KDE Plasma 5.26 Sees More Features & Fixes Ahead Of Beta

[birdie]

I recently finally gave up on KDE, sadly its simply too buggy for me, I actually migrated to wayfire, its not great, there are some annoying bugs like scaling changing to 1x when you apply a setting modification. the only bug I experience in day to day usage isnt even a wayfire bug, but I use mpv-paper for an animated background and that causes some odd issues sometimes.

but I have to say, I dont regret it, its missing A LOT for sure, (current I have screenshots step up as copy to clipboard only, and only area selection for instance) But man is it nice not experiencing constant bugs that irritate me. and its nice being able to report and find issue on an issue tracker that isn't a usability nightmare.

I wish KDE all the best, but I doubt ill be going back any time soon.

I wonder why you couldn't use Windows where everything just works. Every day there's a new pain story on Phoronix.

Oh, and today I paid https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora a visit and the last three dozen posts or so are about various crazy bugs/problems with Fedora with no solutions.

It's like people want to subject themselves to pain only why?

[Quackdoc]

This is actually the first time I hear Wayland is needed for some specific apps. Previously I was always hearing the same story about some proprietary or generally old X apps that just don't work on XWayland, so you had to use an X session.

I use waydroid because some ISPs have started to think shipping routers that only allow you to login via android apps is a good idea. well I do also like using touchscreen tablet so that helps with that too.

I wonder why you couldn't use Windows where everything just works. Every day there's a new pain story on Phoronix.

Oh, and today I paid https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora a visit and the last three dozen posts or so are about various crazy bugs/problems with Fedora with no solutions.

It's like people want to subject themselves to pain only why?

sadly I get even more bugs on windows lately, though I have been playing around with OSX in a VM and it has unironically been the most stable so far, if qemu gets good virtual GPU support, I could see me self making a hackintosh

[ktecho]

I recently finally gave up on KDE, sadly its simply too buggy for me, I actually migrated to wayfire, its not great, there are some annoying bugs like scaling changing to 1x when you apply a setting modification. the only bug I experience in day to day usage isnt even a wayfire bug, but I use mpv-paper for an animated background and that causes some odd issues sometimes.

but I have to say, I dont regret it, its missing A LOT for sure, (current I have screenshots step up as copy to clipboard only, and only area selection for instance) But man is it nice not experiencing constant bugs that irritate me. and its nice being able to report and find issue on an issue tracker that isn't a usability nightmare.

I wish KDE all the best, but I doubt ill be going back any time soon.

Yeah... I want to change too, but I don't think this ultra-simple WM can help make the things "just work". For example, the "printers" thing was very buggy for me in Plasma the other day and I had to reboot to windows to print a PDF, but I don't think something like wayfire will have a more mature interface. That's why I'm thinking on changing to Ubuntu (with Gnome). I don't know if other have had a good experience with XFCE...

[prueba_hola]

Yeah... I want to change too, but I don't think this ultra-simple WM can help make the things "just work". For example, the "printers" thing was very buggy for me in Plasma the other day and I had to reboot to windows to print a PDF, but I don't think something like wayfire will have a more mature interface. That's why I'm thinking on changing to Ubuntu (with Gnome). I don't know if other have had a good experience with XFCE...

Try opensuse, i guess you will be happy with xfce there

[ngraham]

Wayland or X11 KDE? Wayland KDE has some funky bugs like Yakuake not dropping down correctly which works flawlessly on X11. While I've been using the Plasma Wayland session lately, I'd be lying if I didn't say it feels less stable or didn't have more random application crashes than their X11 session.

ngraham

On that Share button it says:

Share
Send a link to the application

What application does it send the link to?

Is that a grammar slip-up and should it be "Send a link of the application"?

English is funny. It should probably say "Send a link to this application" or "Send a link for this application" That's a relatively easy change. Would you like to try your hand at doing it? I can help!

[zexelon]

I keep coming back to KDE, its probably the most useful DE i can find for Linux. I run it on top of Pop and I have tried using Gnome for a few months and keep going back to it because it has some nice features but the latest theming screw ups they have been doing made it basically unusable. Also had a couple of bizare glitches where leaving nuatilus running for a few days would suddenly cause it to start filling my hard drive via its logfile... nothing like a multi-hundred gig log file and a no longer usable linux system!

KDE has one huge bug for me where it runs out of x-sockets every few days but its turned out to be a chrome thing that only seems to manifest itself in KDE.

Basically the long and short of it is there no winning for the "Linux Desktop"! That said, it is vastly better then Vista... and what it was a few years ago

[polarathene]

KDE has one huge bug for me where it runs out of x-sockets every few days but its turned out to be a chrome thing that only seems to manifest itself in KDE.

I believe that was fixed in recent month or two, depending on your distro it might take a while to arrive though. Plasma 5.24.6 was the bugfix release I think, or Plasma 5.25.x.

---

I do have a bug with Chromium and Firefox (and other apps, but usually affects browsers), that happens after a reasonable amount of uptime and activity. The affected app stops painting, window resize will update a frame, and while you can interact with mouse and type, the window itself just doesn't update to indicate any of that until an event like resizing fixes it. This is on X11, but I suspect the nvidia drivers may play a role in it, I haven't done testing without using nvidia or a different DE to know for sure.

One other bug that only affects Chromium/Chrome based browsers, and this is when I have many windows and tabs (several hundred) open after some time. New tabs (which I often open links as) start to be blank and never load, requiring me to copy the URL, open a new tab paste and load and repeat until it does. If I continue enduring that, eventually the browser becomes unresponsive, even with plenty of memory available. Been an issue I experience maybe once a month or so for years now. Not even resizing a window will give me a chance to save anything I was doing :\

In rarer cases still, Plasma / Kwin itself only updates the cursor and no longer paints anything. If I can switch to another tty I can usually restart kwin_x11 and salvage anything unsaved before rebooting to properly fix.

Those are probably my top bugs I experience, but not easy to reproduce or report in any meaningful way.

[zexelon]

polarathene Thanks! Yah I run Pop_OS 22.04 so it tends to take a while to get the latest updates... Is there an official PPA from KDE to get current versions for Ubuntu based systems? Yes I could google this myself, but dinner bell just rang!

Edit:
Found this Kubuntu PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports-extra

It has Plasma 5.25 available, when I am ready to risk my machine I may give it a try

Edit 2:

Just as a heads up... use of this PPA on my Pop_OS install did melt it down in the end. The meltdown happened during further updates, it did initially fix the issues I was having with KDE though, so its good to know the fixes are in the pipeline!

[bosjc]

Bring more features like this

Yes. Would kill for the ability to adjust brightness on screens, too. Have had to go back to redshift for this ability unfourtunately. ngraham I remember seeing a ticket for this awhile ago, any idea if it is still being looked at? Would love to ditch redshift (again).

[ktecho]

Try opensuse, i guess you will be happy with xfce there

I don't want to change the OS because I use it on my servers and containers too. But I may try the Ubuntu based XFCE flavor...