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

[ssokolow]

It is very rare that people use KDE applications outside of KDE Desktop. This is the reality of it. The vast majority of KDE apps are only used in a Plasma interface. Just because you can point out a few outliers (and not all of those you listed are actually seeing any usage outside Plasma) it does not mean that the rule is not the one i stated.

It depends on the application.

Krita is a great paint program, so my brother uses it on Windows.

K3b is the closest thing Linux has to a proper Nero Burning ROM equivalent where everything else is Adaptec Easy CD Creator or worse, so my mother and other brother use it on Lubuntu.

Filelight has smart caching and selective rescan that kicks Baobab's ass on a rotating platter drive, so we all use it on Linux. (And Baobab's radial view has been playing a perpetual game of catch-up with Filelight since it copied the design off Filelight in the KDE 3 era.)

Okular supports features that Evince doesn't, such as grab-scrolling, drawing a rectangle to zoom or select, and choosing between text or an image to send to the clipboard, table selection, and a built-in magnifier. It also supports more file formats. For that reason, my mother keeps it installed on her Lubuntu system.

I prefer KRename and KDiff3 to all competing options I've tried.

Ark's integrated KPart-based preview is great. All it needs is a readout of the total uncompressed size of the archive in the status bar, better drag-and-drop support, and smart handling of how .deb files are archives within archives, and it'll beat file-roller in every category.

Is there a GTK+ equivalent to KCachegrind?

There was a period when I was on LXDE, and I still used all of the things mentioned.

[TemplarGR]

It depends on the application.

Krita is a great paint program, so my brother uses it on Windows.

K3b is the closest thing Linux has to a proper Nero Burning ROM equivalent where everything else is Adaptec Easy CD Creator or worse, so my mother and other brother use it on Lubuntu.

Filelight has smart caching and selective rescan that kicks Baobab's ass on a rotating platter drive, so we all use it on Linux. (And Baobab's radial view has been playing a perpetual game of catch-up with Filelight since it copied the design off Filelight in the KDE 3 era.)

Okular supports features that Evince doesn't, such as grab-scrolling, drawing a rectangle to zoom or select, and choosing between text or an image to send to the clipboard, table selection, and a built-in magnifier. It also supports more file formats. For that reason, my mother keeps it installed on her Lubuntu system.

I prefer KRename and KDiff3 to all competing options I've tried.

Ark's integrated KPart-based preview is great. All it needs is a readout of the total uncompressed size of the archive in the status bar, better drag-and-drop support, and smart handling of how .deb files are archives within archives, and it'll beat file-roller in every category.

Is there a GTK+ equivalent to KCachegrind?

There was a period when I was on LXDE, and I still used all of the things mentioned.

Blah blah blah blah lots of BS here from a KDE fanboy....

Krita is great but your brother could use GIMP which is greater. People using Krita on Windows are an extreme niche, most people don't care about Krita, i have never met a single person in my life who used Krita on windows and you are the first one i met online...

K3b is a useless program since no one uses cds/dvds anymore in the age of NAND flash and extremely fast internet, both on land and on mobile. Even then, K3b is just a front end for the same libs Brasero is using, so K3b is not essential and not many people need it, if you need to burn a cd, there is a ton of apps to do it.

Filelight? Seriously, you are going to use THAT as an example? The vast majority of people don't need it and it is not that much better than competing solutions. Baobab is more than fine.

It goes on and one but the point is clear: You nitpick a few issues/apps and pretend that the vast majority of people use their Windows/Apple/GNOME/XFCE/etc with KDE apps.... You are delusional....

[mikus]

Is it too much to ask for them to simply fix multi-monitor desktop use after 15+ years? I've used KDE since 3.0 days, and it's still absolute crap.

