KDE Plasma Users Are Still Running Into Multi-Screen Issues

[MadCatX]

systray and task manager alone in 5.7. nepomuk / baloo in the recent past. The biggest one though is akonadi, which should just have died ages ago.

Taskmanager is a small easily exchangeable component, systray is (probably, haven't looked at the code) too. Nothing wrong with rewriting that it it's warranted. Nepomuk was indeed horrible, hence we got baloo which actually works. Despite all the horrible things said about Akonadi it now actually works reasonably well, at least for me.

No, of course I don't expect them to fix an open source library which leads to important applications crashing with a complete data loss, why would I. No, I don't expect them to fix a base library which leaves to the whole session crashing and thus all data in all open applications being lost, why would I. Doesn't sound like a sane thing to do to me at all. </sarcasm>

We obviously have a very different point of view on this matter. I just don't see why should KDE devs clean up Qt devs mess. In fact I think they have been more than helpful already, a lot of stuff that was originally a part of kdelibs landed in Qt5. It's the Qt devs that owe one to KDE devs, not the other way around.

Yes, sure, nobody ever would use that. I mean ... Microsoft certainly never would, Adobe certainly never would, Google never would, Wolfram never would, Oracle ... all these big players ... nah, they'd never even touch it. Oh ...

Not to mention the probably lesser known ones. Sorry, but there are plenty of Qt based applications, both Open and Closed Source Software. And most of these run mostly on Windows.

M$ "uses" Qt only because it inherited Skype like that. They are also more than eager to ditch the desktop client altogether and move everything to the web service. It probably shouldn't surprise you that Qt based apps run on Windows since Qt is a very multiplatform toolkit. It doesn't change the fact that Qt still feels like a second-class citizen on Windows because it strongly relies on tools developed and used mostly on UNIX systems.

Oh, what do I know, some lesser known things like a decent personal information management, integration into directories and identity management, decent inbuilt backup and shadowcopy solutions, management of clients ... basically: almost everything that matters the very moment you have more than your two personal machines that you use for goofing around on the internet.

If you don't want to count these but rather go for home computing: okay, see what apple does. Airplay, time machine, the mobile sync which makes kdeconnect look like a joke ...

I do use more than one computer on a regular basis and I've never felt like I've been missing out on things. Not having my sensitive data managed by a proprietary set of tool counts as a plus for me. I can do backups and shadow copies with Btrfs snapshotting. Apple's solutions are nice but they actually work only if you have an Apple-only environment.

It depends on what areas these are and how big the damage is. In my opinion Plasma is far beyond the fixable point and slowly sinking. And if you look at user polls and activity, this is fortunately also what the numbers say. So: grab some popcorn, watch the ship sink while they wildly point at and blame others and already chose what desktop you will switch to when it is finally dead and buried. (Well, probably not buried, someone will come and dig it up like the trinity project did with KDE3, and keep it alive in a more sorry state than it already is.

I really don't think that KDE is doing anywhere anytime soon. Should it ever happen, I'll probably have to move away from Linux as my desktop system altogether.

[darclide]

Taskmanager is a small easily exchangeable component, systray is (probably, haven't looked at the code) too. Nothing wrong with rewriting that it it's warranted.

Which has nothing to do with the original argument, but glad to see that you are looking for new excuses the very moment one delivers

Nepomuk was indeed horrible, hence we got baloo which actually works.

Except that it doesn't, it is hell-ish to debug, still eats CPU and RAM, breaks Akonadi even more than it already is the very moment you start synchronising with external sources ... oh dear, that list is long.

Despite all the horrible things said about Akonadi it now actually works reasonably well, at least for me.

And not for plenty of others, http://dilfridge.blogspot.ch/2016/05...ds-to-die.html (and comments)

We obviously have a very different point of view on this matter. I just don't see why should KDE devs clean up Qt devs mess. In fact I think they have been more than helpful already, a lot of stuff that was originally a part of kdelibs landed in Qt5. It's the Qt devs that owe one to KDE devs, not the other way around.

*shrug* stay on the ideological point of view then, I point at reality which is: users get crashes due to Qt, KDE people point fingers instead of working on a fix, users ditch plasma for something else. Simple and works for me.

