Plasma 5: is it really usable?

chsims1 · 2016-01-07 22:43:22

Hi All,

I migrated to Plasma 5 as per the advice on the Arch homepage, and I feel as though I am left with a very broken system. I can't go a day without 2 or 3 crashes; often these are not reportable because the application doesn't keep a log for some reason.

Yes, I could spend hours searching all this stuff down to sort it out, but I want a reasonably stable system to do my day to day work. I really should have ignored the guidelines to upgrade. In my opinion it was very poor advice.

Please don't come back at me saying cutting edge stuff and all the rest; I do not subscribe to testing. I guess I'm just a little peeved at how my blissful Arch experience has been transformed by "up"grading too early.

Regards,

Ian Sutherland

P.S. I'm quite loathed to downgrade, but it really doesn't seem ready for general release just yet

Last edited by chsims1 (2016-01-07 22:51:57)

V1del · 2016-01-07 23:08:19

Works fine here, unless you point at specifics it's hard to make a judgement whether this is specific to your system or not. Many of the more annoying crashers/instabilities are bugs in QT5 which have to be fixed there and are only exposed by KDE since they are the biggest user.

johanbcn · 2016-01-08 00:53:25

I installed a fresh system last week and experienced a lot of crashes. Removing the propietary nvidia driver and switching to nouveau fixed a lot of them.

Other than that, I find it's kind of usable if you don't mind the stuff that occasionally breaks out of the blue and without explanation.

Last edited by johanbcn (2016-01-08 00:53:45)

midixinga · 2016-01-08 00:54:42

If you are not willing to spend a lot of time to get a setup for a reasonably stable system and to workaround all issues, I would say no, it's not really usable for the moment.
I spend a lot of time (but it's my hobby, this is Arch with KDE :-) ) and my system is quite stable.

Wilco · 2016-01-08 10:13:34

For me, Plasma 5 works fine. Before updating I removed (backup) most directories in my home dir, like .config, .local, etc.

However, Plasma5 still has plenty of bugs, it would be nice if the developers would focus solely on bug fixes for a few releases.

Loose_Control · 2016-01-08 11:50:27

I don't have any problems with plasma 5 on my notebook with intel drivers. (after the drivers bugs where finally fixed >_>)
The only annoying thing in my opinion is that some things aren't ported yet.

The first thing to do when switching is getting rid of old configs and hope you don't hit any bugs in drivers or Qt which make you life a pain. (Like with Nvidia drivers right now)

btw there is a bug with phonon-vlc (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335111) if you are using it it also might cause the crashes try switching to phonon-gstreamer.

Last edited by Loose_Control (2016-01-08 11:56:43)

mukl · 2016-01-08 15:14:39

I use it on my intel based Laptop and nvidia/amd based desktop and it works very well.

I just have a big problem with akonadi ignoring a huge bug with courier-imap. (But this Bug already appeared in kedpim4: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338186)

I also recommend to get rid of old configs.

twelveeighty · 2016-01-08 15:18:25

I've been running Plasma 5 on this work-critical laptop for months. Yes, it has its issues from time to time, but nothing has stopped me from doing my work.

midixinga · 2016-01-08 15:42:27

Loose_Control wrote:

btw there is a bug with phonon-vlc (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335111) if you are using it it also might cause the crashes try switching to phonon-gstreamer.

or do not: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357592
and that is one problem, that we have very different bugs depending on hardware/etc

king3vbo · 2016-01-08 16:53:10

I have been using Plasma 5 for a few weeks now and really enjoy it. It did require several hours of tweaking and configuring to get it to play nice with everything. Old configs can be the death of you, in my experience.

drcouzelis · 2016-01-08 19:10:40

I'm everyone here has already seen this but apparently KDE Plasma 5.5 Has Matured Past the Point of Plasma 4.

...And for those like me missing the glory days, try the openSUSE build with KDE 2!

TheSaint · 2016-01-08 20:10:48

I'd say that is usable, but incomplete.
GTK doesn't render properly.

arojas · 2016-01-08 20:59:28

TheSaint wrote:

I'd say that is usable, but incomplete.
GTK doesn't render properly.

What does GTK rendering have to do with Plasma?

Soukyuu · 2016-01-08 22:41:58

Aside from dolphin5/kio being retarded (literally) when interacting with fuse filesystems (at least sshfs and ntfs) and crashing now and then on file operations, it's quite usable.
I'm running several systems with KDE5, with nvidia's proprietary driver on nvidia systems. No crashes related to that.

TheSaint · 2016-01-09 09:03:16

arojas wrote:

What does GTK rendering have to do with Plasma?

I'd say that icons in the tray are not seen and colors are not matching with the theme (i.e. some message is written in pale blue over white). The second one I should fiddle some more.I installed breeze-gtk but I don't know where to go for.

The Infinity · 2016-01-09 17:27:04

TheSaint: Legacy tray icons are finally working now (without any additional effort). Breeze-gtk has some bugs and can't use the KDE color scheme (because GTK devs removed the API to create non-CSS themes). Besides that it is working fine.
Soukyuu: You're right, interacting with sshfs is really a bit slower then in Dolphin 4 (especially when browsing a directory with lots of subdirs).

In my opinion Plasma 5 is stable now (using proprietary NVIDIA driver/Intel HD graphics/open source ATI driver). Can't even remember the last crash.

Soukyuu · 2016-01-09 18:49:01

It's more than "a little" slower for me though, see attachments here.

Updated today and plasmashell crashed twice already. That's what I get for claiming it's stable for me

Arch Linux

#1 2016-01-07 22:43:22

Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#2 2016-01-07 23:08:19

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#3 2016-01-08 00:53:25

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#4 2016-01-08 00:54:42

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#5 2016-01-08 10:13:34

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#6 2016-01-08 11:50:27

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#7 2016-01-08 15:14:39

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#8 2016-01-08 15:18:25

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#9 2016-01-08 15:42:27

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#10 2016-01-08 16:53:10

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#11 2016-01-08 19:10:40

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#12 2016-01-08 20:10:48

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#13 2016-01-08 20:59:28

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#14 2016-01-08 22:41:58

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#15 2016-01-09 09:03:16

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#16 2016-01-09 17:27:04

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

#17 2016-01-09 18:49:01

Re: Plasma 5: is it really usable?

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