicate by enabling it again so it seems to be gone for now even with full screen redraws.

Last edited by mouseman (2015-04-03 18:38:44)

JKAbrams · 2015-04-03 20:50:58

ChemBro wrote:

lynxlynx wrote:
I doubt it. Plus, half of the fault is on the KDE side, which did advertise better compatibility.
No, this is not KDEs fault. The dev of plasma said several times, if you want a stable experience, wait for plasma 5.4.

If thats the official ambition to not have the brokenness that is KF5 fixed until the end of July I need to think about going back to KDE4, cant have a broken computer for 4 months.

The state of my KF5 machine right is kinda useless with plasmashell using 100% CPU a short time after restarting it, along with the other problems I've described here and in other threads.

So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?

Elemento Cero wrote:

In my case, Plasma 5 seems stable enough for daily use

speedyx wrote:

A KF5 experience near perfect!

speedyx wrote:

Now I have a very stable system that works very well in KDE!

Really guys? Users of proprietary systems are laughing at us. This brokenness is worse than even Windows Millennium.

mangus · 2015-04-03 21:12:22

JKAbrams wrote:

ChemBro wrote:
lynxlynx wrote:
I doubt it. Plus, half of the fault is on the KDE side, which did advertise better compatibility.
No, this is not KDEs fault. The dev of plasma said several times, if you want a stable experience, wait for plasma 5.4.
If thats the official ambition to not have the brokenness that is KF5 fixed until the end of July I need to think about going back to KDE4, cant have a broken computer for 4 months.
The state of my KF5 machine right is kinda useless with plasmashell using 100% CPU a short time after restarting it, along with the other problems I've described here and in other threads.
So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?
Really guys? Users of proprietary systems are laughing at us. This brokenness is worse than even Windows Millennium.

That's rude and unfair. Go install whatever suits you and always remember the luck you have instead of bitching free developers.

JKAbrams · 2015-04-03 22:31:15

mangus wrote:

JKAbrams wrote:
ChemBro wrote:
No, this is not KDEs fault. The dev of plasma said several times, if you want a stable experience, wait for plasma 5.4.
If thats the official ambition to not have the brokenness that is KF5 fixed until the end of July I need to think about going back to KDE4, cant have a broken computer for 4 months.
The state of my KF5 machine right is kinda useless with plasmashell using 100% CPU a short time after restarting it, along with the other problems I've described here and in other threads.
So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?
Really guys? Users of proprietary systems are laughing at us. This brokenness is worse than even Windows Millennium.

That's rude and unfair. Go install whatever suits you and always remember the luck you have instead of bitching free developers.

Unfair, perhaps, as KF5 does way more than ME ever did, but as for the comparison of the desktop experience, I'm just talking from my own objective experience, KF5 gives me more problems than ME did, but that was just to put things in perspective. When I talk about other people laughing, that's not a figure of speech but I'm just sharing my experience.

By the number of problems KF5 has given me I just assume I'm not a special case, so when people call this "perfect experience" it seems to me they are using av totally different yardstick then what would be applied to other software, and that is what rubs me the wrong way. I believe free software can do much better, so why use a different yardstick? When something is broken we should not be afraid to call it broken.

Or what do you think? Do you think free software is forever doomed to be second class software and as a user of it you should expect brokenness even when it's considered stable and actively recommended?

surfatwork · 2015-04-03 22:38:47

JKAbrams wrote:

If thats the official ambition to not have the brokenness that is KF5 fixed until the end of July I need to think about going back to KDE4, cant have a broken computer for 4 months.
The state of my KF5 machine right is kinda useless with plasmashell using 100% CPU a short time after restarting it, along with the other problems I've described here and in other threads.
So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?
Really guys? Users of proprietary systems are laughing at us. This brokenness is worse than even Windows Millennium.

You seem to have a remarkable sense of entitlement. I can understand that, given the hard work you have put into developing KDE, and the enormous amounts of money you have paid for it....

what - you didn't do either???? then you should either get a commercial OS, perhaps Windoze or MacOS - not that they are guaranteed to work, but atleast you would have paid for the privilege of moaning. Or submit bug reports and help the KDE developers fix issues. In the meantime, you could spend some time trying to find out why your system goes at 100%, while Plasma 5 is working fairly well for many others.
Cheers, have a great Easter break.

