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KDE Plasma 5 Becomes the Default Desktop of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

sfcrazy writes: Jos Poortliet, former openSUSE community manager, wrote in a blog post, "At the time of writing this, the openQA servers were busily running tests and, by the time we publish this article, they should be done. What was being tested? A massive amount of changes, bringing not only the latest Plasma 5.3 and Applications 15.04.1 to Tumbleweed, but also marking the switch to Plasma 5 as the default desktop!" The switch to P5 will also have a massive impact in Plasma 5 development because now there will be more users finding bugs and filing reports to make it even better.

1 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Let's hope that Plasma 4 is kept as an alternative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    KDE Plasma 5 is not yet near to be production ready, notwithstanding the 5.3 version. Just to mention a few issues:

    for instance:

    - kwin compositing is not usable on older nvidia hardware with the nvidia proprietary driver 304.x, even if the driver supports opengl 2.1
    - session save/restore is totally broken (at logout the running applications are saved, but then at the next login they are restored to the wrong desktops/activities and in the wrong places/sizes)
    - there is no support for screensavers
    - there is no support for guest sessions
    - plasma can crash when attaching an external monitor or projection screen
    - there is a huge number of missing widgets/plasmoids wrt to plasma 4 (scientific calculator, sensors monitoring, to mention a couple)
    - some widgets are present but broken (cpu load widget misrenders on systems with more than 1 cpu and is not practically dockable to a panel as it takes a huge amount of horizontal space)
    - some widgets make the plasma desktop crash when you try to remove the widget, so that once added the widgets require the manual editing of a configuration file to be removed

    All these are aspects well visible even before having more users finding bugs and filing reports.

    Making something that is not production ready the default is actually *hurting* the product, not helping it, because it creates frustration in its users, makes them bitter about the evident regression wrt what they were used to. If users are given no way to stick to Plasma 4 until Plasma 5 fills their needs they may even jump into other desktops to fix their ability to do everyday work (from what I hear, cinnamon seems a favorite of Plasma 4 orphans). This can have a very negative impact on KDE usage numbers and make the desktop irrelevant, no matter its many qualities and intense work on development.

    Let's hope that Opensuse will at least leave Plasma 4 installable as an alternative to Plasma 5. Kubuntu did not (version 15.04 Vivid is Plasma 5 only). Kubuntu says they provide the alternative via Kubuntu 14.04 Trusty LTS, but this is not really an option: if you are already on version 14.10 Utopic, you can only update to 15.04 Vivid, there is no downgrade path, and you cannot stick to 15.04 either as it shall go EOL in a couple of months. Furthermore, those who are currently on Utopic, probably did the Trusty -> Utopic upgrade because they needed something that is in Utopic and was not in Trusty, so even a re-install to Trusty is not an option to them.