KDE Plasma 5.16 Will Let You Reboot Into The UEFI Setup Screen

[Danny3]

What bootloader do you use? Grub can handle this with the grub-reboot command.

I think it's Grub or what whatever comes by default with Kubuntu 18.10.
I didn't know about this command, thanks for mentioning it!
But still I would prefer a GUI for it, but not a separate one, one integrated into the reboot option of the current DE, in my case KDE.
I don't have have the time and patience to try all the:
grub-reboot Windows 7
grub-reboot 'Windows'
grub-reboot W7
Or whatever the right command is.
I prefer that the DE takes the correct version from GRUB list of operating sytem and then prepares the right command in background so I can just click on it without caring what's the correct command.
So, it's very nice that GRUB has this options, I hope that in the next versions th KDE developers will take advantage of it so this works also on non-uefi systems.

[Grogan]

Good for you.

What pisses me off with Plasma at this point of time is that it causes the system to lock up hard when starting a Wayland session with Nouveau. Until this is addressed, I have to run Plasma Wayland with KWIN_COMPOSE=Q to force QPainter CPU rendering instead.

Well, that would piss me off seemingly more than it does you. With that kind of problem I don't think I'd have the words "use" and "KDE" in the same sentence, at least not without some adjectives. If it didn't work well enough for me, I wouldn't be praising it.

The only reason I'm using KDE again now, is because the styling settings are fine grained again, and the fancy effects actually WORK for me now and don't crash things out from under. Before this the compositing effects in desktop environments were a curiosity, kind of like manually activating XScreensaver to play with them, knowing that you wouldn't want that poo engaging while you are doing anything serious. For me, right now, this is stable enough that I can actually have all this eye candy (animation effects, and I'm using transparency all over the place for various things). I've adjusted it, and myself and I don't even miss my awesome XFCE setups anymore (except for the screen edge desktop switching, but keyboard shortcuts are just as easy). A bit of start up bloat, but I've never been happier with my desktop.

amdgpu here though, with relatively current graphics stack and I do use X, not wayland.

Qpaint drawing really shouldn't be horrible though, it wasn't that long ago when we didn't have hardware accelerated window managers and we made do. You'd obviously have to choose your configuration and styling wisely. It's not like you wouldn't have hardware acceleration where it matters, like browsers and video etc. with Nouveau in your situation I'd presume.

No, not even clever compiling tricks are a good solution for things that are supposed to be GPU accelerated. Remember the old days when MESA was a software implementation of OpenGL? It was OK in a pinch, to fake OpenGL and be able to run spinning gears animations or some of those screensavers, but it was terrible for any serious rendering. It wasn't anywhere near as good as llvmpipe either.

I also get that using Nvidia is not an option for you because you want to use Wayland. KDE/Kwin fails to meet that.

[Sonadow]

Good for you.

What pisses me off with Plasma at this point of time is that it causes the system to lock up hard when starting a Wayland session with Nouveau. Until this is addressed, I have to run Plasma Wayland with KWIN_COMPOSE=Q to force QPainter CPU rendering instead.

Without this environment variable, Plasma Wayland will use llvmpipe and default to OpenGL rendering, which is painfully slow (and completely unusable) even on my dual Xeon and dual Opeteron beasts.

But with KWIN_COMPOSE=Q, Plasma is plain borked where screenshots are concerned; Spectacle refuses to capture anything and only returns empty results. Interestingly, screenshots can be taken in Plasma Wayland under OpenGL rendering.

[Grogan]

kde plasma's panel has items functioning like an utility window. auto-hiding the panel does not work if kwin isn't configured to hide utility windows.
smplayer's palylist window, among other useful windows, is classified as an utility window. open smplayer and it's playlist side-by-side with a file-manager like dolphin with hiding of utility windows and you'll find that the window you'd like to drag files to disappears when you click the file-manager.
As you say, nobody is forcing me to use KDE, so I don't, and my frustration with this only lasts about 2 minutes when I occasionally, increasingly rarely, see if KDE has become anywhere near usable. It's not. Of course, Baloo using 100% CPU and IO for hours on end unless you disable it doesn't exactly help with all the bugs KDE has that makes me stick with XFCE4 - because it works, it's not got anywhere near the amount of features but the ones it does have actually work. I can auto-hide my panel AND drag files between playlist windows and file-managers. And so on.

Saying "just don't use it" as in "Don't use KDE" isn't really a good response to criticism. It's not something that encourages people who don't use it for various reasons to switch or even try it for a few days.

There's quite a bit of stupidity in Kwin... what you mentioned for example. I have Steam doing that to me in my kubuntu gaming setup, some hidden resource takes focus and the panel won't go into hide position. I can usually get it by clicking on Steam's titlebar, but sometimes it takes a few tries.

Another stupid thing... I like to be able to switch desktops at screen edges (I came from using XFCE for a long time). The way it's implemented in modern KDE (at least since KDE 4, which made me throw up in my mouth at the time) is that the same bottom screen edge that triggers panel showing, is stolen by desktop switching to move to a lower row of virtual desktops, even if you don't have one. It doesn't matter what screen edge you put the panel on, the panel will never appear. So I either have to turn off panel auto hiding (absolutely unacceptable, I like a large panel) or not use desktop switching at screen edges. So basically that feature is unusable to me.

As for Baloo, that does cause severe iowait for me in its default, aggressive configuration (index everything including file content). I think upping the NOFILE limit helps with that, but I have the search indexing disabled because I hate that anyway (in any environment). Even if I have to search for something I have a general idea where it is... I've always just used the find command. I don't even allow slocate.

