KDE Fixing Many Bugs, Prepping New Plasma 6.3 Features

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

There was talk of trying to make it into a proper distro with A/B roots, etc, which would ease the pain of a broken update. I have no idea how invested in this they really are though.

It's obvious that a lot of contributors want to move away from an Ubuntu LTS base, our friendly ngraham included.

https://discuss.kde.org/t/plan-b-for-when-ubuntu-is-no-longer-a-viable-desirable-etc-base-for-kde-neon/8727/3

They seem fairly serious about it, see my previous response to myself for links. A base platform (Ubuntu LTS) where upstream struggles to stay current with dependencies and that contributors don't want to use themselves isn't tenable in the long term. And personally, I like the direction of this prototype work. Tinkerers will always have pure Arch or Gentoo or other options. What Linux really needs is a bullet proof out-of-the-box desktop experience. Container support is excellent on Linux and getting better every day, both in terms of real containers with Podman / Distrobox, and containerized apps. We are getting close to the point where there's enough polish in the "glue" / interaction with the base system that we can offer users an experience that's both rock solid and easily extensible.

[sophisticles]

So how many bugs are still left?

Dozens?

Hundreds?

Thousands?

Uncountable?

More importantly when are they going to rebase KDE on COSMIC?

Basically make a Plasma theme for COSMIC and call it KOSMIC, or POSMIC.

[Luke_Wolf]

Yes, I've been thinking about it recently, but I've been using Ubuntu for more than a decade and I didn't want to learn a new system. And besides that, you always have Ubuntu packages available for software that you want to install, but you don't always have packages for Arch, or other more modern distros.

Arch honestly has the widest package repos around once you add in AUR (much bigger than Gentoo or Debian) but generally unless you run particular obscure software you don't really need to worry about distros packaging them because they're generally available either through flatpak or the more normal repositories.

I really don't understand the cult of Debian, I've used pretty much every major distro over the past almost 20 years now and Ubuntu proper was bad, but Debian gave me the worst experience I've had in a Linux distro with lots of things just being broken in ways they weren't in other distros. Which made a lot more sense when I figured out that Debian users have a very different meaning of the word stable from the rest of us in that they mean it doesn't change not that a lot of QA is put in to making it actually work.

Arch and openSUSE are great if you want a very custom desktop, Fedora is great if you want a boring desktop where you're not customizing everything and things Just Work (TM).

I'm pretty much running Arch and FreeBSD these days and RHEL variants like Rocky at work.

[ahrs]

So how many bugs are still left?

Dozens?

Hundreds?

Thousands?

Uncountable?

More importantly when are they going to rebase KDE on COSMIC?

Basically make a Plasma theme for COSMIC and call it KOSMIC, or POSMIC.

I'd wager there's still less bugs overall in KDE than there are in the woeful state of the COSMIC alpha. I've tried it on my machine and it's rough, really, really rough. It actually got worse somehow in the last release. I had no screen tearing / screen artifacts in the first alpha but it was awful in the next one. I'm sure the System76 team will get there eventually but at present it's clear nobody should be building anything on top of it (not that KDE is ever going to ditch Qt, you're laughing if you think that will happen).

[ngraham]

Our new immutable distro KDE Linux is coming along nicely, and it's very serious. The fact that it's described as a prototype reflects technical realities, not a level of hesitancy in embracing the project. I currently have KDE Linux running on a secondary laptop and my living room HTPC, and it's fantastic already IMO. Development assistance is eagerly appreciated.

https://invent.kde.org/sitter/kde-linux

[ahrs]

https://invent.kde.org/sitter/kde-linux

Great codename for a project that's bananas! It's nice to see that configuration management is a design goal:

DConf-like configuration management UI suitable for enterprise and managed environments leveraging KConfigXT for everything

Power users want some easy way to script configs that's not "hand-editing config files" and enterprise users want some way to deploy managed configs. With GNOME, I believe they even have some sort of integration with FreeIPA so desktop configs can be tied to Active directory, etc. Projects like Fleet commander are interesting it'd be nice if KDE had an answer to that:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/FleetCommander

[openminded]

It's a shame we cannot have more up-to-date Plasma in Ubuntu... I'm having problems with audio devices in 6.1, but I don't know if they've been fixed already in more modern Plasmas.

Don't worry Plasma 6.2 has it's own bugs too
Every distro has its disadvantages and flaws. KDE Neon has fresh Plasma but dated system components, Ubuntu is quite relevant but no Plasma updates, Arch pulls most recent Qt and Plasma causing weird bugs due to the lack of QA and testing, etc etc etc.
The bug free setup doesn't exist.

[mobadboy]

Hmm I thought KDE plasma 6.2 was meant to fix all the bugs...


Maybe fix all the bugs before launching a new feature? Basic project mgmt practice

[reba]

I ran Debian for some years and had quite up-to-date packages because I chose Debian sid. My experiences were usually very good, sometimes, especially just before or after a major stable update, package dependencies get a little wonky, but that's kind of expected and can be reacted on easily (if it wants to uninstall 50% of your system - don't update, come back later, when the dependencies have been fixed)

I switched over to Arch now (CachyOS) and am very happy. It is even more stable, the number of packaged applications is utterly crazy and I can mix and match my system just as I like: dbus-broker, iwd, pipewire, Wayland, Nvidia, labwc + dozens of tools as my desktop, everything is customized to my liking and all those wheels and cogs fit seamlessy into each other. Nothing really breaks when updating and I begin to believe the name calling of Arch being error prone or difficult is a total urban myth. I works perfectly.

Between I tried Fedora and Red Hat and it did not click with me. It was just too opinionated, strict, packages were quite old, package management atrocious. Using the system felt weird and strange and somehow backwards and neckbeardy.

So: from Debian to Arch in one step with good experiences on both ends but Arch is my soul mate.

Edit: Nix/Guix are also nice but IMHO not ready for showtime yet

[skeevy420]

Nothing really breaks when updating and I begin to believe the name calling of Arch being error prone or difficult is a total urban myth. I works perfectly.

Arch used to have plenty of issues a decade ago and more. They've done a lot of work since then as well as systemd helped standardize a lot of things. For me, 2014 was when updates shifted from occasional breakage to an occasional warning on the Arch homepage.

It's not an urban myth as much as it's "Back in my day we had to manually install and maintain Arch uphill, both ways, in the snow."