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KDE Implements More Wayland Bits, Lowers Bug Count To Match Plasma 5 Stability

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  • KDE Implements More Wayland Bits, Lowers Bug Count To Match Plasma 5 Stability

    Phoronix: KDE Implements More Wayland Bits, Lowers Bug Count To Match Plasma 5 Stability

    KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap that highlights all of the interesting KDE desktop changes to have landed over the past week...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I think I've encountered this Xwayland copy paste issue. Pretty annoying so good to know they fixed it.

    Comment


    • #3
      I'm a KDE/plasma user and have been for at least a decade or more continuously. The current versions of plasma - under X11 - are super stable! I hardly ever have a crash! Something that was very common in the early days of both KDE 5.x and Plasma 6.x.

      Recently i've also tried - read forced, as an update just changed it and i didn't notice - Plasma on wayland. The general impression, and specifically the first impression, is just great. It works! However, over the course of weeks i began to notice weird behavior that i hadn't before. For whatever reason (i figured out soon after) my pc fan was spinning up, slowing down, spinning up... much more then usual. Turns out that kwin wayland is quite a bit more cpu hungry then x11. Over time i found more small but annoying issues. I won't name them as this page did a far better job at naming many many more then i've faced. I ended up switching back to X11.

      Another thing i noticed with recent updates is... things breaking! Some things break clowly over time so you might at first not notice it's broken but just consider it as "ahh, next update will fix it, right?". Like the plasma-systemmonitor program that replaced ksysguard, sadly the plasma-systemmonitor is now essentially useless because it itself sucks up a full cpu core. The calculator app got some recent changes and it couldn't properly calculate anymore (fixed in an update thereafter). Kate/kwrite got updates to it's word wrap behavior which is now "conveniently" configurable in two different places where both do matter. SVG walpapers broke completely (fixed in this very weekly i see). Konsole adapted new (been there for some releases now) visuals, like new lines are "changes" as default which is just fugly and annoying, it can be turned off but it's "yet another setting where i don't like the default". Also for Konsole, it's not a great TTY anymore, i switched to using Alacrity. Dolphin to me has many issues and they seem to be getting worse. Like: large folder with gifs, you will notice scrolling stutter which already happens just just a couple dozen; thumbnail previews (in the right pane) sometimes do and sometimes don't preserve aspect ratio; sorting large folders (which i myself fixed in dolphin some 20 years ago!) is back to being dog slow (granted, this probably happend soon after i fixed it with a fix on top of it that nerfed it again); and so there's many more small annoyances.

      I'm still a KDE user and will be because it's the best DE for my usage. However, i do get a strong feeling that - specifically in recent years - the testing part of software development is getting skipped or neglected. Like for real, how on earth can you break the calculator and ship it? I get that testing isn't the most fun part of development, i too hate testing. But i do see the value of it. More worrisome is that it does have tests but probably doesn't test for (1+1 <enter> +1) as that was failing (1 as response instead of 3).

      Comment


      • #4
        The experience with KDE 6 may vary concerning the use case.
        When using it like Windows - one program started - terminared - starting a second program etc.,
        then I am convinced that it is stable enough - even for a Wayland session (which surprised me
        when seeing the other problems KDE 6 had).

        When working in old style workstation mode - 9 terminal windows (konsole) on each desktop,
        8 virtual desks - it is absolutely unstable and really problematic.
        As konsole windows don't have necessary parameters to spread them in the desired position,
        size, ... about all virtual desks at once via scripts, one has to rely on session save - which is totally
        broken under Wayland from 6.0 and under X11 really prone to different bugs.

        Some have been fixed (shrinking console windows was nice ... getting tinier every boot/logout - so
        you can guess the age of the windows ... but currently the 72 konsole windows may not respawn
        all - but 0-3 are missing in a random fashion - sometimes a konsole window is misplaced and (typically)
        placed on the 1st virt. desk instead of the one it belongs.
        And after about 6 boots all konsole windows lose the various different directories and all show ~ (i.e.
        the logged user's home directory) - and the next boot, only Firefox will respawn - no konsole window,
        no okular window. This pattern was visible about 6.0 and only seemed to diappear with 6.1 - while
        6.1.1 it was clearly present again.

