KDE Neon With Plasma Ported & Optimized For Low-Cost 64-bit ARM Laptop

[boxie]

I just tried the KDE Neon distro on my Pinebook. Right off the bat kwin crashed and restarted falling back to XRender backend, I saw the "OpenGL compositioning (the default) has crashed KWin in the past" message in "Compositor -- Systems Settings"

I really don't understand why would kwin not be running on EGL in this distro, I mean this is the whole point, who the f**k would spin up and release a KDE distro like this only to have it end up running software acceleration? (sorry if I offend anyone). The experience is awful. Pinebook cannot do regular accelerated OpenGL 2.0/3.0, it only does OpenGL ES and EGL. I also tried the following to force kwin to use EGL but without success:
$ export KWIN_OPENGL_INTERFACE=egl
$ kwin --replace

This distro...into the trash it goes.

it *is* a beta release, so hopefully they polish out the rough edges and get it working nicely with egl

(also, thanks for testing, this is kinda interesting)

[RussianNeuroMancer]

desktop DE and compositor are unaccelerated, as userspace 3D acceleration is only available via EGL (any app that links against X11/GLX gets software accelerated)

Gnome Shell Wayland and KDE Wayland use EGL, could you try it and report back? You also could launch Chromium with "--use-gl=egl" so it will use EGL and GLES.

It's been a while since I tested all this proprietary EGL stuff, last time it was Intel CloverTrail based on ImgTech PowerVG 545 SGX. Back then it's didn't work well because Intel halted updated proprietary driver release that supposed to fix quite a few bugs. Hopefully Pine get it a bit better this time.

[sireangelus]

Can any one of you upload a video where you test window performance and basic browsing? like loading facebook main page, to have a gauge of the performance by feeling. I want to buy one of these as ssh/web config machine for the office, since it's light and has a long battery life. I can't find a video of this machine in action.

[Charlie68]

My notebook is an acer aspire E1-522 - Amd Quad-core E2 3800 processor (1.30 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache), as you can see poor hardware, yet Tumbleweed -KDE runs very well without problems. Supporting today that Plasma 5 is heavy does not make any sense, for the simple reason that it is not true.
Then I do not exclude that there are problems on certain hardware, but this is so for all DE, if you do not buy compatible hardware, do not complain.

[Nth_man]

I just tried the KDE Neon distro on my Pinebook. [...]

In the official news page (https://dot.kde.org/2018/08/22/kde-p...aptop-pinebook) there's a link to https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6443 , where they have written "Looking forward to your feedback in comments section", you can inform them there, and therefore someone can help you.