KDE Plasma 5.9 Being Released In One Month With Many New Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.9 Being Released In One Month With Many New Features

One month from today, KDE Plasma 5.9 will officially meet the world...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.9-One-Month

[birdie]

When will they start working on decreasing memory usage, fixing segfaults and visual glitches?

[M@yeulC]

This is much welcome. Last time I tried KDE/Wayland, it was complete garbage, around 2 weeks ago on Arch. This was possibly due to the state of multi monitor support under wayland.

I also noticed that it works much better on a fresh KDE installation (as opposed to my migrated-from-kde4 setup), especially regarding search responsiveness (kicker/kickoff/krunner) and RAM usage, so I might do just that when I have some time.
I do not blame them for trying to get the expected minimum functionality for a 2017 Linux desktop (Wayland support) before optimizing.

[bobwya]

Hopefully plasma-shell will have a rudimentary off-main-thread UI updater - so that the panels and menus don't stop working / lockup whenever networking goes down (e.g. post-resume), etc. That's super annoying... Feature creep appears to be a bit of an issue as well...

[bug77]

When will they start working on decreasing memory usage,

It uses something like 200MB on a fresh session, how much is acceptable for you?

fixing segfaults

Haven't seen one in years.

and visual glitches?

Haven't seen many of those either (and certainly no annoying ones), but I suppose it's possible different video drivers will yield different experiences.

[Duve]

This is much welcome. Last time I tried KDE/Wayland, it was complete garbage, around 2 weeks ago on Arch. This was possibly due to the state of multi monitor support under wayland.

I also noticed that it works much better on a fresh KDE installation (as opposed to my migrated-from-kde4 setup), especially regarding search responsiveness (kicker/kickoff/krunner) and RAM usage, so I might do just that when I have some time.
I do not blame them for trying to get the expected minimum functionality for a 2017 Linux desktop (Wayland support) before optimizing.

I kind of suspect that with Wayland, until things settle within KDE over it, you are likely better with a fresh install if only to reset everything else that KDE relies on under the protocol.

Gnome had similar growing pains when it began it's compositor development, same with Enlightenment from what I have seen. I expect KDE to be no different there, with the exception that the growing pains will not last nearly as long.

[Steffo]

When will they start working on decreasing memory usage, fixing segfaults and visual glitches?

KDE uses less memory than Gnome. I still use Gnome, because it's more reliable and less noisy than KDE. For instance, I hate KDE Wallet and I don't like these pop ups for every fart it has done in KDE.

[starshipeleven]

KDE uses less memory than Gnome. I still use Gnome, because it's more reliable and less noisy than KDE. For instance, I hate KDE Wallet and I don't like these pop ups for every fart it has done in KDE.

You still use GNOME because you can't remove a checkbox in settings?

KDE System settings -> Account Details -> remove the checkbox on "Enable the KDE wallet subsystem" will disable the Wallet and stop the popups.

[ElectricPrism]

You still use GNOME because you can't remove a checkbox in settings?

KDE System settings -> Account Details -> remove the checkbox on "Enable the KDE wallet subsystem" will disable the Wallet and stop the popups.

Thanks, that shit really annoyed the hell out of my wife when she was on KDE.

Every time I try KDE it's "almost there" for me. To this day I can't find a Application Launcher that is as simple and functional as Slingshot. Their Fullscreen App Menu on 43" 4k looks aweful.

At the end of the day I always trade these "amazing new features" for "functional", "simple" and reasonable stability.

Plasma Shell has always seemed nice but the KDE Apps is where KDE usually looses me.

Dolphin Files seems "evolved" instead of "designed". Amarok has always felt like a nightmare when being accustomed to a iTunes style music library.

GTK on Plasma feels half assed and out of place, especially when X app has a totally different File Chooser than Qt apps.

Then there are home-run KDE apps like Krita and KDenlive (WTF Is a KDENLIVE?)

Gnome on the other hand has apps that help me use my Linux for business - Activity Journal, Geary, Evolution, Documents, Lollypop is bomb, Terminix, Eye of Gnome is simple, Evince gets out of my way and displays PDFs cleanly.

Obviously I've become accustomed to Gnome by now and it's not flawless either - I just wish for once that KDE could take some UX classes or something and have all those cool features available and turned off until the user decides they want them.

[mikus]

I would really just love for kscreen and kwin not to utterly freak out every time it sees my monitors detach in multi-display setup. I've seen it work with amd oss drivers, just apparently not nvidia as I have now. I've tested with clean installs of neon and arch, both are broken in the same ways.

Hearing wayland is still broken/dysfunctional for multi-monitor is sad.