KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta Released With Better Wayland Support

[tildearrow]

As in, the whole desktop disappears or does plasmashell itself crash (panel goes away)? The latter is not nearly as bad as kwin is still running and you can restart plasmashell from KRunner. It does happen pretty much randomly every couple of weeks for me (sometimes even just looking at an idle screen when reading).

Just plasmashell, and it restarts itself.

Even if you think it is "not nearly as bad", it is still a major flaw that should not exist.
This is not supposed to be a mess, come on.

What do you mean by "every time"? The SDDM-in-a-window bug seems pretty interesting though. Never seen that, and I don't really know how that could even happen... but regarding the thing about being kicked back and SDDM running in the background, I had something like that a few times after the machine recovered from swapping. In my case, KDE took extremely long to exit and showed a (non-functional) desktop again before finally exiting a minute or so later.

SDDM in a window bug:
- You log out
- KWin crashes while logging out and somehow it survives (rather than being killed by SDDM restarting)
- KWin restarts itself and the magic cookie is ignored
- KWin takes over the X session (which runs SDDM) and turns SDDM in a window

I'll post a video of the issues later

[bug77]

Fedora 32, default KDE install, boot, log in, run Konsole, run `top`, check `plasma` process: it will eat around 300MB of RAM (RES, not VIRT) with zero plasmoids (except the default ones) and its CPU use will be far above 0%. I didn't have this issue with KDE 3.5. I don't have this issue with XFCE: it's 100% idle and barely registers in top unless you're interacting with it.

4-5) can you rereplicate my setup? No? Then what are you talking about?

CPU/network use plasmoids are truly horrible. There are no plasmoids to show a command output. There are no plasmoids to monitor (lm-)sensors as much as I want to.

It's probably Fedora. On Arch, Plasma eats ~240MB (with 4 monitoring plasmoids showing), with no CPU usage. I also disagree about the monolithic design, the whole point of KDE5 was to break things down into smaller pieces. (Of course, we now have those that cry wolf at KDE stuff having too many dependencies...)

[smartalgorithm]

wow, this is a serious upgrade... and lots of modules have "Require C++17" commit...

[Citan]

1) Monolithic design
2) High CPU/RAM use
3) Crashing plasmoids, crashing plasma
4) Plasmoids which only work on the desktop (I never have my desktop open: I work with applications not with my desktop) and cannot be properly embedded in the task bar
5) Counter-intuitive UI

Here's my XFCE task bar. Tell me how can I achieve the same with Plasma.

1) Not sure what you mean by that? My feeling is on the contrary that you have all kind of components and configuration to customize in any way you see fit. Or maybe it's about the aesthetical unity? I'd say it's closer to a boon than a curse though.

2) Sorry, but wrong. I mean, maybe you have trouble on your machine for some reason, but there have been some comparisons these last years showing that KDE as a whole is not hungrier than most competitors, Gnome included and not the last.

3) I'm sorry to hear that for you. I have no such problem, but I've been sticking on X11 for now. Maybe it's because you were brave enough to test Wayland. XD

4) Not sure what you mean by that?

5) Matter of taste and habits I'd say, which is of course fine . I find it eons more intuitive than Apple's environment personally, and midly more intuitive than Gnome (well, didn't try it recently, my memories are from Ubuntu 18). At least you have a few consistent rules that direct most of the UX. Beyond that, ability to configure and change everything is up to one's own taste obviously.

Fedora 32, default KDE install, boot, log in, run Konsole, run `top`, check `plasma` process: it will eat around 300MB of RAM (RES, not VIRT) with zero plasmoids (except the default ones) and its CPU use will be far above 0%. I didn't have this issue with KDE 3.5. I don't have this issue with XFCE: it's 100% idle and barely registers in top unless you're interacting with it.

On that point specifically, it may simply be precisely because you just made a fresh install, and that (sadly imo) some services are active by default with notably the infamous search indexer. Which would easily explain the sensible CPU use case arising.