Every day, KDE as my favorite linux desktop is still abysmal. KWIN compositing is unusable in a real environment, either on my desktop with 20 cores, 128gb of ram, and an nvidia 1070GTX, or a dell xps15 with both nvidia and intel gpu's. If I enable compositing on my laptop, it destabilizes within days. On my desktop, a week or so. If I disable kwin compositing, it runs indefinitely. Hmm.

The alternatives aren't much better. Mate loses a ton of function, and Marco compositing has made it far worse. Cinnamon is more unstable than KDE for normal use. Gnome simply doesn't do anything for me, this and others are simply too lacking.

I switched to using my xps15 laptop with arch linux as a full-time rig as my desktop became suddenly unstable (thanks Arch), but my laptop (Arch too) driving 2x 4k displays while usable is far more quirky. I never could get nvidia prime working with any kernel or nvidia blob. Finally after having to restart the desktop (not laptop) every 2 days, disabling kwin all together gets me months of uptime on my laptop. WTF?!

This doesn't mean it's good - I still have to randomly restart the desktop when it just randomly decides to not let me log back in (every few weeks), not let me click or move anything (every few weeks), disconnect my thunderbolt dock and resize everything (every other week), or just randomly break with a youtube video under chrome (every few weeks).

Compositing is the devil of every windowing system. I wish I could go back to 2008 before gpu compositing my devices would have uptimes of 6 months or more. Everything evil about linux has to do with compositing and gpu's I find.

I've been so pissed off with the entire linux experience the past few years, I've tried going back to windoze (my xps15), using a mac (an old macbook I had from a former employer), and others, that I keep coming back to broke ass linux.

As a native linux user for 15 years, I really wish they'd figure this out.

[mikus]

Another comment - posting in KDE forums go nowhere. They talk, discuss, but nothing happens. They add new crap, leave the old broken and unfixable. I've tried posting to KDE dev forums, nvidia, kernel, others, all for not. Everyone just blames another dev team. They keep adding more function, but missing the fact their core is broken and sticking their head in the ground.

I'd start with a refactor of compositing. Not an easy topic - even windoze 10 doesn't do this well. I tried windows for a good month after being so disgusted with linux, I went back with all the same problems. It as better than windoze on my factory installed xps15 that my mouse lagged every time I moved it too fast, but didn't crash hard every few days.

Every time my thunderbolt dock randomly drops my connection, same with my desktop and displayport-to-hdmi adapters crash, it resizes all my windows to something absurd, as well as move them all to a (terrible) corer of my screen.

Windowing between multiple monitors again has been an issue since 4.0 and has not improved. Mate/cinnamon were better about this, but not perfect. Windoze wasn't either, so I get this is an industry problem, but so odd I feel like the only person to actually use linux daily and feel these issues. After 15 years, these aren't unique to hardware after many upgrades/replacements, so I consider them systemic failures in design/code.

[ssokolow]

Blah blah blah blah lots of BS here from a KDE fanboy....

That really should be a sign for me to just step back and let you be an object lesson in "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt," but it's cathartic to give in to that "Someone is wrong on the Internet!" urge every now and then.

Krita is great but your brother could use GIMP which is greater.

My brother used to use GIMP exclusively for years. When he finally discovered Krita, he switched to it because it's better for digital painting with a Wacom tablet. (eg. The right-click palette is much more comfortable, its stroke smoothing option is easier to tune to work properly, and the brush engine is better.)

People using Krita on Windows are an extreme niche, most people don't care about Krita, i have never met a single person in my life who used Krita on windows and you are the first one i met online...

Look up the term "representative sample". I can just as easily argue that I've seen plenty of Windows users who claim to either be using Krita or have been using it until they decided to pirate a copy of Corel Painter or Paint Tool SAI for some advanced digital painting feature X or Y which GIMP doesn't even offer.

K3b is a useless program since no one uses cds/dvds anymore in the age of NAND flash and extremely fast internet, both on land and on mobile.

I burn DVDs for non-volatile backup. My mother burns DVDs so she can give people a 50¢ disc rather than bothering them to return a borrowed $8 USB stick.