        Bugs about this problem are open since KDE 6 - in various forms - as some variations had been fixed - but
        the main problem persisted till 6.1.4 which got available to KDE neon (22.04 LTS based, User Edition) just
        yesterday. And today I can confirm that the bugs around session save have not been fixed with 6.1.4.

        I like KDE - and I will wait for the fixes to come - but I am not amused that KDE 6 was released in such
        a broken condition that even one tester would have seen a lot of problems - so this was not ready
        for users.
        Another thing is that reactions are seldom - package problems are solved very fast - when several users
        agree that they have the same problems it got addressed - but concerning session save there had been
        a plethora of bugs in that code - and several are still there ... and I had the hope that these problems could
        be addressed in 6 weeks - but it is a lot longer now and the problems are still there.
        Maybe it is due to Qt 6 introducing a lot of changes ... but the more changes - the longer a testing phase
        for devs should be before users get hands on it to reveal the seldom remaining bugs with different HW
        settings and other strange conditions.

        But if this situation is now settled concerning the hot spots for the developers, maybe there is time soon
        to really ask for feedback for bugs still not addressed so bug reporters can help in finding the solution.

        What stikes me is that some reports were about crashes - I have never seen crashes of KDE 6 -
        just bugs in various forms - and typically random things ... working elements - suddenly not
        working - working again - suddenly again without effect ... but never any crashes at all.
        So I really think that those bugs should be found when looking at the save session code base
        and config format.

        I am happy that KDE neon (based on Jammy, i.e. 22.04 LTS) still get KDE updates - and I would wish
        that this prolongs till those bugs had been hunted down.
        On the other hand I really wait for KDE neon based on 24.04.1 - which was delayed - and 24.04 LTS may
        be some additionally work comparing to 22.04.1 LTS to get it in good shape (the snap problems seem to
        grow every version ... maybe using Debian directly may be something to consider - as Ubuntu seems to
        have no interest to have an install options for a no-snap installation and thus let users have to cope with
        various probems (access/interoperability, performance/wasted energy, additional disk space/security problems)
        due to the unreasonable sanboxing and the many different library versions used (similar to flatpak).

        Comment


        • #5
          - The Plasma weather widget adding a "feels like" temperature indicator.
          I'd rather not know that. By that I just mean it's so fucking hot and humid that I'd rather be told 103F instead of 115F. That's tomorrow's forecast . It's only 100 and 113 today

          It'll be nice on Monday when 103 is the Index and not the Actual

          Comment


          • #6
            The comment did not appear after several minutes - thus submitted again ... and deleted when the comment appeared again.
            ​
            Last edited by JMB9; 17 August 2024, 10:33 AM.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by JMB9 View Post
              The experience with KDE 6 may vary concerning the use case.
              When using it like Windows - one program started - terminared - starting a second program etc.,
              then I am convinced that it is stable enough - even for a Wayland session (which surprised me
              when seeing the other problems KDE 6 had).

              When working in old style workstation mode - 9 terminal windows (konsole) on each desktop,
              8 virtual desks - it is absolutely unstable and really problematic.
              As konsole windows don't have necessary parameters to spread them in the desired position,
              size, ... about all virtual desks at once via scripts, one has to rely on session save - which is totally
              broken under Wayland from 6.0 and under X11 really prone to different bugs.

              Some have been fixed (shrinking console windows was nice ... getting tinier every boot/logout - so
              you can guess the age of the windows ... but currently the 72 konsole windows may not respawn
              all - but 0-3 are missing in a random fashion - sometimes a konsole window is misplaced and (typically)
              placed on the 1st virt. desk instead of the one it belongs.
              And after about 6 boots all konsole windows lose the various different directories and all show ~ (i.e.
              the logged user's home directory) - and the next boot, only Firefox will respawn - no konsole window,
              no okular window. This pattern was visible about 6.0 and only seemed to diappear with 6.1 - while
              6.1.1 it was clearly present again.

              Bugs about this problem are open since KDE 6 - in various forms - as some variations had been fixed - but
              the main problem persisted till 6.1.4 which got available to KDE neon (22.04 LTS based, User Edition) just
              yesterday. And today I can confirm that the bugs around session save have not been fixed with 6.1.4.

