KDE Plasma 5.13 Ships As The Best Plasma 5 Release Yet

[polarathene]

You have to be using an SSD though which I suspect Plasma developers are using and not testing HDD use case which is way slower in many critical paths. A lot of stuff is awfully blocking on I/O which could be way better for user experience if Plasma used I/O asynchronously.

5.13 had bunch of work on boot time, profiling things to identify sync I/O blockers that could be handled as async instead iirc. Anything else you had in mind that should be async that isn't? Also using a good disk I/O scheduler will help, BFQ for example should make a noticeable difference as a desktop user.

[molecule-eye]

Has the giant cursor on Wayland been fixed?

This is SO easy to fix for yourself. Just manually set the cursor size you want in the settings.

[molecule-eye]

Already arrived in KDE repositories in openSUSE LEAP 15

How? I thought TW gets the latest stuff right away and leap doesn't. Also, for the short one month period I ran TW, plasma updates took way longer than that to roll in--sometimes two weeks or so. I'm jealous, because I just moved to Manjaro thinking I would get updates ahead of opensuse folks, but apparently not! (Unless I enable testing...)

[woprandi]

I'm hesitating between Fedora KDE and KDE Neon to have the best KDE experience. Which one to choose ?

[starshipeleven]

How? I thought TW gets the latest stuff right away and leap doesn't.

Currently TW does not have that, maybe in a few days.

Also, for the short one month period I ran TW, plasma updates took way longer than that to roll in--sometimes two weeks or so.

They are running openQA, recompiling all dependencies and fixing any issue they find. It's one of the reasons TW manages to be stable while still a rolling release on the edge. Stuff half the distro depends on will require more time.

I'm jealous, because I just moved to Manjaro thinking I would get updates ahead of opensuse folks, but apparently not! (Unless I enable testing...)

Afaik Manjaro does the same as Tumbleweed but with a more static timescale. They lag a few weeks behind actual Arch upstream.

If you want to stay on the edge you should enable testing repos (which should receive packages as soon as they land in Arch), and risk more instability.

[torturedutopian]

Hi ! Are you referring to boot time ? Are you referring to constant HDD spinning due to Baloo indexing ?

As for myself, I have installed Plasma on many machines including low end ones. It always felt FASTER than other well known DE except for the boot time and except when lots of indexing were taking place. So I disabled files indexing. (it's disabled too I think under Ubuntu 18.04)

In general, even on slow machines, I tend to find KDE is more I/O intensive BUT faster overall and thus more usable. It also applied to core apps like Okular, Gwenview, Dolphin. A little slower to start, and so much faster (and features-full) to use.

Indexing is very bearable with an SDD though. But that's clearly a problem that should be addressed, granted. I now find it super useful. It used to be a little annoying with my HDD.

Exactly this!! Finally someone said it!! I have reported this twice and still not fixed!

This is my main issue with this DE and makes it impossible for me to use it. I just install software, I write a usb flash with gnome-disks and during that period, plasmashell is completely frozen. It's ridiculous at least! And it's something since the beginning of KDE 5.

Many people talk about the completely broken single-threaded architecture of gnomeshell but plasma ain't that better either.

[torturedutopian]

I'm hesitating between Fedora KDE and KDE Neon to have the best KDE experience. Which one to choose ?

I guess Neon is the way to go because this will clearly more more tested / supported. But Neon is based on an LTS Ubuntu, so everything will be a little outdated soon. (yes, drivers, kernels & core apps are backported)

So it rather comes down to you general distro requirements and why you prefer Fedora over ubuntu. KDE itself probably won't differ much.

I find Neon very enjoyable to get a constantly up to date & supported KDE ; my bugs reports make more sense now that I am sure devs can replicate them instantly. It also feels great to have an up to date DE over a stable distro. I use it since the beginning and I never encountered strange phenomenons due to distro / KDE integration / testing.

I installed it on friends, family and even disabled people PCs, none had issues so far, and they've been updated for about 2 years. It might make sense to use Fedora to get a state of the art distro and innovative features. Anyone using an up to date KDE stack over Fedora here ?

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

KDE Neon has QT 5.10 & Plasma 5.13, but is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, not 18.04 LTS.

According to the Kubuntu forum, they're waiting on Ubuntu to update QT from 5.9.5 to 5.10 before making Plasma 5.13 available.

[elvenbone]

I haven't been following KDE (don't run it myself, but interested in trying). One of my main gripes with Linux (or rather X11) is the mixed DPi support, ie running a 4k and FHD display together without scaling issues, setting lower res on a monitor, fiddling with xrandr scaling and so on. I remember reading something about KDE looking to fix it in 5.11-12 but don't think they did. Does anyone know the current status of this?

They said that display-dependent UI scaling was not possible with X11 (or rather too much work for them I guess), but apparently it is implemented for Wayland.
Nonround scaling factors (like 1.4 instead of 1.0 or 2.0) never really worked for me, though. Haven't tried again since 5.11. Hence I go for font DPI scaling only. At least that is consistent across frameworks, Plasma-Framework, bare QT, GTK, etc.
But that setting is always systemwide I believe. And not really usable when monitor DPI differs by more than 50%.

[schmalzler]

And it still seems to be impossible to get color calibration for wayland. Any idea when/how it will be possible?