KDE Plasma 5.5 Beta Presents New Features

[Serafean]

They replaced the flat icons in the traditional app launcher with some colourful abominations. Even worse, the shut-down and restart icons just look like a red and a blue ball in SDDM due to their small size. They also added unnecessary borders to applications in the task-bar and a blue highlighting that looks like shit with green icons.

Normally I don't give a shit about appearance but I wish they had stuck to the flat design principles.

And that's strictly your subjective view...
Now for my strictly subjective view :
I personnally love the borders in the task bar. The default Breeze theme changed and I see my desktop as beautiful again...
The shut down/restart icons are no better than they were before (still can't tell which is which at a glance, have to wait for the tooltip).
And no, I don't like flat design principles

[M@yeulC]

Quite disappointed by the last update, in some regards. Some design decisions can be seen as a regression, and there is no way to go back.
Moreover, I recently installed it on a friend's ultrabook, and was quite disappointed with the touchscreen gestion. I wish the convergence promised by plasma active was there.
But overall, nice bug fixes and such, plasma is more and more stable, it even runs on an old laptop (I tried it just for the fun, and it turned out to be quite responsive and usable).

[darkbasic]

KDE is awesome. Buggy as hell but still awesome. Can't wait to test wayland.

[wodencafe]

KDE is awesome. Buggy as hell but still awesome. Can't wait to test wayland.

It has always been that way. I'm on Unity right now because KDE crashed on me for the millionth time.

I'm waiting for another couple of update cycles before I try and start KDE again, so hopefully all of the god damn annoying crash bugs will be taken care of by that point.

[schmidtbag]

I don't understand what you people do that cause KDE to be so buggy. Sure, every once in a while something like kwin will crash on me but it starts right back up as though nothing happened. Lately, there's only 1 weird continuous problem (visual glitch) I encounter and I may have figured out a simple workaround to stop it.

KDE, in my opinion, is pretty solid. Though, I will have to admit that KDE on ARM (at least for Arch Linux) is almost unusable. Sometimes just clicking on the K-menu will crash all of plasma.

[Scias]

I don't understand what you people do that cause KDE to be so buggy. Sure, every once in a while something like kwin will crash on me but it starts right back up as though nothing happened. Lately, there's only 1 weird continuous problem (visual glitch) I encounter and I may have figured out a simple workaround to stop it.

KDE, in my opinion, is pretty solid.

Agreed. I've been using it since Plasma 5.1, and while 5.1 was truly unstable, later releases and especially the latest one are far from the bugfest a lot of people complain about lately. I rarely encounter crashes (the thing that crashes the most here is systemsettings) despite using it daily, and as you said if it does happen stuff gets restarted instantly.

I don't know, maybe I'm just lucky enough, or it's because of Arch vanilla packages/settings, but Plasma 5.4 has been enjoyable and stable for me.

[rtfazeberdee]

I must be living on another planet because i don't find KDE buggy at all and i'm using opensuse tumbleweed - maybe i'm doing something wrong

[zanny]

I don't understand what you people do that cause KDE to be so buggy. Sure, every once in a while something like kwin will crash on me but it starts right back up as though nothing happened. Lately, there's only 1 weird continuous problem (visual glitch) I encounter and I may have figured out a simple workaround to stop it.

KDE, in my opinion, is pretty solid. Though, I will have to admit that KDE on ARM (at least for Arch Linux) is almost unusable. Sometimes just clicking on the K-menu will crash all of plasma.

Plasma Desktop is probably the most taxing user of QML in the market right now, so its revealed thousands of bugs in the QML engine. Remember, Qt's QML renderer is basically an OpenGL compiler and scene graph on top of everything a normal application has and that is at the complexity scale of a browser rendering engine in and of itself.

They should probably provide a legacy icons set since not all the new ones are objectively better. Its about choice, right? The next release will hopefully ship with both icon sets as options - "Breeze Fresh" and "Breeze Classic".

[darkbasic]

I don't understand what you people do that cause KDE to be so buggy.

I use my laptop with two external monitors attached through a single mini displayport cable and the lid closed. When electricity goes off and back again I have no signal anymore and I have to restart my laptop using magic sysrq keys. Or let's talk about the unusable KWin with Intel drivers on Broadwell which forces me to use Xrender. I'm using Arch Linux, so everything is "the latest and greatest".

[Luke_Wolf]

I don't understand what you people do that cause KDE to be so buggy. Sure, every once in a while something like kwin will crash on me but it starts right back up as though nothing happened. Lately, there's only 1 weird continuous problem (visual glitch) I encounter and I may have figured out a simple workaround to stop it.

KDE, in my opinion, is pretty solid. Though, I will have to admit that KDE on ARM (at least for Arch Linux) is almost unusable. Sometimes just clicking on the K-menu will crash all of plasma.

Given they only appeared after Michael reblogged Kevin Kofler's mailing list post about it being a mess, I'm saying they're trolls.

The only legitimate complaints about Plasma 5 as far as I'm aware are a results of either driver bugs or plasma's completely broken process model for plasmoids that allows a single plasmoid to block or kill the entire plasma stack.