M$ "uses" Qt only because it inherited Skype like that. They are also more than eager to ditch the desktop client altogether and move everything to the web service.

Ignoring the very obvious bias you have, given the misspelling: glad to see you cherry pick that one example you have a pseudo argument for and ignore all of the others.

It probably shouldn't surprise you that Qt based apps run on Windows since Qt is a very multiplatform toolkit. It doesn't change the fact that Qt still feels like a second-class citizen on Windows because it strongly relies on tools developed and used mostly on UNIX systems.

then it should surprise you that plenty of Windows only software is using Qt, given that platform independence was not a reason for that choice, one wonders why people would choose such a second class citizen, then. Not to even mention that this is where the money comes from, and these days not many thing run without money, not even the precious (F)OSS we have.

I do use more than one computer on a regular basis and I've never felt like I've been missing out on things. Not having my sensitive data managed by a proprietary set of tool counts as a plus for me. I can do backups and shadow copies with Btrfs snapshotting.

Which KDE does absolutely nothing for. No integration, no GUI, nothing at all. Yeah, of course you won't see the lack of features if having to read manuals and hammer in cryptic commands is the same for you as having an out of the box working experience that even non techies can use.

Apple's solutions are nice but they actually work only if you have an Apple-only environment.

Of course this is wrong, but even if it was right: with the glorious failure that is called freedesktop we are at times where most decent KDE stuff also only works within a KDE environment, same goes for Gnome, same goes for the others. So: not really a gain here.

I'd argue that interoperability is even worse in the FOSS world than in the proprietary world, but of course fanboys don't like to hear that.

I really don't think that KDE is doing anywhere anytime soon. Should it ever happen, I'll probably have to move away from Linux as my desktop system altogether.

Fortunately the number of users is already decreasing, the number of active devs looks bad at well, especially when you look at core kde applications such as dolphin or konsole or core technologies such as baloo or akonadi (actually the whole PIM stack is close to a one man show) ... so yeah, let it die and rot already, hopefully whatever system you'd switch to afterwards (probably neither M$ [sic!] Windows nor Apple Mac OS) will benefit from the newly available resources.

[Del_]

systray and task manager alone in 5.7. nepomuk / baloo in the recent past. The biggest one though is akonadi, which should just have died ages ago.

I have not had any issues with akonadi for ages. I do occasionally see people report problems, so I am sure there are use cases that have been problematic. However, I have been a regular user of akonadi for years, never been bitten. Are you sure you are talking about problems that actually affected you, or are you just coughing up things you have read on the internet? Busy google round this evening maybe?

Nepomuk is a wellknown example of over-engineering, too many dependencies, developers over-reaching. It is however now a very old story, and stands out as an outlier. Easy to condemn in hindsight, seemed like a fantastic idea at the outset. Bringing it up now is ... bad manners. Not to mention irrelevant, it got addressed ages ago. It was never ignored, so it is also a counter example to your claims. Bringing it up like this makes your posting seem like an indiscriminate rant.

Not to mention the probably lesser known ones. Sorry, but there are plenty of Qt based applications, both Open and Closed Source Software. And most of these run mostly on Windows.

Sure, and what did they ever contribute to Qt? Ever heard of Kdab? Just about the largest external contributor to Qt. Educate yourself:

https://www.kdab.com/about/

KDE has been extremely important for Qt in so many ways I don't know where to start.

Oh, what do I know, some lesser known things like a decent personal information management,

kdepim is the best pim in existence, hands down. It only has two problems, and you seem oblivious to what they are. Let me be of some assistance:
-microsoft is controlling the market with proprietary protocols, stick to kolab based groupware and you are fine
-kdepim is misconfigured by default, so you need to spend a couple of hours setting it up to your liking.

integration into directories and identity management, decent inbuilt backup and shadowcopy solutions, management of clients ... basically: almost everything that matters the very moment you have more than your two personal machines that you use for goofing around on the internet.

Now you lost me, I use KDE on Red Hat as my main workplace, all of that works fine. You seem to be very confused about what a desktop environment is about? Are you by any chance ranting in general about linux based desktops?