Another thing that's dumb... the "run a command" prompt (e.g. ALT+F2) is actually a search box now ("Plasma Search") and when you type something in there, it comes up in a search list and you can't just type a command and hit enter, you have to choose it from the list of matches, and good luck with that trying to get out of a malfunctioning game or something without killing your session. (i.e. I have trouble getting it in focus and selecting a match when I have no use of a mouse pointer). So I set the keyboard shortcut to None and created a custom one so that ALT+F2 just launches a terminal, which is far more useful to me than that silly search box.

Despite nonsense like that, I'm very much enjoying Plasma 5 (currently 5.15.3), but at the same time I will curse silly behaviour.

[Vistaus]

Baloo did it to me once after I wiped ~/.config trying to fix an unrelated problem. A lot of distributions have Baloo set up to be less aggressive by default...wipe that and, well, we'll call it "fun times ahead"...

That said, after giving it two days to run it was really nice to be able to search scripts I wrote from the start menu. I ended up with a 4GB Baloo DB.

Tracker always spiked my CPU and so did Nepomuk (Baloo's predecessor). Baloo still consumes a bit more than I like to, which is why I disabled it, but in all fairness: it has never 'spiked'.

[skeevy420]

Baloo has never spiked my CPU. Neither has Gnome’s Tracker. BOTH KDE and Gnome would do well put an explanation of user-adjustable settings in front of users. Not everyone jumps into system settings immediately after an update install or understand every option on offer.

Baloo did it to me once after I wiped ~/.config trying to fix an unrelated problem. A lot of distributions have Baloo set up to be less aggressive by default...wipe that and, well, we'll call it "fun times ahead"...

That said, after giving it two days to run it was really nice to be able to search scripts I wrote from the start menu. I ended up with a 4GB Baloo DB.

[kpedersen]

This usually causes Fastboot to error out and fallback to the 'slow' boot that allows access to the UEFI menus.

True, I suppose if that works it is quite a good last resort.

But how long until it just comes up with an "Oops" image and a phone number for you to contact them for a replacement machine XD

[rtfazeberdee]

I did not mean to say people shouldn't use KDE. What I am saying is that I do not use KDE because I like to auto-hide my panels and be able to drag and drop files from a file-manager to a playlist window - which is something really basic KDE can't do (you can have one or the other but not both). I am also saying that the result of "bugs are fine, live with them, configure around them, disable the problematic defaults" and things like that is that some people, including myself, find something that works instead of messing around trying to find the root cause of bugs & reporting them.

It should also be mentioned that most people will probably just say screw this buggy shit and forget KDE instead of finding the cause of bugs & opening bug reports (or adding to existing). I actually do this even though I don't use KDE (and most of those are still open, some have been for years).

If you can live with the bugs then great, use it. If it works for you then it's all good. For me it's not a choice.

In future just stick to making your specific point rather than sweeping generalisations about KDE being usable that are complete cr*p

"It should also be mentioned that most people will probably just say screw this buggy shit and forget KDE instead of finding the cause of bugs & opening bug reports" - yes because people make sweeping false comments that KDE is usable does not help the situation.

[Sonadow]

It's not a bug, you have fastboot which can do some boot time optimizations/assumptions, and then some boards offer UltraFast boot, or whatever marketing name for it. The latter one takes that a step further and one of those is skipping the bios logo display and accepting input iirc(you cannot interact with bootmanager like grub or systemd-boot, it just goes with whatever was default once the timeout runs out(normally that's something the user sets to 0).

If a boot is noticed to fail multiple times, some boards will disable the feature, otherwise you need to set a UEFI var to toggle booting into UEFI on next restart which is what the terminal command does(and presumably what this GUI addition does as well). Alternatively, you can take the boards battery out for a moment to do a classic reset.

I remember some setting that was meant to disable legacy USB or something, but ended up ignoring USB input completely, even after boot process iirc, bad information of what the feature did... Luckily had a PS/2 keyboard lying around, otherwise battery reset probably would work too.

A more reliable alternative to breaking Fastboot is to boot the system without any hdd, ssd or USB storage devices. This usually causes Fastboot to error out and fallback to the 'slow' boot that allows access to the UEFI menus.

[polarathene]

Wait, what happens if the OS inevitably gets trashed or you need to replace your hard drive? Having KDE as sole access is a hack rather than a fix.

I don't believe a UEFI implementation can be classed as standards compliant if it can be bricked.

How did you originally get around the bug in your ASUS hardware?

It's not a bug, you have fastboot which can do some boot time optimizations/assumptions, and then some boards offer UltraFast boot, or whatever marketing name for it. The latter one takes that a step further and one of those is skipping the bios logo display and accepting input iirc(you cannot interact with bootmanager like grub or systemd-boot, it just goes with whatever was default once the timeout runs out(normally that's something the user sets to 0).

If a boot is noticed to fail multiple times, some boards will disable the feature, otherwise you need to set a UEFI var to toggle booting into UEFI on next restart which is what the terminal command does(and presumably what this GUI addition does as well). Alternatively, you can take the boards battery out for a moment to do a classic reset.

I remember some setting that was meant to disable legacy USB or something, but ended up ignoring USB input completely, even after boot process iirc, bad information of what the feature did... Luckily had a PS/2 keyboard lying around, otherwise battery reset probably would work too.