NAND isn't at that price point yet and, NAND or rotating oxide, optical disks have the advantage over fixed storage that, if the drive electronics fail, you can easily swap them independent of the medium.

Also, we're Canadian. Canada has very high mobile data rates and most people outside cities have to rely on mobile data for Internet faster than dial-up. We have to interact with such people.

Even then, K3b is just a front end for the same libs Brasero is using, so K3b is not essential and not many people need it, if you need to burn a cd, there is a ton of apps to do it.

It's not the libs. It's the set of features exposed and the stability. Last I tried Brasero, I found it prone to crashing and bearing that distinctive GNOME scent of "You don't need those features because we say so."

(I say this as someone who has sometimes gone direct to writing my own scripts around GAFFitter, genisoimage, dvdisaster, and wodim, but still likes to use a GUI most of the time.)

Filelight? Seriously, you are going to use THAT as an example? The vast majority of people don't need it and it is not that much better than competing solutions. Baobab is more than fine.

It's possible Baobab has copied Filelight's caching since but, last I checked, its drill-down was so horrendously unusable on non-SSD devices that i'd teach my mother to use ncdu before I'd give her Baobab. Claim what you want, I know what I experienced.

It goes on and one but the point is clear: You nitpick a few issues/apps and pretend that the vast majority of people use their Windows/Apple/GNOME/XFCE/etc with KDE apps.... You are delusional....

No, I responded to "It is very rare that people use KDE applications outside of KDE Desktop." by giving examples of why that statement is suspect. If you can't recognize that there are values in between "very rare" and "vast majority", then you may be delusional.

There. I've had my "look at how wrong you are" moment and now I'm going to let you have the last word. I've got better things to do with my time than argue with someone who comes off as an actual fanboy.

Oh, and I mentioned that I was running LXDE with this stuff for a while... that's because I'll run whichever mixture of desktop components best meets my needs. I left KDE when the migration from KDE 3.5 to 4.x was a dumpster fire and came back years later when I needed to have panels all along the bottom edge of a desktop with monitors of different heights... something Plasma can do but LXPanel can't. I still run PCManFM instead of Dolphin for my file manager, Leafpad for when I don't feel something merits gVim, urxvt with a patched version of the "kuake" plugin instead of Yakuake, Geeqie instead of Gwenview, etc. etc. etc.

[TemplarGR]

That really should be a sign for me to just step back and let you be an object lesson in "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt," but it's cathartic to give in to that "Someone is wrong on the Internet!" urge every now and then.



My brother used to use GIMP exclusively for years. When he finally discovered Krita, he switched to it because it's better for digital painting with a Wacom tablet. (eg. The right-click palette is much more comfortable, its stroke smoothing option is easier to tune to work properly, and the brush engine is better.)



Look up the term "representative sample". I can just as easily argue that I've seen plenty of Windows users who claim to either be using Krita or have been using it until they decided to pirate a copy of Corel Painter or Paint Tool SAI for some advanced digital painting feature X or Y which GIMP doesn't even offer.



I burn DVDs for non-volatile backup. My mother burns DVDs so she can give people a 50¢ disc rather than bothering them to return a borrowed $8 USB stick.

NAND isn't at that price point yet and, NAND or rotating oxide, optical disks have the advantage over fixed storage that, if the drive electronics fail, you can easily swap them independent of the medium.

Also, we're Canadian. Canada has very high mobile data rates and most people outside cities have to rely on mobile data for Internet faster than dial-up. We have to interact with such people.



It's not the libs. It's the set of features exposed and the stability. Last I tried Brasero, I found it prone to crashing and bearing that distinctive GNOME scent of "You don't need those features because we say so."

(I say this as someone who has sometimes gone direct to writing my own scripts around GAFFitter, genisoimage, dvdisaster, and wodim, but still likes to use a GUI most of the time.)