If you don't want to count these but rather go for home computing: okay, see what apple does. Airplay, time machine, the mobile sync which makes kdeconnect look like a joke ...

Hm, you seem very confused. kdeconnect is not a replacement for syncing. It provides very simple desktop integration for your phone. You can use any cloud service, or like me, KDE's offspring Owncloud/Nextcloud for syncing. Apple is playing catch-up with kdeconnect in its latest OS, Microsoft has nothing like it. I have enjoyed it for a couple of years already.

Plasma is actually shaping up nicely. Once the next Debian stable comes out, I am sure it will shine as the best desktop ever created. Then I will jump on board with all my machines.

On an anecdote, my experience is quite different from yours. Upon a discussion with Aaron where I pointed out in a blog comment what I believed to be the gravest design flaw in KDE4 (namely the widgets on the task bar jumping around and disappearing), he submitted a quite effective fix. Again, an experience 180 degrees different from yours. About bugs, there was one that plagued me to the point that I downloaded the source code and fixed it myself. Actually, KDE has never been better managed than now, and it shows. KDE4 is now rock solid, and Plasma is far ahead of where KDE4 was at the same time in the development cycle. Why do you want Plasma anyway, anything you miss in KDE4?

[MadCatX]

Which has nothing to do with the original argument, but glad to see that you are looking for new excuses the very moment one delivers

The argument being that stuff got rewritten? What's wrong with that? Every larger software project does that. That's why we write software in a modular fashion, isn't it?

And not for plenty of others, http://dilfridge.blogspot.ch/2016/05...ds-to-die.html (and comments)

I can write blogposts like that about half of my current desktop stack if I wanted. I have KMail managing about 10000 emails from four different accounts at the moment and in hasn't glitched out on me for at least a few months. No, Akonadi is not great by any measure but it was still pretty bold of the KDE devs to try and build something like this. On the other side of the spectrum you have DEs that provide the user experience akin to Win95 or focus on constantly removing functionality and breaking stuff.

*shrug* stay on the ideological point of view then, I point at reality which is: users get crashes due to Qt, KDE people point fingers instead of working on a fix, users ditch plasma for something else. Simple and works for me.

And what's the other option? Migrate KDE to GTK? Hack together half-assed fixes and workarounds? IMHO the KDE devs are doing the right thing here, it's definitely not like they have never contributed to Qt, is it?

Ignoring the very obvious bias you have, given the misspelling: glad to see you cherry pick that one example you have a pseudo argument for and ignore all of the others.


then it should surprise you that plenty of Windows only software is using Qt, given that platform independence was not a reason for that choice, one wonders why people would choose such a second class citizen, then. Not to even mention that this is where the money comes from, and these days not many thing run without money, not even the precious (F)OSS we have.

And how many Windows|Mac-only Qt-based apps are there exactly? Even building our own Qt build on Windows is an incredible pain in the butt, especially when you need to support Windows XP with Qt 5.6.

Which KDE does absolutely nothing for. No integration, no GUI, nothing at all. Yeah, of course you won't see the lack of features if having to read manuals and hammer in cryptic commands is the same for you as having an out of the box working experience that even non techies can use.

I don't care what other people find convenient, I want to use tools that to the job for *me*. Linux and Plasma 5 does that, other software stacks don't.

Of course this is wrong, but even if it was right: with the glorious failure that is called freedesktop we are at times where most decent KDE stuff also only works within a KDE environment, same goes for Gnome, same goes for the others. So: not really a gain here.

I'd argue that interoperability is even worse in the FOSS world than in the proprietary world, but of course fanboys don't like to hear that.

It is at times but it has nothing to do with KDE. One could argue that a large contributor to the interoperability brokenness has been RedHat, at least for the last few years.

Fortunately the number of users is already decreasing, the number of active devs looks bad at well, especially when you look at core kde applications such as dolphin or konsole or core technologies such as baloo or akonadi (actually the whole PIM stack is close to a one man show) ... so yeah, let it die and rot already, hopefully whatever system you'd switch to afterwards (probably neither M$ [sic!] Windows nor Apple Mac OS) will benefit from the newly available resources.

