KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being “Fairly Livable” | Hacker News Reader

KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being “Fairly Livable”

phoronix.com

105 pointsthepbone65 comments

I'm a big KDE fan and wish them well in this update. People complain about the papercuts, UI inconsistencies, and feature overload you find in KDE but if you follow Nate's blog on https://pointieststick.com, you can see that they are continually working to address all of these things. That KDE was Valve's chosen DE for Linux on the Steam Deck hopefully means yet more resources for additional polish and features.

I am also a big fan, It was actually KDE Plasma that convinced me to switch to GNU/Linux. I was offered distros with other desktops at first and all were lacking features and customisability. Only when trying out a distro with Plasma have I switched and remained. And I find it better then anything that is out there, even when counting closed/proprietary alternatives.

Just give me the ability to drive the ui over multiple desktops like it’s gnome: via keyboard shortcuts, and I’ll be open minded. Don’t make me touch the mouse. Then, add some nice ui transitions: keep transitions, don’t make them instant. Slide or fade things.

But last time I tried kde/plasma, I couldn’t pull it off and went back to gnome.

I used Plasma 5 with i3 instead of kwin [1] with 2 monitors for a while. Never really need to use the mouse when you don't want to. That is the whole reason I use i3 to begin with. It was fine. But I went back to normal i3. I just don't need all that desktop environment stuff. I don't know if I would recommend it, but it was doable.

I don't know about transitions or anything. I don't use transitions, so ... no idea. i3 just instantly switches between monitors or workspaces etc, though maybe someone has implemented transitions like they did with gaps? Again, no idea.

[1] https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage...

> Then, add some nice ui transitions

KDE allows for flexibility and choice about such animations. I dislike that sort of thing and disable them all, so I don't know how well the various options work, but I do know they're there.

You might want to try again. Plasma has virtual desktops, all kinds of UI transitions with animation speeds from "slow" to "instant", and a whole host of keyboard shortcuts available for switching desktops, windows, etc. They've also put good work into the System Settings window that makes these types of things easier to find and configure.

I think it would be very rare that someone would give configurability as their reason for leaving KDE / Plasma for Gnome. If anything, people tend to complain that KDE is too configurable.

Yet it lacks pretty simple things like putting the same dock on two monitors.

I'm using KDE Plasma with multiple desktops and monitors using only keyboard shortcuts, it works pretty well. I can switch the focus to other monitors, send a window to another monitor, using keyboard shortcuts. There's an important configuration that needs to be set for this to work, which says each monitor has a separate focus.

I found the name of the option, it's "Separate screen focus", located in the settings under Window Management -> Window Behavior -> Focus Tab -> Multiscreen behavior

It looks like that last session only shows up when there are multiple monitors, which is why I could not find it on my laptop.

The negativity in this thread is fascinating and shows just how different expectations from users can be. I've been a KDE user since installing Fedora on a lark right when KDE4 "left beta" which, if the developers were being honest, was much closer to an alpha. It was painful, but KDE today is very feature rich and relatively low resource.

I use KDE on a very old thinkpad and it is fantastic, I really enjoy the experience. KRunner is my primary way of interacting with the DE and combined with the recent touchpad gesture support is a very clean way of navigating what a DE should provide a user. I've been using plasma wayland for the last two years and in the last year has become more 'clean' (smoother animations, no tearing, stable) than X11 ever was. I get ~9 hours of battery on an X1 Nano Gen2 using the most recent Firefox and various terminal applications.

Every six months or so I try other DEs, gnome, budgie, the plethora of tiling managers, etc et al. None of them are as nice to use as KDE. KDE specifics aside, as always, Linux on the desktop is more polished than ever. Is it as polished as Windows/MacOS? Probably not but I don't really care. Maybe it is finally the year of the Linux desktop? Using any of these modern GUIs, ZFS, and the impressive new 8+ core CPUs available from AMD/Intel with 32Gb+ of RAM and NVME SSD makes it seem like local computing has become what I always wanted it to be. I now store and process my data in RAM. It's incredible how fast laptop compute is.

BTW. Latte dock is very stable now as well, and is a great addition to KDE if you haven't tried it. Obligatory scrot...

https://i.imgur.com/RG8ZJ3x.png

PostScript: After the monetization of imgur it's worse than ever. What are HN folks using for image hosting now?