JKAbrams · 2015-04-03 23:49:17

surfatwork wrote:

JKAbrams wrote:
If thats the official ambition to not have the brokenness that is KF5 fixed until the end of July I need to think about going back to KDE4, cant have a broken computer for 4 months.
The state of my KF5 machine right is kinda useless with plasmashell using 100% CPU a short time after restarting it, along with the other problems I've described here and in other threads.
So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?
Really guys? Users of proprietary systems are laughing at us. This brokenness is worse than even Windows Millennium.
You seem to have a remarkable sense of entitlement. I can understand that, given the hard work you have put into developing KDE, and the enormous amounts of money you have paid for it....
what - you didn't do either???? then you should either get a commercial OS, perhaps Windoze or MacOS - not that they are guaranteed to work, but atleast you would have paid for the privilege of moaning. Or submit bug reports and help the KDE developers fix issues. In the meantime, you could spend some time trying to find out why your system goes at 100%, while Plasma 5 is working fairly well for many others.
Cheers, have a great Easter break.

Yeah, should have tried to explain that I as a user has no right to tell a free developer what to do. I'm grateful for all hard work that has been done. I thought that was a given here, perhaps it has to be said explicitly.

I report bugs whenever I find them, when I find a solution I always try to give back to forums and other places like AUR. As for the plasmashell problem I've spent a lot of time trying different things but have so far has not found anything that will affect the problem, the bug report is here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341674, and I have no more information than a "me to" comment on the small indication that it might be related to multiple monitors.

Not that this either gives me any right to free tell developers what to do, that just shows I try add my tiny part to the whole.

There is this thing about users of software and ambitions of large projects, at some point of size (in terms of users starting to depend in it) something akin to responsibility for starts to develop, if we would like people to actually use the software. This is a hard problem, the schism between on the other hand the decisions that developers makes in those positions WILL have a effect on a large number of users and at the same time we cannot hold a developer giving his/her free time responsible to that standard. I have no answer here. I just feel not letting users be honest about their experience is not the answer.

I just see wasted potential, I guess it depends on if you think things like KDE can be developed without treating users as beta testers, I believe it can, but I understand there might be other opinions. At least we should be open and honest about it. What I really see is yet other ways I'll never be able to have my friends or family use free software, and for that I'm sad, for myself I'll manage one way or another, not gonna go back to proprietary solutions - thats no way forward, but perhaps I'll go back to KDE4 until KF5 is ready.

Btw, thanks for your well wishes, I'll send them back!

surfatwork · 2015-04-04 00:18:56

JKAbrams wrote:

I guess it depends on if you think things like KDE can be developed without treating users as beta testers, I believe it can,

This is defly going off-topic now, but I'll bite.
KDE is developed by a community. In this community, if the users don't test, provide feedback and file bug reports, who is going to? That's how a community works, to the best of my understanding.
Forget open-source, community projects - this is how every major software platform works. Win7 had hundreds of updates. So does MacOS. How is that any different from KDE?

And if a particular bug is causing a subset of users a lot of pain, they have the freedom to fix it themselves, or find an alternative/workaround or pay someone to fix it for them on a priority basis.

desaparecido · 2015-04-04 09:22:35

JKAbrams wrote:

ChemBro wrote:
lynxlynx wrote:
I doubt it. Plus, half of the fault is on the KDE side, which did advertise better compatibility.
No, this is not KDEs fault. The dev of plasma said several times, if you want a stable experience, wait for plasma 5.4.
If thats the official ambition to not have the brokenness that is KF5 fixed until the end of July I need to think about going back to KDE4, cant have a broken computer for 4 months.
The state of my KF5 machine right is kinda useless with plasmashell using 100% CPU a short time after restarting it, along with the other problems I've described here and in other threads.
So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?
Elemento Cero wrote:
In my case, Plasma 5 seems stable enough for daily use
speedyx wrote:
A KF5 experience near perfect!
speedyx wrote:
Now I have a very stable system that works very well in KDE!
Really guys? Users of proprietary systems are laughing at us. This brokenness is worse than even Windows Millennium.

hi, in opensource project and linux/gnu world we have the freedom of choice, and when we make a choice of a linux distribution, or a desktop, before take our choice, were tested another ones. Your choice of Archlinux is for "some" reason, and in this choice probably you choice "a bleeding edge" distribution with "a rolling release" system... but behind this "bleeding edge" there are something like that "the user is responsible of your installation", and so, all that is wonderful but at the same time that is great, sometimes the're bugs in news releases, and is our opportunity to help the community (arch, or kde, ... etc) reporting bugs, helping another users, or to learn. If your choice is other, you can wait for a "stable and all-made KF5 and Plasma5" distribution, there are a lot, and so you can install something made for another one without "complication". It's better take your freedom like that, choosing, that talking bad about community-opensource projects..

snack · 2015-04-04 09:50:58

JKAbrams wrote:

So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?

