openSUSE Tumbleweed Begins Rolling Out KDE Plasma 6 Desktop, But No Wayland Default Yet

[Blademasterz]

Sus Linux is Ginome, what comes to my mind..

[user1]

SUSE regularly go against KDE upstream and fill it with junky downstream patches, yet people still have this meme in their heads that SUSE is "the best" distro for KDE. No, it's really not. KDE devs have regularly pointed out issues with it (Nate Graham and Neal Gompa in particular), and also if you want to know what SUSE employees think of KDE, go read rbrownsuse's account on reddit LOL.

SUSE only support GNOME in their enterprise distro, not KDE. KDE is entirely a community effort on SUSE just like it is on Fedora, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.

I agree. To me it seems like this whole "OpenSUSE is the best KDE distro" thing is nothing more than anecdotal evidence.
Afair, some even claimed that KDE is the flagship desktop on OpenSUSE, which is simply untrue.
Btw, I've read somewhere that in OpenSUSE, KDE is packaged by volunteers, while Gnome is packaged by paid SUSE employees.

[mxan]

I agree. To me it seems like this whole "OpenSUSE is the best KDE distro" thing is nothing more than anecdotal evidence.

It’s not so much anecdotes as it is history. SUSE *used* to be the flagship distro for KDE… but once they got bought by Novell in the mid-2000s they switched to GNOME, and it’s been the same ever since. It’s old nostalgia masquerading as current fact, I guess.

Afair, some even claimed that KDE is the flagship desktop on OpenSUSE, which is simply untrue.

People say that because it’s the default option in openSUSE’s installer. Want to know something funny? SUSE devs themselves claim that openSUSE “actually” has no default desktop which is… weird. An option is literally selected by default, what do they mean there’s no default when there quite literally is?!

Btw, I've read somewhere that in OpenSUSE, KDE is packaged by volunteers, while Gnome is packaged by paid SUSE employees.

True, it’s the same as Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.. KDE is packaged solely as a community effort on every major distro. In case anyone needs more evidence just look at SUSE’s immutable offerings. Aeon (the GNOME version) is backed by SUSE employees while Kalpa (the KDE version) is maintained by exactly one random volunteer community member. Richard Brown among several other SUSE employees are actually annoyed that Kalpa exists, because they just really don’t like KDE. Sad.

[Blademasterz]

KDE is packaged solely as a community effort on every major distro.

*some

[woddy]

Yeah i get it. My distro changes the theme.

Is this different than using wayland by default as upstream wishes?

as Dev themselves explained. of KDE, the default wayland in Plasma 6 is what they ship, but then they themselves say that the various distributions are free to change this setting. Tumbleweed only does this to make switching from 5 to 6 less of a pain and to distinguish any problems, it will be the default after that. I'm sure the Plasma Devs agree or at least understand this choice. Then you can argue about everything....

[woddy]

SUSE regularly go against KDE upstream and fill it with junky downstream patches, yet people still have this meme in their heads that SUSE is "the best" distro for KDE. No, it's really not. KDE devs have regularly pointed out issues with it (Nate Graham and Neal Gompa in particular), and also if you want to know what SUSE employees think of KDE, go read rbrownsuse's account on reddit LOL.

SUSE only support GNOME in their enterprise distro, not KDE. KDE is entirely a community effort on SUSE just like it is on Fedora, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.

you mention rbrown who is known to be against KDE and is free to be, but he only represents himself, neither SUSE nor openSUSE. GNOME is the only de supported by SUSE is known, but SUSE is not openSUSE. What makes openSUSE an excellent KDE distribution are the Devs who work there and know KDE well and have excellent relationships and collaboration with them.

[szymon_g]

SUSE regularly go against KDE upstream and fill it with junky downstream patches, yet people still have this meme in their heads that SUSE is "the best" distro for KDE. No, it's really not. KDE devs have regularly pointed out issues with it (Nate Graham and Neal Gompa in particular), and also if you want to know what SUSE employees think of KDE, go read rbrownsuse's account on reddit LOL.

Could you provide us with links an quotes?

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

How short is your inactivity timeout that you can trigger it while actively playing a game?

Screens turn off after 15 minutes. System goes to sleep after 45 minutes. This works perfectly fine on X11. On Tumbleweed + KDE + Wayland, programs that typically inhibit energy saving actions like turning off the display don't actually inhibit anything.

[smitty3268]

Is this different than using wayland by default as upstream wishes?

Upstream is still fine with distros using X, as long as they know that it's deprecated and going away in the future.

It's still fully supported right now, though. It's Fedora that was really trying to get rid of X, not KDE.

[alcalde]

Oh boy. I started the update today and walked away for a bit. There was no warning anything special was going to happen. I come back to discover the system LOGGING OUT ON ITS OWN! Thank goodness I wasn't running a long-running process or doing a backup or anything at the moment. It drops me to the KDE login screen, except the screen is giant like it's for a tablet, complete with displaying an on-screen keyboard! (This update is being run on a 1080p desktop). I see the wayland option selected for login, and I surmise that some hellish KDE 6 update must have transpired. Well, maybe if I just reboot, everything will be OK....

I get a normal-looking login screen after reboot. However, the login image/animation I had before was gone, replaced by a default KDE logo. My desktop's widgets are missing; there's just a box saying this widget is incompatible with KDE 6. My task bar is no longer aligned with the bottom of the screen either for some reason. Worst of all, my backlit keyboard isn't lit. It doesn't have a hardware switch; it lights based on whether the scroll lock key is on or not. KDE, of course, ignores the scroll lock key, so I had to write a little script bound to the scroll lock key that toggles the scroll status via the xset command. I check, and toggling via the xset command now no longer turns the backlight on. This keyboard is practically a super-cheap Das Keyboard with no backlight on (for those who don't know, Das Keyboard has no labels on the keys).

Argh. OK, I'll just awesome OpenSUSE option to boot back into an earlier BTRFS snapshot at the grub boot menu. This does indeed get rid of the nightmare, but the keyboard light still won't come on. I surmise that is because when KDE 6 got its first shot at running it "upgraded" some config files in my account's home directory, and something it changed kills the xset toggling somehow. I confirm this is the case by booting with a flash drive that has Tumbleweed installed and hadn't been updated yet. It ran my script on KDE login and the keyboard light came on.

Well, I have a separate home partition and I've set up BTRFS snapshots with it, so I'll just roll back to the hourly snapshot it took of the home partition right before I installed the updates. That's when I learn that snapper can't use its rollback on subvolumes, only root volumes. OK, let me boot into the command prompt and then run the text menu version of the YaST tools and snapper to manually revert all the changes in the home partition to an earlier snapshot. I have to go run some errands, and come back 2 hours later to find the text menu version is STILL computing changes! That should have only taken a few minutes; apparently that doesn't work or something went wrong. Now I've got to try logging in and reverting the home partition and hope KDE doesn't write anything wonky to the config files when I log out again. Sigh.

For what it's worth, I'm also on an AMD CPU and GPU. Don't know if that really has anything to do with it.

Not having too much fun with Tumbleweed today. The updater should be able to display warning messages about updates rather than expecting users to check websites and mailing lists before running every upgrade. Had I known a potentially destructive desktop upgrade was coming down the pike I'd have done a full backup before running it.