KDE Saw Many Bug Fixes This Week From KWin Crashes To Plasma Wayland Improvements

[mikus]

On X11, even with LCDs, I've found the KScreen 2 daemon to have a penchant for confusing Plasma about screen assignments and which panel should go where, so I disable it on my desktop (KRunner → Background Services)... assuming I don't just use nVidia's MetaModes option to lock the desktop resolution to keep games' first-run resolution changes from confusing KWin into squashing everything into a single monitor.

Try newer KDE if you can - easily done on Arch or other rolling distro's, not so much on ubuntu without going Neon. At least the window positional handling is much improved as of an upgrade last week, as well as restoration of windows to the right places, so long as they don't get too disturbed (which mine do with above TB3 dock gyrations), it it working far better than it has since 4.x. Ahem, about time.

[ssokolow]

Try newer KDE if you can - easily done on Arch or other rolling distro's, not so much on ubuntu without going Neon. At least the window positional handling is much improved as of an upgrade last week, as well as restoration of windows to the right places, so long as they don't get too disturbed (which mine do with above TB3 dock gyrations), it it working far better than it has since 4.x. Ahem, about time.

To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever seen a window manager without that issue. I had the problem under Openbox, Kwin 3.x, Kwin 4.x, and now Kwin 5.x, and it's been a long time, but I vaguely remember having it under other WMs too.

It's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to a day when there exists a Wayland compositor with crash recovery, server-side window decoration support, and APIs that allow things like automatic time trackers to be ported (and either nVidia support or being far enough in the future that I've replaced my GTX750 with something AMD). Wayland doesn't give arbitrary applications access to the permanent resolution-changing APIs and then defer reacting in an attempt to guess whether it's really a fake-out from a fullscreened application.

That said, I will admit that I'm currently on Kubuntu 16.04 LTS because my upgrade from 14.04 LTS got side-tracked with bug-squashing long enough that I'm now sufficiently used to its flaws to be more interested in continuing to replace ugly hacks with proper solutions before I press forward.

[mikus]

My last adventure with wayland was running ubuntu on my xps originally, as I had for some 13+ years, and finally was sick of it being just as broken, particularly every upgrade. Ubuntu defaulted to wayland, and I could never figure out how to get it back to xorg, as it prevented me from using any desktop other than gnome-shell, and I HATE gnome-shell. I moved to arch, but after a few years of it, can't say I've found it much better for other reasons.

I've been struggling making any DE work well for me here, I'm starting to think the graphic driver is buggy, or the new kernel, which arch has me up to 5.5.9. So far Cinnamon/Mate will crash in less than 2 days of running hard, and kde is just all over the place, sometimes it'll crash in 20 minutes, sometimes a week. Even bigger issue is my monitors.

Every time my displays get powered down via the os, it's a total crap shoot which of the external displays will restart. Sometimes 1, sometimes both, sometimes neither. Each DE was a bit different about this too oddly... I might say this might be my TB3 dock, as it is fairly new, but I would get this on my desktop with a 1070gtx with my 3x 48" tv's as well losing random monitors.

KDE will sometimes not see one of the displays (nor xrandr), sometimes it sees them, but shuts them off, forcing me to reconfigure display settings. It keeps forgetting about it, losing it, whatever, but almost every time I walk away from my desktop, I either need to reconfigure the displays, or unplug/plug back my TB3 dock. It's also getting worse about my window placement and restoration oddly, almost like some state tracking is going insane over time. Also interesting, my kde menu panel freezes after a random interval as well, as well as my systray and other useful things.

Cinnamon tends to work best, but the hard locking issue is almost a bigger problem than kde being just random and weird. Compositing there works pretty well at least, I just can't pin down the crash as nothing indicates an issue, until it's just dead. It occasionally loses displays too, but a restart of my tb always brings it back up, and all my windows go back where they were meant to, unlike KDE.

Tried using MATE again, and while not bad, is maddening for other reasons. Mostly lack of HiDPI settings that make everything super huge, or super small, all inconsistently, while still getting the same crash every few days. It is somewhat related to Cinnamon, so something common to the two seems awry... It was not very good about putting my windows back when I'd lose displays there too.

Truly maddening how consistently unstable/bad kde has become. I have an older Dell Latitude e7240 laptop running kde (5.7.5) neon/ubuntu that is rock solid. I've had it on for the past few months, and use that to try and ssh back to mine to diag when it does crash, and kde on that is absolutely stable with full compositing. I really miss having a DE that works for more than a few hours/days at a time, KDE and others really need to address these issues before anything new.