I tried Plasma 5 and then rolled back to KDE4 a couple of times, since Plasma 5 still misses some features I need/want (Lancelot, complex plotter, painless system tray...). The rollback never gave me much pain, the only annoying thing is that in order to satisfy dependencies on downgrade you might have to remove applications and reinstall them after the downgrade. But in the end I can call it a smooth experience.

cferry · 2015-04-04 15:06:29

Hi all,

I'm using Plasma 5 and the transition from KDE4 to Plasma 5 went pretty well, both on my laptop and workstation. Some posts earlier, someone complained about the absence of Dolphin, and was advised to compile it from AUR.
I also did! Yet I may add that, although there are numerous dependencies that come with dolphin-git, skipping the "baloo" one (semantic desktop bloatware that comes with KDE along with akonadi and strigi) does not prevent the file manager from compiling and running well (Dolphin's devs have kept Baloo optional for now). It breaks pacman's dependency tree, but at least it works, without the bloatware.

By the way, does any of you know if the "picture" plasmoid is going to be ported to Plasma 5? (I've heard that some plasmoids will not be ported, but I don't know for this one...).

Elemento Cero · 2015-04-04 16:35:52

I have several problems with Plasma 5, but they are minor, and I understand it will take time to be perfect and polished (less if a lot of testers help). When I say "it's ok for daily use", in a rolling release distro, I mean "you can use it but you may encounter a few quirks", and I think it's totally discouraged for a workstation. In that case, it's preferable KDE 4.

Obviously, the transition could be smoother, but I'm impatient about software and I want the latest the sooner the better. For the time being, I'm combining Gnome Shell and Plasma 5 as I see fit, but Gnome has its own problems too (damned Tracker!). Nothing is perfect; I only hope that these problems you are experiencing with Plasma 5 get a proper solution as soon as possible.

arojas · 2015-04-04 16:43:30

cferry wrote:

By the way, does any of you know if the "picture" plasmoid is going to be ported to Plasma 5? (I've heard that some plasmoids will not be ported, but I don't know for this one...).

If you mean the frame plasmoid, the source is still in git so it will get ported eventually. Applets that will not be ported have their sources removed from git.

Archange · 2015-04-04 23:20:50

With latest plasma-desktop, I can’t open the menu anymore, it says there is an issue with “org.kde.plasma.private.kickoff”. Has anyone faced this too and is there a solution?

firekage · 2015-04-05 00:34:53

snack wrote:

JKAbrams wrote:
So my question is: What issues will I face when I try to downgrade?
I tried Plasma 5 and then rolled back to KDE4 a couple of times, since Plasma 5 still misses some features I need/want (Lancelot, complex plotter, painless system tray...). The rollback never gave me much pain, the only annoying thing is that in order to satisfy dependencies on downgrade you might have to remove applications and reinstall them after the downgrade. But in the end I can call it a smooth experience.

It is possible to have them both and log into one of them at the login prompt? I had few years ago Ubuntu with almost all desktop menagers for it and during log in i could choose which of them i want to use (unity, kde, gnome, mate and so on). I'm not asking about full -Syu when KDE4 will be replaced by KDE5 aka Plasma 5 with missing some apps but for both of them to be installed and ready to go whenever i would choose one of them.

BTW how did you rollback to KDE4 from Plasma?

Last edited by firekage (2015-04-05 00:35:23)

arojas · 2015-04-05 07:42:46

firekage wrote:

It is possible to have them both and log into one of them at the login prompt?

No. Plasma 5 is a new version of KDE4, not a different DE.

nierro · 2015-04-05 08:43:13

@nierro: does restarting plasma help? You should be able to:
killall plasma-shell && plasma-shell &

#746
Yes, it indeed helps. As i thought, it restored normal ram usage by plasmashell. Even then, it still grows up only while using transmission-qt.

snack · 2015-04-05 08:54:40

firekage wrote:

BTW how did you rollback to KDE4 from Plasma?

