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The State Of KDE Plasma For Summer 2017

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  • #21
    Originally posted by shmerl View Post
    Was the horrendously long startup time fixed? Debian testing is still stuck with Plasma 5.8.7, and startup time (after logging in with sddm) takes me around 90 seconds.
    Are you using the default KDE install on a laptop HDD? Because KDE is fully started up in roughly 15 seconds for me, which isn't fast but not annoyingly slow either.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by markc View Post
      I don't understand the HiDPI "problem" with plasma. I have a QHD (3200x1800) 13" laptop and I simply set the font DPI to 232 and the icons/advanced up to 48 and 128, desktop 256, job done. Even Firefox and Thunderbird look just fine since late last year. Been doing this for 3 years and for the last year it's been close to perfect.

      I have tried the scaling setup in SystemSettings/Display and Monitor/Displays but that sucks. It often looks fat and ugly whereas my old-school approach has a leaner less bloated but still nice font and icon size look. I don't want EVERYTHING blown up by x2 or even x2.25 (whatever), just the fonts and icons. Leave a 1px border at a lean 1px rather than a sometimes blurry fat ~2px.
      I just setup a KDE desktop for a friend of mine, migrated them from Ubuntu 16.04(Gnome or Unity I think) to Manjaro KDE. It was for a laptop with a 1080p display so not HiDPI per se, but this user has vision difficulties, so things need to be scaled up. Upped the font DPI that went well, upped scaling via Display config settings, these all seemed to render poorly even integer 2x scale.

      Plenty of the elements scaled crisp and clean, but icons for some apps like Octopi(Qt) I guess are bitmap or something, they looked pixelated, wasn't aesthetic. Yakuake had a similar aesthetic on it's buttons for menu/close/etc(regular windows titlebar buttons were crisp). Fonts were mostly fine, I do recall some being pixelated like when choosing to shutdown/reboot and KDE brings up the options to choose from a gain with a countdown, the text here I guess is bitmap?

      Cursor only had 3 options, resolution-independent and 24 or 48. 48 wasn't big enough for my friend, maybe that can be increased via terminal or config file, or the cursor is bitmap based not vector, thus requires making a specially tailored cursor theme(which may or may not support sizes greater than 48 without additional modifications to KDE?). To assist here and let them zoom in more, I enabled the KWin zoom effect, meta+=, it's alright however it's like zooming in with an image editor and even text will get blurry/pixelated here as does the cursor, for them it suffices at least

      I guess accessibility needs like that are even more niche than HiDPI support, but hopefully the work on HiDPI support might still improve my friends experience, or at least their next laptop with a higher res display might fix the quality issues.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by Slartifartblast View Post

        Take your pick:



        Why do you ask, is a particular bug hitting you ?
        Umm... Compiz has a tonne of bugs too: https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz what's your point?

        With that logic I could just say the reverse of your statement with Compiz?

        I did have a particular bug that I loathed with Kwin since moving to KDE from Gnome, but that appears to have been fixed in the past month after being around for years with nvidia hardware. I'm pretty happy with Kwin as a compositor, I was curious what particular bugs caused you such grief? And how long ago since you last tried Kwin?

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        • #24
          Originally posted by oldgaro View Post
          My beloved KDE, great days back there. Hope all the best for those guys! ...
          What are you using now?

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          • #25
            Originally posted by polarathene View Post
            I did have a particular bug that I loathed with Kwin since moving to KDE from Gnome, but that appears to have been fixed in the past month after being around for years with nvidia hardware. I'm pretty happy with Kwin as a compositor, I was curious what particular bugs caused you such grief? And how long ago since you last tried Kwin?
            Hmmm funny you should say that, the Nvidia remapping bug fix has actually broken something for me on dual screen using Kwin, Compiz currently works flawlessly. FYI Martin Gräßlin (now Floser) doesn't own an Nvidia card and so never personally tests Kwin with Nvidia:

            Buffer objects (VBO, FBO) need remapping after suspend/vt switch with NVIDIA



            "I do not have an NVIDIA card, so I cannot test. It is based upon the information which we have in this bug report. Please test whether it works."

