all these machines run debian trixie with KDE and i think i only ever seen glitches once, or twice in only one of them. I think the macbook. Granted, all devices run from the internal GPU, intel or AMD.
The only time i saw kde "krash" a lot was when i was demoing arch in a VM, to see what the fuss is all about that distro. But i don't know if it was virtualbox, or arch.
This is not normal. Do a RAM test to see if you have a hardware issue.
This was apparently fixed in version 590 of the driver which was released only recently: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/fd-leak-with-explicit-...
I've been running plasma for over a year, there was like 1 crash during the 5->6 transition, it's otherwise been perfectly fine.
Even things as basic as handling the wallpapers was crashing users' desktops up until recently: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.5-Crash-Fixes
Literally any piece of complex software. See LLVM for example. LLVM is the backbone of most compiler work in the world right now.
Does KDE use RAM differently than every other software?
It has become reasonable graceful in giving it back when you you need it nowadays.
It's kinda infamous for that, and had held up Linux adoption for a decade or so.
But you sort of missed the point, I think. The comment chain was about speculating why KDE could possibly crash if there was faulty RAM while other software would be fine. And the kernel absolutely crashes when there's faulty ram.
You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
I will say it's atypical though. We measure session uptimes in months. There is probably a very specific cause that can be addressed or mitigated.
I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too.
That said I'm running a shader as my desktop wall paper on Nvidia drivers so I don't feel like any of my complaints are all that justified. :D
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
(rust analyzer and java eat all my ram)
So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong.
My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled.
It's possible it's just KDE, but it's also possible KDE is triggering hardware issues.
RAM is also always one to check, especially on an older machine.
Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-Segv-Response should get you started. People made special software packages to trigger the hardware problem in a minute or so.
There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.)
And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too.
I concur on the driver issues. To my understanding the Vega driver situation is actually better on Linux than on Windows (or at least it used to be), but it's never been well-supported hardware.
I think you are.
As an experiment, try a fresh VM of your distro and see if it still crashes.
Rolling distros are not an exact science. They can can get stuck in weird inconsistent states because of some local modification or stagnant dotfile or configuration that is not forward compatible. That sort of thing is more likely with complex software, it's usually not a bug unless upgradeability is a seriously supported thing.
I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM?
I have crashes on a monthly basis but I'm also pushing it pretty hard with 4 Activities, 5 Workspaces, and 3 Screens. That's 60 desktops for it to manage (granted, only about 10-15 in total actually have anything on them) with my tiling window management scripts on top of that. Plasmashell and Kwin take up 20% of my CPU on average which is unfortunate but that's the cost for my setup I guess.
I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces.
Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling).
Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them.
I missed this one. Yeah, I have the same problem and couldn't fix it but I use a tiling window manager so I didn't need that space for anything else. I've come to appreciate the overview actually and you can drag-and-drop windows between workspaces without having to jump around.
I think the best way to describe Activities is that they filter "what" is available whereas Workspaces filter/select "where" it goes. Spotify automatically chooses my "Background Tasks" Workspace when it opens and it is available on all my Activities. My task manager always shows up in my main workspace but not in my "Gaming" activity. It's a really powerful feature once you understand how it works (eg. notifications from other activities can be muted; separate file and folder views; email accounts hidden in Thunderbird, etc.)
Edit: You could probably get total isolation by using the other TTYs! A fully separate user and different desktop environment even. You just need to use Alt+F{1..9} to cycle between them. For a specialized workstation this could actually be a clean way to handle it.
Each activity has 9 virtual desktops because that's what I use in the main profile.
And yeah Firefox is a bit different, however you can select an option to get the regular KDE menu bar back! I've done this.
And I configured my workspaces in a 3x3 grid, that way it doesn't take so much space (and also it's much easier to navigate them than 9 in a row!). This grid function is really one of the big things that annoys me in macOS (it used to have grids but they killed it when mission control came out), windows and Gnome. I need a grid, especially because I switch with hardware keys.
[1] Might be https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5984
I believe this is a very good point!
Linux as an OS is so fragmented that the number of paths are basically innumerable. Many of them are "happy" but they can be hard to find and also change from year to year.
I have a machine that has run Debian 11 and 12 with no issues but 13 hung before launching the UI. Fixable from the terminal but still, super un-happy path!
KDE on SUSE vs on Debian vs on Kinoite and with various sound demons, file systems, file browsers etc will surely differ in ways that are beyond the direct control of the kDE devs too.
My experience is on Bazzite with a Radeon 7800 XT and 9070 XT. I've had two amdgpu hangs playing The Finals which were a Mesa bug, this crashed kwin but kwin wasn't responsible in the stack trace. It's been fixed since.
That's really it since May 2024.
Until recently I used all three major OS almost every day for work, school, games, servers, etc. I’ve seen really bad bugs in all of them. Just spend some time looking around the Internet, Linux and KDE crash constantly. There’s also people regularly slobbering over Linux for a variety of reasons.
What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?
I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but no I don’t believe your shoes are made of gold just because you said so.
Also, you're trying to move the goalposts. The progression has been:
> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day
> I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
> Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying
> What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?
Nobody said they hadn't experienced a single bug until you tried to make a straw man. I've seen bugs on every desktop OS I've used for any length of time. I don't see crashes on KDE.
If KDE works for you, great. It crashes often for me. I find it exceedingly hard to believe it hasn’t crashed on you at least once when that’s such a common experience among me and my peers. I put more stock in my own experiences and the experiences of people I know than random internet commenters. I don’t know what else to tell you.
More annoying is that gwenview often hangs my entire system somehow.
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell
In fact the same happens on Windows a lot when explorer.exe crashes. People often don't even notice it.
Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.
I helped someone else earlier today with an unstable Linux laptop, it turned out there was an amd/gpu/drm issue that was crashing Wayland in the background.
My first bet would be that you've got something similar going on -- a hardware or device driver problem. You've crawled through journalctl and the like, I assume?