[geearf]

Fedora 32, default KDE install, boot, log in, run Konsole, run `top`, check `plasma` process: it will eat around 300MB of RAM (RES, not VIRT) with zero plasmoids (except the default ones) and its CPU use will be far above 0%. I didn't have this issue with KDE 3.5. I don't have this issue with XFCE: it's 100% idle and barely registers in top unless you're interacting with it.

Just looked, I have a few widgets on top of a standard Plasma, but like you nothing on the desktop because what would be the point... It's at about 300Mb indeed but 0% CPU.
That seems quite acceptable to me.

[Charlie68]

It is useless to write about Plasma bugs here, it is necessary to report to the developers.
After that a lot depends on the distribution, Kubuntu is a mess, I personally tried KDE Neon recently and was surprised to see bugs that I didn't have in Tumbleweed.
Leap is a rock for anyone who wants a lot of stability, but I read of users who also find Plasma great on other distros like Arch or Manjaro.
However I haven't found a bug-free DE yet, maybe because it doesn't exist! XFCE is a joke, they haven't been able to correct the tearing with their compositor for years, not to mention the fact that like LXQT it is the DE of the poor. In the sense that XFCE is designed for a GTK alternative intended for old or poorly performing PCs, the same goes for LXQT with the difference that it is the lightweight Qt alternative.
To have as few bugs as possible it is always better not to upset a DE, as the tests are always done on default settings.
Mind you I'm not arguing that XFCE and LXQT suck, far from it, but they have their problems too.
If you are a fanatic of a certain DE you will only notice the bugs of the other DE. It is always like this !

[boxie]

1) Monolithic design
2) High CPU/RAM use
3) Crashing plasmoids, crashing plasma
4) Plasmoids which only work on the desktop (I never have my desktop open: I work with applications not with my desktop) and cannot be properly embedded in the task bar
5) Counter-intuitive UI

Here's my XFCE task bar. Tell me how can I achieve the same with Plasma.

1) pretty sure there are lots of different components, are there not? - it's not a single binary (kwin, plasmashell etc)
2) 300 MiB is what my plasmashell is using atm - or less than 1% of my total system ram. we may have to disagree on "using too much ram" here
3) totally, 100% agree. A crash in a thing should not take out plasma. I can make this happen using their newer system monitor plasmois
4) this is resolved by having more screen real estate, I have a sliver of monitor for showing system info on a secondary monitor
5) I guess it is what you are used to. it all seems fairly well laid out to me. I do tend to search for the things I want though.

As a plasma user I can certainly understand complaints about some of the things. but for me it has been relatively smooth sailing for years now

[polarathene]

1) Monolithic design
2) High CPU/RAM use
3) Crashing plasmoids, crashing plasma
4) Plasmoids which only work on the desktop (I never have my desktop open: I work with applications not with my desktop) and cannot be properly embedded in the task bar
5) Counter-intuitive UI

Pretty much same response as others..

1) Can you elaborate on what issue this is causing? The broke out KDE into more dependencies with Frameworks and Applications, Plasma leverages Frameworks afaik so I'm not quite sure how it's being monolithic here.. I have no experience with XFCE, how is it different? Is the DE packaged in even more granular dependencies?

2) While I haven't measured anything in like a year or so, I don't see how it'd have gotten worse, there's been more optimizations since and I was getting 450MB RAM (total system usage) on a fresh install IIRC, i3/Sway and LXQT I think were not much smaller either, Gnome was closer to 1GB.

CPU wise I get 0-1% idle, only actual apps like Chrome have notable CPU usage, you mentioned using Konsole with top, I did htop and looked at that plasma process, for an uptime of 3 days currently and a bunch of stuff going on, CPU is 2-5% for plasma and memory RES is 604MB and SHR 188MB, which is nothing on my 32GB desktop (which I did the check on) nor an issue on 4GB laptop, how much less is XFCE using? I can't really see any major gains from 100-300MB more RAM tbh.

For added context the desktop system has a 4/4 cores/threads Intel i5-6500 CPU, averaging 10-20% CPU atm with 16GB of RAM used, I have 50 or so Chrome windows open(20+ tabs each), an electron app, Dolphin(3 windows), Firefox(1 window, 10-20 tabs), 3 Kate text editor windows open(each 10+ tabs), 2 VSCode windows(5 tabs each), 2 Okular windows, and still some more apps open across 4 virtual desktops.

