KDE Applications 15.12 Up To Release Candidate State

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Applications 15.12 Up To Release Candidate State

The KDE community has today announced the release candidate for KDE Applications 15.12...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Apps-15.12-RC

[tigerroast]

Maybe I simply suck at maintaining my KDE installation, or perhaps Arch's packages aren't very stable (hell, Plasma itself might not even be that stable on most distros), but KDE just isn't very reliable for me. Also, autohiding the panels isn't very smooth compared to GNOME.

I tried KaOS on an old HP TouchSmart and it was quite possibly the cleanest OS that's ever been on that rig.

[bakgwailo]

Maybe I simply suck at maintaining my KDE installation, or perhaps Arch's packages aren't very stable (hell, Plasma itself might not even be that stable on most distros), but KDE just isn't very reliable for me. Also, autohiding the panels isn't very smooth compared to GNOME.

I tried KaOS on an old HP TouchSmart and it was quite possibly the cleanest OS that's ever been on that rig.

I have kde-unstable enabled (along with testing, of course), and I really have to say that the next plasma release fixes most of my pain points, and a few of the remaining issues I reported, half of them look to be resolved in the official release. I am thinking 5.6 is probably where it is going to get very nice, especially if there is a focus on cleanup the little stuff now.

[Shiba]

Maybe I simply suck at maintaining my KDE installation, or perhaps Arch's packages aren't very stable (hell, Plasma itself might not even be that stable on most distros), but KDE just isn't very reliable for me. Also, autohiding the panels isn't very smooth compared to GNOME.

I tried KaOS on an old HP TouchSmart and it was quite possibly the cleanest OS that's ever been on that rig.

It's not Arch, it's the same mess on Gentoo. KDE will always be KDE. The only reason that keeps me from switching to something else is KDE PIM.

[gfxdrone]

For me, the change to KDE frameworks 5, aka, plasma desktop 5, or whatever kde likes to call kde 5, did not involve any choices. The upgrade failed on all my systems, 1 was simply unable to start kde at all, one was so radically unstable that I was unable to even consider it as my primary desktop any longer, and one barely started, then totally failed as well. Considering I did extensive KDE support for a distro I used to belong to, I have to be considered at reasonably expert. As of plasma 5.4, the version I attempted to run, Debian sid or testing depending on the system, it was totally non functional, a full failure, by far the worst job I've ever seen KDE do with anything, period.

So for me there was simply not a choice, I had to switch desktops, and considering I've been running kde for almost 10 years, that switch came fast, unanounced, and forcefullly, by kde totally and utterly messing up anything that even remotely looks like a stable desktop,

I say this with some sadness, because I felt when I switched to kde 3.5 initially from windows 2000, I had found the perfect desktop. Until, that is, kde 4 rolled out too early, not ready for production use, though in that case, I held off instlaling kde 4.x until I think version 4.8, which was basically almost usable again, and by 4.14, kde was almost getting to be as feature complete as kde 3.5 was, though MUCH slower, radically, extremely, slower, but at least one order of magnitude. But I lived with it, figuring, ok, free software, young developers, fine fine, plasma, new framework, a lot of changes, I'll wait it out.

But my recent experience with the totally broken 5.4 release made me realize that I could no longer use kde for anything, a desktop that is so poorly tested that it's default dm, sddm, won't even start it on one system, and where plasma itself was so radically unstable and glitchy that it could not be considered for even 1 minute as a viable option for anything made me realize, ok, fine, they did this on 4.x, and it took well into the cycle, 4.10 or 4.12, until it was smooth and most stuff was there again, and now, what, they broke it ALL again?!! That to me was the last straw. The slow as molasses stuff I'd sort of adapted to, like a wife who is abused by her spouse gets used to it, but when I switched to xfce, it all came back to me, right, now I remember, fast good clean desktops, highly configurable, minus stupid ideas that nobody ever used, like activities, the dreaded pecan, etc, but what was even worse, kde 5.x showed clearly that the devs aren't even interested in unix desktops, you know, powerful work environments, catered for users who know what they are doing, via virtual desktops, etc.

This dread was made even more clear to me when I read on Martin's blog, who I wont' bother to link to, a kde dev, his total and utter denial about what crap the new kde is, for example, he said that bug reports are way down. That is true, because I dutifully tried using the bug reporting tools on the systems where I could even start the desktop at all, and it did... nothing. Never once did it successfully send off a bug report, not one time. Tons of desktop crashes, why, by carefully tweaking my settings to turn off everything, I was actually able to operate my primary work station for up to 10 to 15 minutes, max, per total desktop freeze.

Task bars, worse, themes, worse, not a single thing improved that I was able to see, not one. Some of the applications have small improvements, but I use those on xfce and they actually run far better on xfce than they did on kde. In other words, the desktop doesn't crash, everything is fine, all is stable. That's odd given that martin blamed a lot of the failures on qt 5. Odd that, given my qt 5 programs run really well, not perfect, but well, when there's no plasma desktop involved.