And since you cannot contribute neither to Windows nor macOS the new system won't benefit in any way.

[darclide]

I have not had any issues with akonadi for ages. I do occasionally see people report problems, so I am sure there are use cases that have been problematic. However, I have been a regular user of akonadi for years, never been bitten. Are you sure you are talking about problems that actually affected you, or are you just coughing up things you have read on the internet?

Yes, problems that affected me as well. From missing mails, whole folders not being shown, connections not being resumed on mobile to crashes ... a rather long list.

Busy google round this evening maybe?

Not needed. I maintained a medium to large scale set of linux installations (think school) so I have plenty of first hand experience.

Nepomuk is a wellknown example of over-engineering, too many dependencies, developers over-reaching. It is however now a very old story, and stands out as an outlier. Easy to condemn in hindsight, seemed like a fantastic idea at the outset. Bringing it up now is ... bad manners. Not to mention irrelevant, it got addressed ages ago. It was never ignored, so it is also a counter example to your claims. Bringing it up like this makes your posting seem like an indiscriminate rant.

I have been asked for examples, I brought them up. And no, while it might have gotten addressed, it has not been fixed. Baloo is a similar mess.

Sure, and what did they ever contribute to Qt?

Code and money. You?

Ever heard of Kdab? Just about the largest external contributor to Qt. Educate yourself:

https://www.kdab.com/about/

KDE has been extremely important for Qt in so many ways I don't know where to start.

kdab != KDE. And no need to educate myself, I know them well.

kdepim is the best pim in existence, hands down. It only has two problems, and you seem oblivious to what they are. Let me be of some assistance:
-microsoft is controlling the market with proprietary protocols, stick to kolab based groupware and you are fine
-kdepim is misconfigured by default, so you need to spend a couple of hours setting it up to your liking.

Yes, sure, best PIM in existance. Best PIM where I need a couple of hours to set it up, where there is zero integration to the rest of the system (compared to e.g. outlook with exchange), no decent presence integration at all ... it might work if you use a PIM solution at home (and that is borderline tricky), when you start being a mobile user or even are in a corporate environment it is not comparable to the rest at all.

Now you lost me, I use KDE on Red Hat as my main workplace, all of that works fine. You seem to be very confused about what a desktop environment is about? Are you by any chance ranting in general about linux based desktops?

No, while they all have their faults, I am mainly addressing plasma ones here.

Hm, you seem very confused. kdeconnect is not a replacement for syncing. It provides very simple desktop integration for your phone. You can use any cloud service, or like me, KDE's offspring Owncloud/Nextcloud for syncing. Apple is playing catch-up with kdeconnect in its latest OS, Microsoft has nothing like it. I have enjoyed it for a couple of years already.

Yes, catching up, sure. Not to mention that notifications work so much better with OS X / iOS or the more seamless integration with e.g. media playback.

Plasma is actually shaping up nicely. Once the next Debian stable comes out, I am sure it will shine as the best desktop ever created. Then I will jump on board with all my machines.

Yes, because debian stable is known to use the latest versions of desktops available. So while the rest of the world will be at ... hm, knowing debian, probably around Plasma 5.10 debian might be shipping 5.6 when we are lucky.

As a minor sidenote, what you seem to have in store is ad hominem based on your experience being different than mine. If that is the best you can come up with: the fanboys are in a state as sorry as that of plasma.

[darclide]

The argument being that stuff got rewritten? What's wrong with that? Every larger software project does that. That's why we write software in a modular fashion, isn't it?

It's a matter of priorities. When things that worked reasonably fine get rewritten while basic things such as file management are close to unmaintained and people have a whole session crashing just because they dared undocking their notebook, then I think priorities are a bit wrong.

But hey, at least we will get a themes kcm overwrite, that is what we really were waiting for.

I can write blogposts like that about half of my current desktop stack if I wanted. I have KMail managing about 10000 emails from four different accounts at the moment and in hasn't glitched out on me for at least a few months. No, Akonadi is not great by any measure but it was still pretty bold of the KDE devs to try and build something like this. On the other side of the spectrum you have DEs that provide the user experience akin to Win95 or focus on constantly removing functionality and breaking stuff.

