KDE Lands More Plasma Wayland Improvements & Fixes Ahead Of Plasma 5.25

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Lands More Plasma Wayland Improvements & Fixes Ahead Of Plasma 5.25

It was another week of seeing lots of Plasma Wayland session fixes and improvements...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-More-Plasma-Wayland-5.25

[Danny3]

Great to see how nicely this amazing project advances!

[dima]

KWin will no longer crash when hitting Alt+Tab while the context menu for a window titlebar is visible.

Great, but... Come on!

I've switched to Gnome years ago, but I still check KDE news every so often, wondering if perhaps KDE can now run without crashing all the time - but, this does not inspire confidence.

[Slartifartblast]

Great, but... Come on!

I've switched to Gnome years ago, but I still check KDE news every so often, wondering if perhaps KDE can now run without crashing all the time - but, this does not inspire confidence.

Wayland specific, come back and complain when Gnome is bug free running on Wayland.

You waited 6 years for your first post to be this ?

[R41N3R]

Some nice bug fixes for Wayland, great! I'm sure Plasma 5.25 will be a stable & good release. I hope that it allows my Steam Deck to switch to Plasma Wayland as well.

One annoyance is the small size of the default start menu of Plasma. I really dislike the scroll bars that appear as soon as there are some additional categories. Why is it not possible to change the size? :-(

[Steffo]

Great, but... Come on!

I've switched to Gnome years ago, but I still check KDE news every so often, wondering if perhaps KDE can now run without crashing all the time - but, this does not inspire confidence.

Checked out KDE today on Fedora 36 again. Not sure if it makes a difference, but I did not use the KDE spin and installed it afterwards. The result is, that it is still unusable. Firefox is scaled way too big while the scaling of the rest was Ok. The fonts of the KDE start menu entries had artifacts (Wayland, didn't test on X). It did take several restarts before some bugs disappeared:
- The first start the KDE start menu was completely frozen. Also all menu icons overlapped left at one place
- After the restart this behavior disappeared, but if I wanted to log out or shut down, KDE freezed for a few seconds and nothing happened. So I had to do this on console.
- After another restart this behavior again disappeared, but the scaling of Firefox was still too big.

I removed KDE again and I don't bother to report bugs, because if I have problems with basic features, I don't want to know what other bugs occur, if I test this desktop longer than 5 minutes...

[birdie]

Checked out KDE today on Fedora 36 again. Not sure if it makes a difference, but I did not use the KDE spin and installed it afterwards. The result is, that it is still unusable. Firefox is scaled way too big while the scaling of the rest was Ok. The fonts of the KDE start menu entries had artifacts (Wayland, didn't test on X). It did take several restarts before some bugs disappeared:
- The first start the KDE start menu was completely frozen. Also all menu icons overlapped left at one place
- After the restart this behavior disappeared, but if I wanted to log out or shut down, KDE freezed for a few seconds and nothing happened. So I had to do this on console.
- After another restart this behavior again disappeared, but the scaling of Firefox was still too big.

I removed KDE again and I don't bother to report bugs, because if I have problems with basic features, I don't want to know what other bugs occur, if I test this desktop longer than 5 minutes...

KDE/Plasma has been a crap show ever since the release of 5.0. KDE versions 3.5.x and 4.4-4.14 were rock solid on the other hand.

I still completely dislike the monolithic nature of Plasma. KDE 3 had kicker, kdesktop and whatnot and with KDE 5 they created a monster called Plasma which has been nothing but troubles starting with its insane RAM use and ending with it being extremely fragile and prone to crashes.

[user1]

Wayland specific, come back and complain when Gnome is bug free running on Wayland.

You waited 6 years for your first post to be this ?

You know what? not long ago I had a low opinion about Wayland in general. But when I've used Gnome 40 Wayland (on Fedora 34) a few months ago, it was one of the most rock solid Linux desktop experiences ever since I started using Linux. Not a single crash. And wayy more stable than KDE (yes, even on x11). KDE seems to be the only DE where you have these ridiculous bugs like when you customize your panel, plasma shell crashes if you move your cursor "in a certain way", or when you turn your monitor off and then on, Plasma desktop crashes. Issues like these make me think the whole KDE codebase needs some major code refactoring, otherwise bugs like these will keep creeping in again and again.

[Nth_man]

Some nice bug fixes for Wayland, great! I'm sure Plasma 5.25 will be a stable & good release. I hope that it allows my Steam Deck to switch to Plasma Wayland as well.

One annoyance is the small size of the default start menu of Plasma. I really dislike the scroll bars that appear as soon as there are some additional categories. Why is it not possible to change the size? :-(

You can find some information using the links of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332512#c117

[schmidtbag]

I'm still always really curious what it is people do with Plasma that makes it crash so easily and use up so much RAM. Sure, there are stability issues with Wayland, but even then I find it totally usable for everyday use. Most of the time though, it seems like these are people who haven't used KDE in 2+ years and hold onto first impressions.

In any case, it isn't a perfect environment but it is noticeably improving.

I guess the beauty of GNOME is it doesn't have enough flexibility to break so easily.