It's possible Baobab has copied Filelight's caching since but, last I checked, its drill-down was so horrendously unusable on non-SSD devices that i'd teach my mother to use ncdu before I'd give her Baobab. Claim what you want, I know what I experienced.



No, I responded to "It is very rare that people use KDE applications outside of KDE Desktop." by giving examples of why that statement is suspect. If you can't recognize that there are values in between "very rare" and "vast majority", then you may be delusional.

There. I've had my "look at how wrong you are" moment and now I'm going to let you have the last word. I've got better things to do with my time than argue with someone who comes off as an actual fanboy.

Oh, and I mentioned that I was running LXDE with this stuff for a while... that's because I'll run whichever mixture of desktop components best meets my needs. I left KDE when the migration from KDE 3.5 to 4.x was a dumpster fire and came back years later when I needed to have panels all along the bottom edge of a desktop with monitors of different heights... something Plasma can do but LXPanel can't. I still run PCManFM instead of Dolphin for my file manager, Leafpad for when I don't feel something merits gVim, urxvt with a patched version of the "kuake" plugin instead of Yakuake, Geeqie instead of Gwenview, etc. etc. etc.

Again, a lot of blah blah blah blah. I am tired of this. You are presenting niche use cases as the norm. You are completely delusional. Who in their right mind runs LXDE with mainly KDE apps? Why use LXDE in the first place? In order to run KDE apps you need to run their libs too, and those are interconnected, KDE apps are NOT separate from the rest of the KDE desktop contrary to their claim. So you need a lightweight, barebones, desktop environment, but proceed to bring the KDE bloat to it anyway? Yeah right.... And even if there was not KDE bloat and KDE apps on LXDE were like "native" LXDE apps, even then there would be graphical consistency issues here....

And all this just to pretend KDE apps should be considered a "different thing" than the KDE desktop. All this because you need to call it "Plasma 5" instead of "KDE 5" because you have vanity issues....

[Nth_man]

> Blah blah blah blah lots of BS here from a KDE fanboy....

You have showed yourself as you are, everything is clear now, there's no point in continuing nor watching again this thread. If you see nobody answering you, is because they know by now how you are, and have left you alone.

[skeevy420]

Again, a lot of blah blah blah blah. I am tired of this. You are presenting niche use cases as the norm. You are completely delusional. Who in their right mind runs LXDE with mainly KDE apps? Why use LXDE in the first place? In order to run KDE apps you need to run their libs too, and those are interconnected, KDE apps are NOT separate from the rest of the KDE desktop contrary to their claim. So you need a lightweight, barebones, desktop environment, but proceed to bring the KDE bloat to it anyway? Yeah right.... And even if there was not KDE bloat and KDE apps on LXDE were like "native" LXDE apps, even then there would be graphical consistency issues here....

And all this just to pretend KDE apps should be considered a "different thing" than the KDE desktop. All this because you need to call it "Plasma 5" instead of "KDE 5" because you have vanity issues....

Me. Started with Gnome2, moved onto XFCE and LXDE for a bit, eventually went to Plasma. I used the same core KDE apps from Gnome2 all the way until Plasma...well, that's a bit of a lie, I used a mix of core Gnome2 and KDE apps until GTK3 came and I found Gedit to be unusable and then dropped most of the GTK programs I was still using with the logic of -- if Gedit was bastardized like that, what might they do to the rest?

But I find something that works for me and i stick with it. For me that's the programs from the KDE application ecosystem. Doesn't matter what DE I'm using, they make good applications and I use them.

[dragon321]

Looking back, there's KDE 1, KDE 2, KDE 3, KDE 4, Plasma 4, and Plasma 5. KDE 5 might not be the actual, official name of the desktop, but it makes sense why people call it that. The K Desktop Environment might have given every subproject its own name and we're supposed to refer to each little subproject by that name...you know, KDE Applications, KDE Frameworks, Plasma...or we can just wrap it all under the name KDE 5 when discussing it because we all know what we're all talking about.