> Is it as polished as Windows/MacOS? Probably not

Well, in Linux (fvwm) i can set the width of the window border at any size i want. In MS Windows 10, no. In fvwm i can work with virtual desktops, in MS Win 10, no (they are unusable). In fvwm i can tell to windows to have titlebars, in MS Win 10 every program messes with the titlebar. etc.

I use s3 to share with my friends. I wrote a bash script to upload to a s3 bucket. The bucket has a policy to auto delete after X days.

There is a little buffer, 100GB egress free per month. After that, I would be paying $0.09 per GB egress.

With micro costs like these, I wonder if there is a future in self-paying hosting costs.

It should probably link directly to https://pointieststick.com/2023/06/18/on-the-road-to-plasma-...

That was submited about a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36378496

When will plasma be livable in general?

I used KDE from 2001 through KDE4, and tried to use KDE Plasma5 for a few years before throwing in the towel and moving to LDXE.

The Plasma versions seemed to embody change-for-change's sake, and were flaky in non-reproducible ways. Things like the compositor crashing, startup scripts not running in a reproducible way, weird behavior around multiple monitors and the dock sticking to the wrong edges etc.

I just want something simple, not as fugly as TWM, that lets me use focus-follows-mouse and several "weird" personal muscle memory shortcuts around mouse buttons and meta keys for window management actions. Old school KDE gave me all that until my distro (FreeBSD) moved to kde plasma5 several years ago. After that it was just horrible. The last vestage of plasma5 on my desktop was sddm which flaked out after an update, presenting just a blank screen, and leavng me unable to login.

At first, I thought it was just me. Then I thought it was just FreeBSD, but every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently) has people from many different linux distros complaining about the same issues.

I switched from Gnome to Plasma a little over a year ago after using Gnome for over a decade and it's better in every way. Reading your comment feels like I'm reading about the original KDE 4 release in 2008, not today.

>The Plasma versions seemed to embody change-for-change's sake, and were flaky in non-reproducible ways

I haven't noticed any major changes in the last year? Certainly nothing that was forced on me, whereas Gnome was always removing features I used, and the plugins would break with every update.

>I just want something simple, not as fugly as TWM, that lets me use focus-follows-mouse and several "weird" personal muscle memory shortcuts around mouse buttons and meta keys for window management actions

KDE does still let you do focus-follow-mouse and you can certainly add shortcuts, as you can in any other DE, in fact the dialogs to configure it are the same ones that are used in Gnome!

>Things like the compositor crashing, startup scripts not running in a reproducible way, weird behavior around multiple monitors and the dock sticking to the wrong edges etc.

Are you reporting these bugs? I cannot say that I have experienced these problems on any of my KDE machines and my friends that use KDE haven't complained about these problems either

>At first, I thought it was just me. Then I thought it was just FreeBSD, but every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently) has people from many different linux distros complaining about the same issues.

I mean, I just run Ubuntu. Maybe it -is- you? Even if it was SDDM, it's not like you have to use SDDM to use KDE -- I don't.

IDK this post just seems like a lot of FUD to me.

Ugh, gnome. I wanted to move from TWM to "something modern" in ~2001 when running FreeBSD on a DEC alpha as my desktop. I submitted patches to both KDE and Gnome to let their configurators accept my shortcuts. KDE took the patch, Gnome rejected it because it violated their human interface guidelines or some such. So I spent the last 20ish years with KDE.

Its not FUD. They took a stable, working desktop environment and made it more shiny, and less reliable.

I switched to LXQt for the same reasons. KDE is great on paper but Plasma has too many random bugs for me to enjoy (specifically Plasma; Kwin is fine.) I just want a basic and stable desktop environment with GUI configuration and and standard window management... I find that KDE provides some of those but sacrifices stability in an effort to be more than basic. For instance; configuring panels. In LXQt it's done mostly through context menus and setting windows, while in KDE it's supposed to be a more dynamic affair of dragging things around with your mouse. Well KDE's way of doing it has never worked well for me, it always seems to mess up and do something unexpected when I try to use it, so a simple adjustment becomes an ordeal of trying to fix my panels after messing them up accidentally. LXQt's way of doing it may not be as slick and modern, but it's utterly reliable.

You're shadow-banned for some reason. Maybe reach out to HN?

> When will plasma be livable in general?

It already is, and a lot of other people feel the same way. If it doesn't suit your needs, that's fine.