And they should have abandoned it the moment it was clear that it won't work. But no, you get the usual KDE reaction, public finger pointing and fights and in the end it will be replaced anyway, usually also with some people leaving the project in frustration. As said: works for me.

And what's the other option? Migrate KDE to GTK? Hack together half-assed fixes and workarounds? IMHO the KDE devs are doing the right thing here, it's definitely not like they have never contributed to Qt, is it?

Not never, but given the issues at hand: maybe not enough.

And how many Windows|Mac-only Qt-based apps are there exactly? Even building our own Qt build on Windows is an incredible pain in the butt, especially when you need to support Windows XP with Qt 5.6.

Plenty. The most famous is probably Adobe Elements, but there are quite a lot of lesser known applications (e.g. in the public transportation sector in Germany) that are written in Qt and run on Windows only.

I don't care what other people find convenient, I want to use tools that to the job for *me*. Linux and Plasma 5 does that, other software stacks don't.

And that automatically makes criticism and opinions from people where it doesn't work irrelevant? Great thinking.

It is at times but it has nothing to do with KDE. One could argue that a large contributor to the interoperability brokenness has been RedHat, at least for the last few years.

I'm sure you have examples at hand for that kind of accusation.

And since you cannot contribute neither to Windows nor macOS the new system won't benefit in any way.

Of course you can. Not to the core maybe, but quite a lot of important subsystems are open source these days.

[Nth_man]

> which should just have died ages ago.

Anyone can try the [virtual machine that I wrote about](https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B2...dfaGdJTUU/edit) and, if he finds a problem, tell us where the problem is. I can report the bugs.

[Del_]

Yes, problems that affected me as well. From missing mails, whole folders not being shown, connections not being resumed on mobile to crashes ... a rather long list.

Sorry about that. Not sure how your use case looked, but never fun to loose mails. Unfortunately Microsoft has succeeded in destroying the mobile sync arena. There is basically nothing but the proprietary activesync supported. Google could have been the do-gooder, but decided on their own proprietary route there. Yes, some of your fingers need to be pointed elsewhere.

Not needed. I maintained a medium to large scale set of linux installations (think school) so I have plenty of first hand experience.

You come off as bitter. I am sorry it did not work out for you. The largest school deployments in the world is KDE. And you can easily provide a full free groupware solution to all students through kolab. Unfortunately, setting up a good multiuser system still requires skills few school admins possess. No, I do not mean to patronize you, it is just a simple fact.

I have been asked for examples, I brought them up. And no, while it might have gotten addressed, it has not been fixed. Baloo is a similar mess.

First up, nepomuk was known to be bad. As an admin, you either stick with KDE3 (like the kolab guys recommended for kdepim back in the days), or you disable nepomuk by default (like Red Hat). Same goes for baloo, if it bites you, disable it. AFAIK, baloo does not eat your data.

kdab != KDE. And no need to educate myself, I know them well.

I gave you a link stating that many of them came from KDE background, avoid strawmen please. You belittled KDEs contribution to Qt. Can you show me some examples of Windows and Apple only software houses contributing code to Qt?

Yes, sure, best PIM in existance. Best PIM where I need a couple of hours to set it up, where there is zero integration to the rest of the system (compared to e.g. outlook with exchange), no decent presence integration at all ... it might work if you use a PIM solution at home (and that is borderline tricky), when you start being a mobile user or even are in a corporate environment it is not comparable to the rest at all.

Again you seem to be confused. kdepim is not an e-mail server, it is a client. Cell-phones should sync to a server. Kolab syncs all mobiles fine and integrates perfectly with kdepim. It is a full groupware suite used in large deployments, but yes, since it is free software you can even set-up the server at home. Me? I both have a personal kolab server set-up for my private needs, but I am also a paying customer of the cloud solution:

https://kolabnow.com/

But yes, if e-mail is all you need, then imap works great with kmail, always has. As for your outlook+exchange example I really need to concentrate to avoid ad hominems in the answer. *Nothing* but outlook works with Exchange, got it? It is a Microsoft lock-in. Do I really have to repeat this?