As an aside, neither posting I made on his thread, which was about these issues, was published by him, and frankly I don't blame him, when you this incompetent, at some point you must internally realize as a programmer how badly you screwed things up, and you just want to pretend it didn't happen.

My own operating conclusion, since I have work to do with these computers, they are for production, for entertainment, etc, is that KDE is no longer making a desktop for serious users. I am unclear who exactly they are making something that won't even start or run stably in some instances, but it's certainly not me.

On the bright side, as I dipped back into xfce, I found that xfce is radically better than ever, all those incremental improvements version to version, you know the ones, the opposite of the 'break it all every major update' attitude of gnome and kde devs, have led to a desktop that for all the world reminds me of kde 3.5, in terms of how powerful and flexible and FAST it is. desktop switching with heavy programs on the various desktops would take up to 20, 30 seconds on kde, I pretended it was my video card, but as I can see running the same exact heavy loads on xfce, which switches them instantly, I can now see that it is in fact kde that was the problem, not my video card.

I'm very grateful to the xfce4 devs, who have refused to go down this idiotic road, of core redesigns to meet nobody's needs, to make things shiny and bright while making everything that actually matters for production worse.

I'm fairly certain they can keep this up, since I've seen some gtk 3 programs that do not seem to be worse than the gtk2 stuff xfce is built around.

I guess the moral of the story is: if you make desktops for nobody, and make up complicated things to make them do, like activities, while letting the stuff people actually use and like, you know, like having a different picture on each desktop (wild concept that, no?), strong and fast multiple virtual desktops, etc, fall by the wayside, then you have kde and gnome. And I guess unity. All these bad copies of things like osx, all failing to grasp that what real users like about things like apple is that they don't break the interface every few years, not that it's bright and shiny.

So in case you were thinking, oh, this is something I've done wrong, etc, no, it's not you, it's the kde guys, they lost the thread, and I don't see it coming back soon again. If you add in the awful breaks every major version on things like kmail, and my personal favorite, making kate lose ALL its settings on the update, something that has taken me weeks to figure out, because I'd never exported my syntax highlighting schemas, well, my conclusion is that kde can't be trusted anymore, and isn't even interested in being what it was good at, a power user, highly configurable desktop, now it's just garbage that is bad at everything as far as I can tell, unless you run one monitor with one desktop, ie, unless you run a system very much like windows...

This is my RIP for kde, I will never trust them again, I lost over a week on this failure, and I"m very busy at the moment, so I will simply no longer trust kde devs to be competent, or to reflect my needs as a developer and user of free desktops. Fortunately the xfce guys seem to be solidly in my corner in terms of what they value and how they treat their users and their users expectations. To me the ability to put different images on each desktop, whether dual, single, etc, is a simple test that shows the core programming logic is putting my needs first, ie, I work with a lot of virtual desktops, so that better by primary with the desktop devs, and it is, it's obvious.

When I was testing the latest xfce, to see if I could replace kde with it, I kept marveling how much it reminded me of the speed and power and flexibity of kde 3.5, and now I remember why I grew to love free desktops, they weren't trying to be silly bad copies of bad ideas of someone else's desktop, like osx etc, they were just made to be good, fast, light, etc. I believe this is how gnome 2 fans felt about gnome as well, though I always found gnome 2 too simplistic for my work flow.

So kde, no, I wont' use it anymore, and I wont' recommend it to anyone anymore. I'm sure the kde bug tracker will continue to track fewer bug reports, since kde is no longer usable for a significant number of people, nor do I expect to see developers interested in a powerful development tool like xfce start contributing to kde, which is apparently broken from the inside out.

[gfxdrone]

My real post vanished. I disagree that kde will always be kde, it's getting worse every release, to the point that I had to give up on kde totally this past month when I tested then really tried to run 5.4, I switched to xfce, which has gotten quite good, and is as fast as kde 3.5 used to be, faster probably, but very configurable. Something very interesting has happened to xfce since around 2012, they have gotten MUCH better. And it's my feeling they have gotten better because good devs are leaving gnome and kde and making xfce better. Very quietly, without fanfare, but magically, everything I really want is working well on xfce, and it's barely working if at all now on kde 5. If your architecture can't handle something as trivial as putting a simple image on each desktop, then there is something very very wrong with that core architecture in my opinion, it means it's a huge inflexible cludge that can barely run your desktop.

All the cludgy heavy feeling I'd gotten used to with kde 4.x, and far worse on 5.x, when I can even get it running, gone. Magically. Gone. System runs fast. Better than ever. No hardware upgrades, no bloated plasma garbage that does NOTHING to aid me in my work or use of the system, absolutely nothing. Sure, a few little xfce glitches here and there, but I feel like I'm using a real desktop again, run by real desktop developers, not some fragile candy toy that meets no needs I've ever had.

