KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS Released With Much Better Wayland Support, Other Improvements

[bwat47]

In fact, KDE doesn't even support Intel on Wayland 'cause I can't launch a KDE Wayland session at all whereas GNOME Shell works fine on Wayland with this same Intel card.

Plasma wayland session works fine here on intel kably lake graphics (kde 5.11)

[birdie]

Too bad memory usage optimization is just not there.

I open Akregator with zero feeds - roughly 250MB of RAM gets lost. What?!

The Plasma process (default configuration) eats up to 250MB of RAM as well with zero plasmoids on the desktop.

In short, boot up an empty plasma session, lose up to 700MB of RAM. So much optimization.

And some plasmoids crash all the time (like the weather applet). That's just not funny any longer.

In contrast I'm still running KDE 3.5.10 with tons of additional utilities (like knetstats which has no alternative in KDE5) and over 60 feeds in Akregator and memory use is under 250MB.

[Happy Heyoka]

I submitted a patch: https://phabricator.kde.org/D7423 but could use some technical assistance if anyone here is familiar with the systems in question.

And you titled it wrong! no pudding for you!
(I hate people who tell you how to format it instead of just reformatting it themselves and _then_ telling you nicely in a non-passive-aggressive way how to do it from now on)

Ubuntu 18 has apparently still got Qt 5.9, that's a bit sad (for me, for Kubuntu), when is 5.10 due to be the dependency? (since it has apparently been released)

[smitty3268]

Too bad memory usage optimization is just not there.

I open Akregator with zero feeds - roughly 250MB of RAM gets lost. What?!

The Plasma process (default configuration) eats up to 250MB of RAM as well with zero plasmoids on the desktop.

In short, boot up an empty plasma session, lose up to 700MB of RAM. So much optimization.

And some plasmoids crash all the time (like the weather applet). That's just not funny any longer.

In contrast I'm still running KDE 3.5.10 with tons of additional utilities (like knetstats which has no alternative in KDE5) and over 60 feeds in Akregator and memory use is under 250MB.

250MB!!!! Holy bloat, batman! Nobody needs more than 640KB of memory, and I'll never use anything that requires more than that. It's crazy how people think that 250MB of RAM is acceptable these days.

Oh, and get off my lawn.

[RealNC]

Too bad memory usage optimization is just not there.

I open Akregator with zero feeds - roughly 250MB of RAM gets lost. What?!

Why aren't you using a Commodore 64? Or an Amiga, or Atari ST perhaps. Very small memory requirements there. It would be perfect for you.

[polarathene]

At least on Kubuntu Artful (as shipped via the KDE updates PPA), plasma 5.12 represents a significant regression on the standard Xorg session. The power buttons (power-off, sleep, wake up) don't work anymore.

Did you just update without a restart? I've noticed when updating certain parts of the OS parts of the DE like that break. You can shutdown via terminal, `sudo shutdown -r now` will restart for you. All those buttons probably work then after the reboot. If not go into System Settings and check power management, should have config options there for all that, perhaps something got borked for you?

[polarathene]

Too bad memory usage optimization is just not there.

I open Akregator with zero feeds - roughly 250MB of RAM gets lost. What?!

The Plasma process (default configuration) eats up to 250MB of RAM as well with zero plasmoids on the desktop.

In short, boot up an empty plasma session, lose up to 700MB of RAM. So much optimization.

And some plasmoids crash all the time (like the weather applet). That's just not funny any longer.

In contrast I'm still running KDE 3.5.10 with tons of additional utilities (like knetstats which has no alternative in KDE5) and over 60 feeds in Akregator and memory use is under 250MB.

No idea what Akregator is allocating that amount of RAM for, but have you tried using the app? Perhaps you don't see much more allocated and the existing allocated memory is used to up to a certain point before anymore is allocated. What's memory usage of it for you on 3.5 when in use?

Same with the Plasma process, you might find that plasmoids don't have much impact in most cases.

There are distros that boot into plasma session with only 350-450MB of RAM allocated, so you're probably just not on a suitable distro for your needs? Maybe consider KaOS? I use Manjaro personally. Gnome tends to use more than KDE, XFCE I think uses similar amount, can't remember but I think LxQt and i3 also had similar memory usage experience(but these were community spins on Manjaro).

If 3.5 meets your needs that's great, enjoy! For others Plasma 5 offers more for them than 3.5 does, not everyone prioritizes memory usage to such small amounts I have KDE 5.11 working great on a old core 2 duo dual core 2.5GHz 2GB RAM system, and it's running off USB 2.0 stick(32GB using about 15GB). My main system has 32GB RAM averaging 20GB usage, few hundred MB isn't going to make a huge difference for me. Usability/functionality is more important, then resource usage/performance.

What was the knetstats utility doing for you btw that isn't available in modern KDE?

[Delgarde]

Weak trolling. I give it a 2/10.

Really? If that's a 2, how bad would it have to be to get a 1?

[R41N3R]

In fact, KDE doesn't even support Intel on Wayland 'cause I can't launch a KDE Wayland session at all whereas GNOME Shell works fine on Wayland with this same Intel card.

On Arch Linux Plasma 5.12 works perfectly with Wayland and Intel. I had issues with my Linux 4.16-git and AMD DC, I couldn't login to Plasma-Wayland, SDDM just freezes, but as soon as I used the stable release of Linux 4.15 it now works as well! The latest mesa-git somestimes creates as well some issues with Plasma-Wayland, so using the stable release of Mesa is recommended.

[R41N3R]

The release of Plasma 5.12 increased my experience on Wayland dramatically. Even the beta worked perfectly already. Compared to the previous releases quality has improved a lot, the serious bugs are fixed and I can now use it as my daily driver on all my Intel and AMD machines. I am really thankful for this great release!
The improvements required now for Wayland are missing Window decoration e.g. on LibreOffice or Virt-Manager (though Gtk might be a little tricky here), mouse pointer locking in games on XWayland (probably we need a new release of Xorg) and fixing the bugs that where a workaround is required today. But nothing critical anymore like in previous releases when I couldn't use Virt-Manager or when I had system freezes during login on Wayland, the scaling was automatically set to 2x or it was blurry. Plasma 5.12 rocks :-)

The new Color Mode in Plasma-Wayland to reduce blue colors at night and multi monitor environements work well (at least on my setup, test on Intel GPU and modesetting).