> every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently)

SDDM is not a part of KDE proper, but it sounds like they are going to bring it under their umbrella in Plasma 6.

Probably never. I think KDE is just too complicated at this point, with too many components and moving parts. I too very much enjoyed KDE 3: it was really performant on low-end hardware which I was using at the time, boring, and stable. But then KDE 4 happened — truly the Windows Vista moment of the Linux/FreeBSD desktop, and I ended up on a clunky setup built from separate smaller components which has been the most stable experience across all OSes (pretty much no issues or changes in my workflow in ~10 years).

AFAIK they really had to rewrite it — Qt4 was just too different from the old version, and you couldn't simply port older applications without almost doing a full rewrite anyway. Still sad it had to go, and we haven't seen anything similar since.

I am still yet to try the fork, though.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trinity

I have TDE 14.1 compiled under Slackware 15.0 running on an old Thinkpad X60 core duo. The slackbuild is linked to from the Trinity Desktop Environment build instructions on their Web site. Seems to run fine and fastish with a TDE base build plus tde-powermanager.

I was beginning to see a degree of slowness with xfce4 4.18, probably graphics related. I like a full desktop environment with all the apps.

(I didn't use KDE back when it was version 3. I found Gnome 2 good enough)

This looks like exactly what I want. Its too bad its not packaged with FreeBSD.

As with MacOS, I find kde5/plasma5 quite habitable. I try to be my own devil's advocate about my opinions and wants, and how much those matter to moving the needle on my big goals.

I've been use KDE for a very long time, and I'm not a huge fan of Plasma, either. But at least it's possible to configure things in such a way as to avoid a lot of it.

KDE has felt a bit odd to me ever since I think v5 or whenever it was that there was a big shift in its UI design.

Some people really love it and that's great but I think many of its quirks/unique bits will be lost on general audiences. It feels designed for a particular subset of users.

I've also got a preference for LXDE, but after years of it working just fine, a few months ago I run into some weird behavior when maximizing/running full screen applications. I first tried LXQT but faced similar problems. In the end I switched to KDE plasma and it's fine again. Sometimes feel bloated, but at the same time it has some things that work out of the box or that can he configured easier compared to LXDE. Overall I'm ok with it.

> Things like the compositor crashing

I had many crashes, daily, and thought it was due to KDE but then they happened with other WMs too. Then I thought of trying to run the CPU at a lower frequency - lo and behold, no more crashes. Sucks that I can't use my laptop to its fullest power but I'm too tired to deal with the constant crashes at max CPU.

> startup scripts not running in a reproducible way

Never had this issue - all the startup scripts executed as expected.

> weird behavior around multiple monitors

The only weird behavior happened when my DE crashed where panels moved to wrong desktops (I have a three-monitor setup). Once the crashes stopped, haven't had this issue and it remembers the panel settings but on rare occasions I have seen the refresh rate of one of the monitor change from 60 to 30Hz.

> dock sticking to the wrong edges

This never happened to me but see comment above regarding panel moving to wrong desktop (even then edge orientation was retained).

> every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently)

I have suffered from this SDDM issue too - eventually swithed to lightdm and everything works.

> When will plasma be livable in general?

I think it is livable already but thats what it is - just livable and I'm not sure if I would call it highly polished / rock solid - I still find rough edges E.g. adding each widget to panels increases CPU usage by 1% or so even though I'm not adding any CPU intensive widgets; moving icons on the panel is weirdly jumpy and some icons refuse to move; I have to install plugins and weird workarounds to enable panel transparency etc. I have seen panel woes mentioned multiple times in this thread and elsewhere; I think many people would greatly appreciate a feature to export/import panel config (even the entire desktop config) so that even if your panels etc mess up (ideally not but lets be real), you can just restore from the last known good setup. This would make such a big difference to the user experience.

The cleanest and most stable of the environments I have seen was Gnome 2.12 (I think that was the version with Ubuntu Dapper Drake). Intuitive, good balance between features and cleanliness and generally got out of the way. Since Gnome 3 and its radical changes came out, I have been searching for a DE that sticks to the conventional design (no going into rabbit hole of tiling WMs for me) and errs on the side of more features/flexibility. I did dabble with Cinnamon/XFCE/Pop desktop but I always felt that there wasn't sufficient flexibility/features (direct or via extensions). I think Plasma, with all its issues, caters the best to the aforementioned needs. So KDE it is for me, until something better comes along (which given the current ecosystem, is unlikely).