Yes, catching up, sure. Not to mention that notifications work so much better with OS X / iOS or the more seamless integration with e.g. media playback.

I use VLC for my video needs, it has seamless integration with kdeconnect out-of-the-box. I guess it is kind of like chromecast, some apps support it, others don't. Using the phone as your mouse is a substitute for apps that don't. Notifications work great, I have no clue what you are hinting at there. Shared clipboard is really handy (this is coming in the latest OSX, no?). Moving files both ways a breeze. Note, I am running the stable KDE4 for my daily needs. I am not denying that you have some bad experience, but it seems to me that you have made some ill-guided choices. You seem to go with bleeding edge solutions while having no interest in being a beta-tester.

Yes, because debian stable is known to use the latest versions of desktops available. So while the rest of the world will be at ... hm, knowing debian, probably around Plasma 5.10 debian might be shipping 5.6 when we are lucky.

I am very happy to use KDE 4.14.2 (which is what Debian Stable currently ships). Back when you were cursing Nepomuk, Debian stable had a well maintained, latest and greatest KDE3. I find your comment very strange. Does software need to be brand new and untested to be good for you? KDE4 is good enough for me, actually I am hard pressed to see what Plasma will do better. KDE4 today is vastly better designed that KDE3 ever was (yes, this is my personal opinion, but one that is pretty easy to argue).

[MadCatX]

It's a matter of priorities. When things that worked reasonably fine get rewritten while basic things such as file management are close to unmaintained and people have a whole session crashing just because they dared undocking their notebook, then I think priorities are a bit wrong.

But hey, at least we will get a themes kcm overwrite, that is what we really were waiting for.

It's also a matter of people. You cannot expect Eike Hahn to go tackle KScreen issues because it's a part of KDE he doesn't know much about. Instead he focuses on what he knows best and works on that.

Not never, but given the issues at hand: maybe not enough.

You are clearly of the opinion that if one wants to drive a car he should also fix the engine whenever it's needed. I'm not. It's unfortunate that Qt issues are causing trouble for Plasma users but it's ultimately responsibility of Qt devs to fix that.

Plenty. The most famous is probably Adobe Elements, but there are quite a lot of lesser known applications (e.g. in the public transportation sector in Germany) that are written in Qt and run on Windows only.

Adobe Elements? Are we talking about this? (https://www.adobe.com/products/photo...ech-specs.html). The tech specs list that there is a MacOS version available too.

And that automatically makes criticism and opinions from people where it doesn't work irrelevant? Great thinking.

Well, you took a few loosely connected issues that make Linux desktop problematic to use in certain cases. As much as I agree with that, it has nothing to do with KDE. It also doesn't mean that it's useless in general.

I'm sure you have examples at hand for that kind of accusation.

Gtk 3 constantly breaks its theme interface, resulting in Adwaita being the only theme that works. GNOME changes the plugin interface with almost every update and forces the maintainers to constantly adjust the plugins and keep multiple versions of them. Client-side decorations make all GNOME apps stick out like a sore thumb whenever you run them outside GNOME (the lack of working alternate Gtk theme doesn't help either). Basically all RedHat apps are GNOME only and don't work quite that well anywhere else whereas everything from KDE SC works perfectly fine under GNOME. Then there is the whole systemd "let's break whatever we think is a good idea to break and don't give it a second thought" saga but that's a matter for another debate.

Of course you can. Not to the core maybe, but quite a lot of important subsystems are open source these days.

Open source doesn't imply open to public contribution. Even Canonical went out of their way to make public contributions to their software a pain.

[bug77]

My setup is -let's say- a bit uncommon. My secondary screen has different resolution, it's located at my left and it's rotated. For the same setup and for KDE 4 everything was working fine. So I would call that a regression. I've tried plasma 5.5 and 5.6 and I quickly give up. I regret not filing a bug report but I was so frustrated at the time I give up on that too.

I also have a second monitor running at a different resolution (two actually if we include my work setup). No rotation, but both setups are fine. And a second monitor with different resolution and orientation isn't likely to cause the problem you described (e.g. task manager not showing the right windows).
I'd say try it on a clean installation, but I don't know whether you're ready to wipe your /home folder.