KDE Developers Fixing Initial Bugs From Plasma 6.2

[Daktyl198]

1 casual uninformed update on an arch-based system and you have a broken system and a user primed to go back to Windows. SteamOS avoids this issue by being immutable. You flash a system image and boom you're done, no user intervention required. I understand manjaro has an immutable version now, but I find it unlikely that this is what the user was recommending.

Just ask the Arch guys themselves who their distribution is suitable for, it's not newbies.

Any other distro is just as likely to break as Arch is. Being on old packages doesn't magically get rid of package conflicts and errors. Remember when Pop!OS shipped with a Steam package that removed the desktop meta-package AKA all of Gnome and xorg? Arch hasn't had any major issues on basic setups in years. The only people dealing with Arch breakages are people with extremely custom setups.

Additionally, you can always use btrfs snapshots to go back to a working version, similar to Windows system restore. Immutable versions of the OS aren't a catch-all for update errors either. It just means the user can't bork it, it doesn't mean a bad update can't do the same damage.

And weird Arch bros haven't been the target audience of Arch itself in ages. If they had their way, the archinstall utility wouldn't exist. Arch, similar to debian, has become a much more generic distro and has gone out of it's way to become an easy to use base for other distros to utilize, including user-friendly distros.

[DanL]

Sorry not sorry, but Debian strives to catch up to outdated software. System76 needs to fork Debian.

That's why there's Debian sid/experimental (typing this on Debian sid with Plasma 6.2)

[Jaxad0127]

A cool thing on Gnome though is the nice integration of [windows] key. On Gnome you can reduce pretty much all interactions with the windows environment to just this one key: switch windows, switch desktops, move windows between desktops, start typing to find and start a new app.
On KDE you need to learn multiple key shortcuts for that: [windows] will only open the system menu, whereas for selecting apps there's [windows]+[w]. However keyboard search in that mode only searches between open windows, not available apps. This part is not as nice as what Gnome or Windows have to offer.

That should be the same search found in KRunner and the default Application Launcher. If it's only searching windows, OpenSuse must have changed something.

I really wish they made the [windows] key offer same as functionality as what Gnome does - that's probably *the* one thing that's making me prefer to stay with Gnome.

Easy to change keyboard shortcuts. Most people who are used to the Windows workflow will want just Meta to open the Application Launcher.

[ahrs]

Manjaro takes all of what Arch offers and tries to make the updates a lot less painless and not need as much user interactions. That comes at the expense of not being as bleeding-edge as Arch.

Have you seen how they do that? At one point they had a script that would run "rm -rf" on the Pacman lock file mid-transaction! Trying to make Arch into a distro where the user doesn't have to care about .pacnew/.pacdiff files and manual intervention is always going to be difficult unless you go the immutable approach like Valve has.

Manjaro also has an immutable distribution in development, it'll be interesting to see how well that works by comparison or if they find a way to cock that up too.

[ahrs]

That's why there's Debian sid/experimental (typing this on Debian sid with Plasma 6.2)

When are they going to move it to testing? I know the next Debian release isn't likely for a while yet so they've got time but their handling of Plasma 6 so far has not been the best. It's good to see experimental/sid got the 6.2 update quickly at least.

[Vorpal]

The year of the Linux desktop won't be on Ubuntu, Debian, System76, Mint, or any other Debian-based distribution. Sorry not sorry, but Debian strives to catch up to outdated software. System76 needs to fork Debian.

It also won't be with RHEL or SLES. They also strive to catch up to outdated software.

The year of the Linux desktop will happen once Valve releases SteamOS 3 for general consumer and PC usage. Valve uses Arch, BTW.

Arguably the year of desktop (or at least laptop) Linux already happened: ChromeOS is by far the most popular user facing Linux distro (well, after Android, but that isn't desktop Linux).

No I wouldn't want to use ChromeOS (I'm a happy Arch + KDE user). But I think many enthusiasts don't really want to think of ChromeOS in these terms (for good reasons!), but it is technically true.

[Quackdoc]

updated kde on my system to see how the update is, immediately set my monitor to 100% brightness... I'm not the only one either, know at least 1 other person...

[skeevy420]

That's why there's Debian sid/experimental (typing this on Debian sid with Plasma 6.2)

Sid and Experimental are so unstable that there have been, and still are, distributions designed around them because they aren't always safe for end-users to run. That's what Siduction was and what Ubuntu still is.

I ran Sid for nearly a decade and it broke all the time. At least once every six months. Granted, that was the very late 90s to late 2000s. It may have gotten better in the past 15 years that I haven't ran it. Near the end of the 2000s I switched to Ubuntu since it's just a patched up Debian Sid and most everything Linux I knew transferred over. Every dist-update from .04 to .10 from 2008 to 2011 resulted in a fucked up system.

Funnily enough, I installed Ubuntu 20.04 to try out their ZFS setup and never even made it long enough to install the .10 update because it was a massive software downgrade coming from Manjaro. 20.04, even with GNOME (ugh), was a fine OS. I was just to accustomed to bleeding-edge gaming features that were easier to get on different distros. Linux gaming was really, really ramping up around 2020 and being on bleeding-edge was necessary to fully experience it.

My experiences have just made me very leery of that setup. I'm glad you're having a good time and that my old experiences aren't necessarily holding true for Debian users these days.

[skeevy420]

Arguably the year of desktop (or at least laptop) Linux already happened: ChromeOS is by far the most popular user facing Linux distro (well, after Android, but that isn't desktop Linux).

No I wouldn't want to use ChromeOS (I'm a happy Arch + KDE user). But I think many enthusiasts don't really want to think of ChromeOS in these terms (for good reasons!), but it is technically true.

Android and Roku, too. Amazon thingies use Linux as well. By that logic were in the Decade of the FreeBSD Desktop since three PlayStation consoles won the last few console generations.

[fallingcats]

updated kde on my system to see how the update is, immediately set my monitor to 100% brightness... I'm not the only one either, know at least 1 other person...

On the plus side, you should now be able to control the brightness of individual monitors.