Plasma 5.24 | Hacker News Reader

Plasma 5.24

kde.org

I've recently had to use KDE from Ubuntu 18.04 (Plasma 5.12) and my daily driver is Arch Linux with the current 5.24 beta. Improvement in Plasma is really incredible. Kudos to everyone contributing to make it better. It's such a stable and powerful system.

What's still lacking is unfortunately the application side: baloo indexer ist still a mess that hogs cpu and likes to corrupt itself every other day. Replaced it with mlocate. KDE Mail, Organizer, Akonadi are very powerful concepts and ideas and I hope some talented devs take on them and make them more stable and robust. The approach to use PostgreSQL/MySQL on the desktop has failed maybe there is a lighter way i.e. something like oxigraph (https://github.com/oxigraph/oxigraph) for implementing the Akonadi/Nepomuk/ Semantic Desktop ideas in a fast and stable way. For now I'm using evince and evolution for mail and reading PDFs.

Still hugs and love to everyone involved in Plasma I can't imagine using anything else and lately I'm replacing GNOME with Plasma everywhere I'm allowed to.

Not really my experience, KDE was a really stable desktop environment till maybe 2019, after that year, every release in Framework or Plasma usually brings back old bugs, regressions, some of them get solved eventually, some other are "tagged" as not solvable because arquitecture reasons or tech migrations reasons, and that's it.

The current stability of latests versions of Kwin in X11 environments is suffering nowadays from graphical glitches, bugs, performance issues and whatnot, not just in Nvidia, but with Intel and AMD hardware. Other windows managers, even some old window managers, work better than Kwin or have no bugs or glitches or performance regressions whatsoever running on the same hardware as Kwin.

Lastly, some users started to get caught in some strange bugs related to non-functional clicks in widgets, or losing some previously working functionality, like keyboard shortcuts (no, I'm not talking about the ever present bug of the meta key not being able to trigger the main menu if there are several menu widgets loaded in panels).

I'm not really a fan of Gnome, but lastly I keep finding myself solving technical issues in KDE that were long solved, years ago, and now start to appear, a couple every week or two, with the latest "stable" versions.

Not that "old" stable versions work better than the latest code, most distros have a two-four months old KDE in packages and those obviously show the bugs and regression from that moment.

Not really a good moment for a KDE fan as myself, now testing other desktop environments looking for a workable combination of software to use, instead of just accepting Gnome and its limitations.

Did you use KDE when 4 came out? Wow was that buggy. To me, it's all so much better these days that even if some plasma releases have regressions, they don't hold a candle to the issues I experienced with KDE 4.

Every time there is a new plasma release I feel like I want to try it again :)

But I'm just so happy with Gnome.

Can't complain though, having two excellent desktops to choose from is a luxury problem.

A video, by Niccolò Ve, with a review of some of the new features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4vOc-gIpMY

Another from The Linux experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpxiFh6oaY

Notables:

--fingerprint reader support

--drm leasing on Wayland (needed for VR)

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