            Originally posted by polarathene View Post
            Umm... Compiz has a tonne of bugs too: https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz what's your point?
            By the way wrong Compiz sonny, 0.9 has always been crap. I use classic Compiz 0.8.14

            The official GitHub mirror of Compiz Reloaded. Compiz Reloaded has 16 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

            Last edited by Slartifartblast; 05 August 2017, 08:15 AM.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by Slartifartblast View Post

              Hmmm funny you should say that, the Nvidia remapping bug fix has actually broken something for me on dual screen using Kwin, Compiz currently works flawlessly. FYI Martin Gräßlin (now Floser) doesn't own an Nvidia card and so never personally tests Kwin with Nvidia:

              Buffer objects (VBO, FBO) need remapping after suspend/vt switch with NVIDIA



              "I do not have an NVIDIA card, so I cannot test. It is based upon the information which we have in this bug report. Please test whether it works."
              So you're saying you tried out 5.10.3 recently? What did the fix break for you on dual screen?(I have a dual screen setup)

              He might not have an nvidia card, yet he sorted out a fix for users. As far as I can tell it's been working great for me, I haven't seen any graphic corruption from suspend/resume since updating to 5.10.3

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              • #27
                Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
                Are you using the default KDE install on a laptop HDD? Because KDE is fully started up in roughly 15 seconds for me, which isn't fast but not annoyingly slow either.
                I'm using desktop HDD (Western Digital 2TB black series). XFS partition. It's a relatively fast hard drive. That 90 seconds delay is beyond anything that can be caused by slow I/O.

                I'm waiting for newer Plasma to get into Debian to rule out some already fixed regressions, but it takes maintainers forever to package it (Qt dependencies switching and so on).

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by shmerl View Post
                  I'm using desktop HDD (Western Digital 2TB black series). XFS partition. It's a relatively fast hard drive. That 90 seconds delay is beyond anything that can be caused by slow I/O.

                  I'm waiting for newer Plasma to get into Debian to rule out some already fixed regressions, but it takes maintainers forever to package it (Qt dependencies switching and so on).
                  I agree, with a drive like that, the drive shouldn't be the problem here. I personally keep things like Baloo disabled, as that is known to sometimes cause drastic performance issues (I also use an SSD and store my personal files on a NAS, where Baloo isn't all that useful). If you have encryption enabled, that could also be a problem. I would suggest you try doing a disk performance test (in your KDE setup) though, just to really make sure the drive isn't the problem.

                  Also, is your drive under load the entire time when booting? Because if there's roughly a solid minute of it doing nothing, you might have a different problem. Systemd is known to pause for a while (usually up to 90 seconds) when it is waiting for something to occur. For example, if you mount a network drive at boot and that drive is unavailable, that can make your boot waste a lot of time.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
                    Also, is your drive under load the entire time when booting?
                    Yes, the drive is under load while starting up plasma. I'll try disabling baloo and see if it affects it. Is there some perforamnce test for hard drives that measures I/O for small / medium / big files? I suspect it can be something related to XFS and gazillions of small files that are red at startup. Because once it logs in and I log out, next log-in is almost instant (may be stuff is already in filesystem cache?).
                    Last edited by shmerl; 07 August 2017, 11:57 AM.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by shmerl View Post
                      Is there some perforamnce test for hard drives that measures I/O for small / medium / big files?
                      Well, a quick and easy test where you don't have to install anything would be:
                      dd if=/dev/random of=~/output bs=1G count=1 oflag=direct
                      Tweak "bs" for whatever size you want. If you want a rough idea of read speeds, create a ramfs/tmpfs mount and copy the "output" file to it. Note you may have to disable drive caching or reboot, or else it might just copy everything in less than a second.
                      I suspect it can be something related to XFS and gazillions of small files that are red at startup. Because once it logs in and I log out, next log-in is almost instant (may be stuff is already in filesystem cache?).
                      When you log out, most of that data is already loaded into memory, so it's going to be instantaneous. Even if it wasn't in memory, there isn't that much to load for the login screen. If your PC runs fine and applications load at a normal pace once fully booted, this is what gets me to suspect you have a bunch of other crap installed that is run during the boot process.

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