Yeah, but previous versions wasn't modular like KDE is now. It was complete package. Now it's divided to modules. For talking about all - i just call it "KDE".

1) Because the project had been known for decades as KDE. Decades. It still uses that name in many places and files. Just because its developers wanted to decouple their shell (Plasma) from the apps (KDE applications) and the libraries (kde frameworks) does not mean i will play their game. It is just KDE, period. It is simple, short, and everyone understands it perfectly.

2) I disagree, for me (AMD with latest MESA) Wayland on KDE still crashes frequently out of the blue without reason.

1) But it's still named KDE. "Plasma" is name just for desktop and KDE is not just desktop. I didn't said calling it just "KDE" is wrong, I said there isn't such thing as KDE 5.

2) Didn't noticed in my hardware but I'm not using it everyday.

[polarathene]

Is it too much to ask for them to simply fix multi-monitor desktop use after 15+ years? I've used KDE since 3.0 days, and it's still absolute crap.

If I enable compositing on my laptop, it destabilizes within days. On my desktop, a week or so. If I disable kwin compositing, it runs indefinitely. Hmm.

Compositing is the devil of every windowing system. I wish I could go back to 2008 before gpu compositing my devices would have uptimes of 6 months or more. Everything evil about linux has to do with compositing and gpu's I find.

Out of curiousity, why is it important to you for a DE to have such long uptime? Is there a problem with restarting/shutting down? Especially with modern hardware this generally doesn't take long at all.

I currently do that with my laptop or hibernate if I have state and not enough time to save/restore it for a proper shut down(but need to conserve battery), takes less than 30 seconds full circle, and that's with some boot prompts + password to unlock on resume.

On the desktop system(only an old Intel i5 Skylake, 4/4 cores/threads, SATA SSD, 32GB RAM, GTX 1070), I currently have an uptime of 49 days. I've had much longer, but this is usually due to hundreds of browser tabs(many windows) that accumulate among other apps which are less of an issue for me. I do a lot of research, and hop between several projects, not great at coming back to those tabs if I bookmark them(+ that loses any scroll state or highlighted text, etc), also tried saving sessions but not found that to work well for me either, so I just keep the tabs up til I allocate a few days to transfer the value in them to my notes. Plenty of tabs get opened/closed prior to that, but many still accumulate, some with state like form data(like a message being filled out), or some other temporal state that'd be lost if from events like kernel panic or power cuts(happened a few times much to my frustration, but hey I understand I've got poor task management skills and shouldn't let it get to that point).

Barely anyone I know has such an issue, so do you actually have state that is important for that uptime? Or is this just something you're expecting for convenience?(despite apparently not having good experiences with any DE).

The desktop system I have with it's uptime and running off the nvidia drivers does see it's fair share of kwin issues/crashes. Nvidia issues are mostly gone now afaik, haven't experienced quite a few that plagued me years ago. I haven't had to bring up a terminal and tell kwin to use --replace, but there is a problem I still experience. Especially with Chrome, all the tabs in certain windows can stop updating, nothing repaints inside unless I change focus to a different window or resize the window, only fix is to select all tabs but one and drag those out to get a new window instance, then bring that other tab over to the new window. When that happens some other apps may behave similarly, I guess based on how long they've been running for. I have Konsole with htop for example that atm is working properly, but earlier was alternating between two frames, similar has happened with KSysGuard. Same solution, just kill the window and bring up a new instance. A reboot is probably better though.

---

That's problems with kwin/nvidia though, not sure how mult-monitor has anything to do with it? If you're issue is with compositing, just leave kwin disabled? You say it meets the expectation of long uptime which seems to be more important to you? Have you tried Wayland with Intel? Same issue? X11 has some pretty bad drawbacks that might be causing your specific issues? All multiple monitors are in X11 is on big screen with cropping IIRC, it's pretty inefficient too when it comes to screen capture due to that, lot of excess copies need to be done.