              I like KDE - and I will wait for the fixes to come - but I am not amused that KDE 6 was released in such
              a broken condition that even one tester would have seen a lot of problems - so this was not ready
              for users.
              Another thing is that reactions are seldom - package problems are solved very fast - when several users
              agree that they have the same problems it got addressed - but concerning session save there had been
              a plethora of bugs in that code - and several are still there ... and I had the hope that these problems could
              be addressed in 6 weeks - but it is a lot longer now and the problems are still there.
              Maybe it is due to Qt 6 introducing a lot of changes ... but the more changes - the longer a testing phase
              for devs should be before users get hands on it to reveal the seldom remaining bugs with different HW
              settings and other strange conditions.

              But if this situation is now settled concerning the hot spots for the developers, maybe there is time soon
              to really ask for feedback for bugs still not addressed so bug reporters can help in finding the solution.

              What stikes me is that some reports were about crashes - I have never seen crashes of KDE 6 -
              just bugs in various forms - and typically random things ... working elements - suddenly not
              working - working again - suddenly again without effect ... but never any crashes at all.
              So I really think that those bugs should be found when looking at the save session code base
              and config format.

              I am happy that KDE neon (based on Jammy, i.e. 22.04 LTS) still get KDE updates - and I would wish
              that this prolongs till those bugs had been hunted down.
              On the other hand I really wait for KDE neon based on 24.04.1 - which was delayed - and 24.04 LTS may
              be some additionally work comparing to 22.04.1 LTS to get it in good shape (the snap problems seem to
              grow every version ... maybe using Debian directly may be something to consider - as Ubuntu seems to
              have no interest to have an install options for a no-snap installation and thus let users have to cope with
              various probems (access/interoperability, performance/wasted energy, additional disk space/security problems)
              due to the unreasonable sanboxing and the many different library versions used (similar to flatpak).
              That sounds niche enough for there to be potentially be just a single dev working on it if any at all. Worst case, nobody works on it and random people push fixes to it for their needs. If you have a setup that huge you might be better of seriously considering looking at the code yourself and doing some debugging. Or to ask around on KDE centric places (forum, irc, ..). Just waiting for the bug reports probably is't gonna push things forward much. And lastly, but i know this is a unpopular thing to suggest, is to ask a developer (again, look around in the KDE centric communication channels, there's devs there that would want to help out for sure) if they'd be willing to look at a bug for a financial donation. Remember, many are just hobbyists and probably are happy to help, offering them a bit of money to solve your case isn't that bad. But yeah, i realize that this isn't always possible.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post

                I'd rather not know that. By that I just mean it's so fucking hot and humid that I'd rather be told 103F instead of 115F. That's tomorrow's forecast . It's only 100 and 113 today

                It'll be nice on Monday when 103 is the Index and not the Actual
                Holy F! That's hot!
                115F (just did the conversion to metrics i understand) is like 46 celcius.

                If you don't mind me asking, where is that?

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by markg85 View Post

                  Holy F! That's hot!
                  115F (just did the conversion to metrics i understand) is like 46 celcius.

                  If you don't mind me asking, where is that?
                  Central Arkansas. Draw a circle over east Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas centering where their borders meet and you have one of the hottest parts of the US during summer due to it being relatively low-land subtropics that borders deserts and plains. Whenever that high pressure system sits over the plains we get blasted with heat combined with Gulf humidity. July to September can really suck when systems like that set in. Some places get hotter, but the humidity here is what really gets you.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post

                    Central Arkansas. Draw a circle over east Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas centering where their borders meet and you have one of the hottest parts of the US during summer due to it being relatively low-land subtropics that borders deserts and plains. Whenever that high pressure system sits over the plains we get blasted with heat combined with Gulf humidity. July to September can really suck when systems like that set in. Some places get hotter, but the humidity here is what really gets you.
                    Central Oklahoma here. 102/113 today.

                    EDIT: I just interpret it to mean 102 is what you feel in the shade and 113 is what you feel in the sun. Don't know if thats actually correct though.
                    Last edited by duby229; 17 August 2024, 12:24 PM.

                    Comment

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