That's plenty of spare CPU and RAM despite all that, and Plasma is running smooth af for me, doing a great job. I have an even older laptop laying around with an old core2duo dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM and a USB 2.0 stick with distro installed to it, the USB is the biggest bottleneck, but even that runs great and smooth for light usage, I had to mainly do some optimizations to reduce write activity on the USB media, but that's not a fault of plasma, was mostly a problem from browsers frequently updating session/profile to disk.

3) Yeah, can't comment much on plasmoids, don't really use them. Plasma crashes weren't too uncommon for me in the past but I can't recall when the last one was, probably sometime last year? It's become pretty solid with recent releases for me and I'm an nvidia user (where most of my issues were caused with kwin).

4) I think the ones for the taskbar/panel(which is in itself a plasmoid?) has a different name, plasma applets or something? I haven't had any issue with those personally.

5) I think that might be personal preference/bias? UI works great for me, no complaints. Very customizable if I ever want something different, your distro may give you a slightly different default experience though. I'm using Manjaro since late 2016 (previously on Gnome).

Here's my XFCE task bar. Tell me how can I achieve the same with Plasma.

Nothing strikes me as unique/special there, you're against third-party packages for some reason so I'm not even going to bother. I'm sure you could achieve the same if you really wanted to, but if you want to expend minimal effort due to your very specific requirements not being out of the box installed and available (or the defaults don't work the way you want), that's your call, if XFCE is doing that for you by all means keep enjoying XFCE, I'll keep enjoying Plasma

Personally your task bar looks hideous to me, while I have seen some nice XFCE themes, it's often awful looking whenever someone shows it off, but hey if you gotta stick with defaults and not use anything third-party or requiring much customization effort, I guess that's inevitable? You probably think it looks great and that Plasma looks ugly, that's cool too, not everyone has same tastes. For me Plasma does everything I want, I don't see how XFCE would be any more convincing, it seems like I'd be making sacrifices for any possible marginal advantage it might have.

[polarathene]

Sometimes trying to change the wallpaper crashes Plasma (upon opening Configure Desktop)......

Honestly I just think KDE is a minefield...

....it crashes every time.
Heck, it even crashes when you log out and sometimes SDDM reappears ON A WINDOW!

And sometimes you are kicked back to your desktop, with SDDM running in the background...

What distro are you using? I've not experienced any of that. I know of a similar one with SDDM I think, if I've updated my kernel or nvidia driver, trying to shutdown/restart via GUI doesn't work, I have to bring up a terminal and `shutdown -r now`. That's been an annoying bug, but others don't seem to be affected by it, so it could just be specific to Manjaro or Arch. I don't experience it too often, maybe 3-4 times a year?

Linux in general can be a minefield for me, but it's often because I'm doing things that a casual user would not. And then there's just general linux woes like wireless dongles needing a proprietary driver downloaded before you can connect to the internet, or you know to do your research and get a product (that hopefully hasn't changed the chipset to a different vendor which can happen in future production runs) and get an open-source/upstreamed kernel driver, or being cautious with adopting new hardware.

My CometLake laptop I got last year wasn't able to run stable on the current kernel at the time, graphical corruption (Intel graphics no nvidia), inability to wake from suspend more than once (kernel panic), and some BIOS/bootloader corruption too (came installed with Win 10S and the BIOS set to run a single NVMe disk in Intel RAID which Linux installers can't detect the disk at all, you have to know of an undocumented key combination to reveal a hidden option to switch to AHCI mode. Didn't matter what DE I was using for stuff like that.

[angrypie]

SDDM in a window bug:
- You log out
- KWin crashes while logging out and somehow it survives (rather than being killed by SDDM restarting)
- KWin restarts itself and the magic cookie is ignored
- KWin takes over the X session (which runs SDDM) and turns SDDM in a window

I'll post a video of the issues later

Amazing. And people who peddle KDE still have the nerve to criticize GNOME.