I like desktop environments. I actually use LXQT and Windows. I have lots of ideas of how they could be more powerful.

* GUIs aren't as flexible as command line or programming languages, but I wonder if there's some middle ground to add flexibility to GUIs. I think generating complicated data from a GUI would be faster than writing it by hand. For example, if AWS Console could be dumped to Terraform files. Or Visio to a JSON tree data structure.

* Would like the possibility to integrate multiple machines into my desktop environment, for example, I could configure a cloud credentials and servers in my LAN as part of setup and my desktop can coordinate other machines or servers. VNC could be configured automatically and Just Works. I would synchronize my files with the remote environment and index it ALL WAYS so that file search is incredibly fast because searches happen on a different machine, without slowing down my current machine with indexing or searches.

ChatGPT is pretty ok at converting data between representations, even very different ones. This is the only thing I ended up using it for — aggregating text data into JSON structures, converting iptables rules into nftables (or even pf/ipfw), translating an XML tree into YAML, etc etc.

Was a diehard gnome fan for years but ever since gnome 3 nothing has worked. Have been unironically using plasma now for almost a year and really can't complain.

For a while Budgie was the best but now that has fallen into shambles seemingly so KDE really is the way to go

> KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being “Fairly Livable”

So it's time for Plasma 7. /s

Oh no, I was finally enjoying Plasma 5

Maybe I missed it but what benefits does Plasma 6 bring over Plasma 5 to the users? The changes I read seem mainly API focused.

As such, the user benefits are all indirect.

Plasma needs to be ported to Qt6, and thus Plasma 5 becomes Plasma 6. In the process a lot of code is cleaned up, and it is easier to find and eliminate bugs, and also to add new features.

Several new user facing features and improvements are still coming with the release of Plasma 6, and lots more will keep coming in subsequent versions.

Qt 5 used by Plasma 5 needs backporting things. Plasma 6 is using Qt 6 which gets the current development.

Do we get the option for ISO dates in kde programs?

It's being discussed here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340982

In short, the feature was lost when KDE 5 dropped some custom localization component in favor of Qt's. Lead KDE developers argue that the feature should be reimplemented in Qt, and to date nobody has bothered or managed to write a patch for the meantime.

Various programs may be basing the time display format on your LC_TIME environment variable, according to the Arch wiki* setting it to en_DK.UTF-8 will switch to ISO format.

* https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Locale#LC_TIME:_date_and_ti...

Already configured. `date` already prints it correctly but kde is special

Weird, I thought Plasma was going to be the good "consume-a-lot-of-cpu" desktop, with Gnome being the annoying one.

Either way, I'll stand on -- the vast majority of Linux desktop GUI work is an enormous waste of time. Not theoretically based on the product, but in principle because it's mostly a solved problem. Openbox with a few doodads could be fine for the vast majority of users (I do mean even non-Linux users) because the desktop isn't the thing you use, it's the thing you use for a little bit before you get to the thing you ACTUALLY use.

Now make it less ugly and buggy. I firmly believe that if you gave a MacOS/Windows user Gnome on Fedora 38 they would be quite impressed, whereas I highly doubt I could say the same about KDE.

My experience is that Apple people feel more comfortable with Gnome, and Windows people feel more comfortable with KDE.

I'm happy that there is choice, here, personally. I hate almost everything about Gnome, but wouldn't want to deprive people who like it of having it.

To me Cinnamon and some configurations of XFCE feel closer to a traditional Windows-style desktop than KDE does, but very few distros ship either as their flagship DE.

This is an interesting observation but it matches my perception of traditional project philosophies: "we know what's best for you" (Apple / Gnome) vs. "here are options, have at it" (KDE / Windows)

As a MacOS user wanting global menu on linux KDE is definitely better at that than GNOME. I agree GNOME looks a bit better in default config, but I suppose thats subjective. I use KDE with mac-like shortcuts and menu and like it a lot

I disagree quite strongly. KDE is more aligned to the classic desktop environment that most people are used to and familiar with.

For me, I really prefer KDE over Gnome. Gnome seems to do what Windows is trying to do, and they are failing as Windows is. Gnome just seems counter intuitive to me. It's obviously subjective and anecdotal, so take it from that perspective.

2023, the year of the Linux desktop? /s

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