I switched to a VT, removed all the Plasma 5 packages (pacman -Rs plasma-next, or something like this), eventually removing also all the packages which needed Plasma 5, and then reinstalled all the KDE4 packages. I saved a list of installed KDE4 packages and applications before installing Plasma 5 to be able to roll back to an almost identical KDE4 system.

hifi25nl · 2015-04-07 09:55:31

From kernel 3.19.x Plasma starting is VERY slow. I am using nvidia-340xx.

In the same system I have linux-rt kernel 3.18.9 and starting Plasma is fine.
I have checked a lot of things (Xorg log, dmesg, Xsession eroors, etc.) but I have not found a solution.

I guess a sort of incompatibility with Nvidia drivers, but not sure.

pb · 2015-04-07 13:48:04

@hifi25nl - It's probably something with NVidia closed source drivers. I'm user Plasma5 on 3.19 or 4.0rc6 now and I don't notice that it starts slower than on kernel <3.19, but I'm Radeon (opensource) user.

hifi25nl · 2015-04-07 15:31:07

Same problem with nouveau driver just installed. The only error message that I can see is about "WRITE SAME FAILED".

I have been asking about this on Kernel section, without a solution. But i don't know if it is related or not.

Tom B · 2015-04-08 00:38:10

Earlier today my laptop would not shut down (it hang for ages waiting for a process to stop)... upon reboot I can now not log in to KDE. It shows SDDM allows me to log in, shows the progress bar and eventually loads with a black screen. I get a mouse cursor, I can press ctrl-alt-del to get the "lot out" option and alt-f2 to get the launcher, although nothing can be launched from it.

Any ideas how I can resolve this? I have removed ~/.config /var/tmp/kdecache-<user> and looked for other kde related files in ~/, I can't see any. Other users cannot log in either, it just tries to log in and immediately goes back to SDDM.

Really starting to hate KDE5, every day I seem to encounter a different set of bugs.

edit: also tried pacman -S plasma and reinstalling everything.

Last edited by Tom B (2015-04-08 00:41:38)

Xabre · 2015-04-08 00:47:32

Check if your ksycoca5 cache is corrupted, happened to me before (file was not writable, so half of the session programs didn't start.) Just rm ~/.cache/ksycoca5*

Last edited by Xabre (2015-04-08 00:48:14)

indepth · 2015-04-10 00:21:35

For me it's freezing since the last nvidia update. It work wonderfully for like 5-10 minutes then completely frozen!
Anyone know where I can look to find my issue? Nothing wrong in .xsession-errors

arojas · 2015-04-10 06:00:36

indepth wrote:

For me it's freezing since the last nvidia update. It work wonderfully for like 5-10 minutes then completely frozen!
Anyone know where I can look to find my issue? Nothing wrong in .xsession-errors

Remove any *.lock file in ~/.cache and ~/.config

Soukyuu · 2015-04-11 22:54:22

Plasma doesn't seem to be viable for a vnc session. I tried turning off all effects and it still lags much more than kde4 ever did... Also seems to be freezing randomly with device notifier icon pulsating (never saw that happen before).
Back to kde4 again on my "server" PC for now.

Oh and dolphin is still eating my bookmarks for breakfast. I'm glad I froze all kde packages at their last kde4 versions on my main PC.

Last edited by Soukyuu (2015-04-11 22:56:10)

Arch Linux

#776 2015-04-03 17:45:26

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#777 2015-04-03 20:50:58

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#778 2015-04-03 21:12:22

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#779 2015-04-03 22:31:15

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#780 2015-04-03 22:38:47

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#781 2015-04-03 23:49:17

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#782 2015-04-04 00:18:56

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#783 2015-04-04 09:22:35

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#784 2015-04-04 09:50:58

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#785 2015-04-04 15:06:29

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#786 2015-04-04 16:35:52

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#787 2015-04-04 16:43:30

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#788 2015-04-04 23:20:50

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#789 2015-04-05 00:34:53

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#790 2015-04-05 07:42:46

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#791 2015-04-05 08:43:13

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#792 2015-04-05 08:54:40

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#793 2015-04-07 09:55:31

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#794 2015-04-07 13:48:04

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#795 2015-04-07 15:31:07

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#796 2015-04-08 00:38:10

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#797 2015-04-08 00:47:32

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#798 2015-04-10 00:21:35

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#799 2015-04-10 06:00:36

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

#800 2015-04-11 22:54:22

Re: KF 5 & Plasma

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