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

[marmarama]

This is awesome. Plasma 5.x is getting really nice now - lots of stuff is now ported to Qt 5, the Wayland support is getting close to usable for daily driver level, and lots of common-or-garden bugs are getting fixed. Many of the KDE apps (Krita and Kdenlive particularly, but they're not the only ones) are the best-of-breed on Linux; the biggest issue is that they work well on other platforms too, unlike most of the GTK+ apps, and that dilutes development attention. I've never understood why GTK/Gnome apps are so weak, given the huge amounts of money and effort put into them - Qt apps (including KDE) seem to do far better on much more limited development resources. Krita is a case in point - it is far better than GIMP for almost everything it does, but for most of its life has had a tiny fraction of the attention and development effort.

I look forward to a great 2017 for KDE - it continues to make the *right* choices for me.

[kokoko3k]

I can confirm the big memory usage:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368838

(still living with kde4 on another old installation and the memory usage at startup is about an half and does not grows)

...and i can confirm visual glitches too, just one of them:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=221015

I can confirm that when network shares are down plasmashell is completely freezed (this was since kde4)

Fortunately no segfaults to me, but... meh, i'll stay to kde4 for another year if needed.

[birdie]

Well, TBH if <1,000 MB OS mem usage is a requirement, then you should likely be running Damn Small Linux or Puppy, etc. with Enlightenment or some other slim window manager. It's 2017 - 16+ mb is pretty standard. Jesus, sometimes Linux users are the whiniest most biased people ever. I saw ppl on another thread bemoaning the fact that major Linux distros are moving away from i386. All I can say is "thank God". More dev resources available for more important projects. OFC there will always be specialized distros for those who think there PowerPC or 2002 Intel PII should still play Youtube, blazingly browse the web, and play Steam Games.

An OS itself is OK to occupy 1Gig of RAM? Are you fucking insane?

I'm now running KDE 3.5.10 which has 95% of the features of KDE 5 yet I have at least 5 extra KDE applications running and it's consuming less than 300MB of RAM overall. People have collectively gone out of the minds. "RAM is cheap, let's blow our code out of proportions because we can". Dude, there are literally hundreds of millions of PC devices with less than 2Gigs of RAM - are you saying KDE 5 is not for such people? Or since KDE 5 devs have 8 gigs of RAM or more people should get rid of their perfectly working equipment? WTF? Are you serious?

Why are you counting buff/cache?!

Because it's allocated for KDE. Nothing/no one else. Learn what echo `echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` does. It basically flushes everything that's not in use by your running applications.

[useless]

Because it's allocated for KDE. Nothing/no one else. Learn what echo `echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` does. It basically flushes everything that's not in use by your running applications.

Buffer is mem used by the kernel as 'buffer' (read for the difference between buffer and cache; in older kernel these mem where split, IIRC). Cache is mem used by page cache and slab allocator (please read what's a page cache and it's difference from the allocated memory of a process). Both are claimable, and the kernel will claim them when memory is needed.

By the way, you should be doing a 'sync' before since writing to drop_caches won't claim dirty pages, for obvious reasons.

[schmidtbag]

Seems to me most people who hate KDE are:
* Basing their experiences from the first few releases and insist the same problems exist today
* Have no clue how to use it and hate it because it does something they don't like, even though most of the time that can be addressed
* Have no clue how to use it and hate it because it doesn't do something they wish it did, even though it likely does

I don't understand how people can be Linux users and not spend the time and effort to learn a major user interface, so instead they choose to complain about it. Yes, KDE can be a bit overwhelming with features sometimes. There are definitely better ways to approach some things. Iit certainly is not lean. But when you can't even figure out how to disable something with a stock minimal KDE install, maybe, just a little bit, you're the problem.

Every DE has it's pros and cons, and talking crap about one because you don't know how to use it or doesn't suit your personal tastes is ridiculous. KDE is ideal for power-users. GNOME is good for those who just want a straight-forward, stable, modern, and clean interface. LXQt is great for those who want no frills. Unity is supposed to be effective and consistent among varying screen sizes and input devices.

[bug77]

200MB you say? neon-useredition-20161229-1018-amd64.iso :

Buffers totally flushed, no applications running at all (only konsole), 700MB memory usage on fresh start. "200MB", my arse.

Let's break it up by processes:

Plasmashell - 177MB
Krunner - 130MB
kwin_x11 - 109MB
...

Yeah, lean as hell. Learn to lie more convincingly.

Well, you're showing me 350MB used by the whole OS, not sure why you think KDE is responsible for all of it.
And you have not answered my question: how much is acceptable in your opinion?

As for visual glitches? Some themes are broken, various plasmoids have bugs.

So now KDE is responsible for all themes and plasmoids? Are you talking about themes and plasmoids that ship with KDE or third party?

Segfaults? KWin has crashed/Plasma has crashed - Google the last month for either of these two queries. Discover dozens of incidents.

Try again.

I just googled over 10 pages of results for "pink elephants flying" for the last month, so I don't see how is this relevant. I didn't say KDE is immune to segfaulting, I just said I haven't seen a segfault under normal usage since forever. Do you have any specific (preferably reproducible) scenarios that result in a segfault? Is there anything specific bothering you?

Also you may want to check this out: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-di...meminfo-output

And a happy new year to you, too.

[boxie]

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

personally I have not had many segfaults on any desktop I have run in the last year, and I cannot remember one in my kde neon components. That's not to say that are not there (no code is perfect) I just have not encountered any.

I have had some visual glitches, but I am not sure if that is driver related or not (laptop, prime, suspend/resume - you get the picture)

for the last 6 months neon has be rock solid on my desktop with the only problems being related to running the padoka ppa.

Wayland support on multihead though is not usable. I am looking forward to seeing what fixes 5.9 brings to the table.

So to answer your question: they have been.

As for memory usage - how much memory do you think (as a qualified windowing manager programmer) is acceptable to provide a full featured desktop?

[schmidtbag]

I'm not sure why people are focusing on birdie - I'm not 100% sure if he's intentionally trolling, but he is known to mostly spew comments of irrational, subjective, or exaggerated FUD and hate.

[Guest]

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

It uses much less memory than workable winblows 7 and runs far more smooth.

[BangoMopar]

An OS itself is OK to occupy 1Gig of RAM? Are you fucking insane?

I'm now running KDE 3.5.10

...

I do like the Trinity project, and you're free to have your own opinion here, but I don't think you can directly compare KDE 3 and Plasma 5. Unless you're comparing DE's from two different computing eras.