I used to do heavy kde support, and I no longer trust the kde project to deliver a working desktop, all my installs / upgrades from 4.x to 5x failed, they were either non usable, ie, I literally could not even start kde, or radically unstable (and I have a fair idea of what I'm doing, I wrote my ex distro's kde 3.5 to 4.x migration tool), so I no longer trust those kde guys, removing all the features every major release, that's just a sign of bad architecture as far as I'm concerned, I'm not interested in that game anymore, I need a grown up, reliable, fast, efficient, desktop, not eyecandy that runs slower with every release, and whose new features solve no use case I am aware of anyone ever having had.. It was taking up to 10, 15, 20 seconds to switch desktops, on 4x, for example, the more stuff I had open, the longer it took for focus to activate. Magically those same loads are handled near instantly on xfce...

KDE needs to stop wasting time on pecans and stupid activities, but I honestly think that project is ruined, their bug reporting tool fails, which is probably why one of their devs, martin, on a blog posting, noted how many fewer bug reports kde 5 is getting. Yeah, that's easy to explain, when your desktop either fails to start, or crashes, and the bug reporting crash reporter fails EVERY time, that is going to drop your bug numbers way down, for sure. Not the way I 'd go about reducing bug numbers, but each to their own, I no longer believe the kde project is capable of delivering a stable production desktop, I'm not waiting around for them to make 5.x barely usable, that took years with 4.x, I'm done with that game.

I guess now the race is to make the worst most useless desktop you can, pretending that will boost your (non existent) mobile and desktop share (seems to make little difference if it's called firefox os for mobile, gnome, unity, or kde at this point), when it's these very changes that keep people away (true desktop market share totally failed to increase over the past 8 or so years, even with the vista bump, it's still around 1.9-2.0% last I checked, which was recently). For good reason, ruin your users primary interface with the os, the desktop, every x years, and yeah, they'll leave, that works.). The kde5 kcalc widget, with its idiot sized mobile type touch buttons on my (non touch) desktop, that was icing on the cake, that's when I knew kde has lost its way, and is now nothing worth even thinking about. Making the kate code editor session widget 'touch friendly' talk about unclear on the concept, it ran about literally 10x slower, barely would scroll my sessions, and just so they could have big touch type links. Here's a hint: you don't do programming with touch, ok. So tools for programming editors, those don't need touch, right? I've seen the warning signs before, ruin your user's desktop experience for some mystical 'touch' junk that nobody is using, right, that's smart. Still some good programs, and they run great on xfce, better than on kde actually, so it's all good.

And the attempt to rebrand, that most people ignored, to plasma desktop etc, frameworks, another dumb idea, I always have used kde, I don't care if they think it needs rebranding, that was just a small sign of the silly ideas these guys are starting to follow, I guess that's easier than making a desktop that works.

But just to humor the kde kiddies, I was forced to bail by kde frameworks 5.4, plasma desktop variant. Bye kde, it was ok, but you wasted far too much of my relatively precious time from this failure, and I don't use free software to have an inferior slow cludgy stupid desktop, if I want that, apple and microsoft are happy to supply my needs...

[Ansla]

The upgrade failed on all my systems

Couldn't read all that ramblings, but skimming through the post it sounded like you want a stable desktop yet blindly apply random updates completely disregarding past experience.
I personaly found that the best option is to use my personal computer for experimenting with latest releases and my work computer with whatever I know for sure will not cause problems.
So now my home computer uses Plasma 5.4 and indeed hits some stability issues from time to time. This is why I keep my work one on the latest KDE SC 4 for the moment. It's not that I don't like Plasma 5, on the contrary, it's already great and getting better with every release. It's just not ready yet to trust it for when I really need to get work done. And if the distribution I was using wouldn't allow me to stick to KDE SC 4 I would not trust that distro either.

[gfxdrone]

ansla, no, that's not what it was. Since you can't read longer things, and since phoronix first ate my initial post, then put it up, which makes them redundant, I can't really respond. To keep it short enough for you: I know a lot about kde, I've used it a long time, and this was the first unusable release ever. To be significantly unusable on all my systems at 5.4 means I can and do no longer trust the kde devs. I was more responding to people who were wondering if it was just them, or their inadequacies. No, it wasn't, this is the most unstable kde I've ever seen, so unstable that I will never trust them again. They are also in serious denial about their stability and bug issues. I speak as a long time kde user, and initial extreme fan, and kde user supporter.

Is that short enough for you? I realize that phoronix caters to the more fanboy type user, always has, so I won't get into it further here.

Suffice it to say I know what I'm doing much more than your average user, but I also know bad unstable slow cludgy code when I see it. Life is too short.