KDE Plasma 5.5 Has Matured Past the Point of Plasma 4 (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: KDE's Plasma 5 desktop received a lot of early heat for being unstable, missing functionality compared to the older Plasma 4, and other changes that irritated Linux desktop users. Fortunately, with the recent release of Plasma 5.5, they have hit a stage where there's fairly wide agreement that Plasma 5 has now matured past the point of Plasma 4. Ken Vermette looked meticulously at the KDE stack for 2016, including how it's working on Wayland, the setup, widgets, various new features, and more.

Comments

Of course ...

[gstoddart]

They've added 1.5 to the version, of course it has matured.

I remember over the years companies taking v1.1 and renaming it v 8.1 or something equally stupid ... because clearly lying about the major version number means the product has matured.

Version numbers are cheap, and in the hands of marketing they can say anything you want them to. ;-)

Re:so still not as complete as3.5 then?

[dotancohen]

so still not as complete as3.5 then?

And not nearly as polished as 4.10 was, either. Here is a list of just the first few problems that I started to list, before the problems started really piling up:

* Maximized windows do not have thier scrollbars flush against the screen edge. Thus, Fitt's law cannot be used to quickly put the mouse cursor on the scrollbar.
* Vertical panel does not auto-hide with second monitor attached.
* No System Monitor widget. Apparently being worked on.
* Volume Up cannot be set. Volume Down and mute work fine.
* Krunner no longer accepts Bash commands. I have a bash command that I run periodically, this would work in Krunner in KDE 4 but does not work in KDE 5.
* The panel app freezes often. I can intermittently freeze the panel by clicking on More Settings in the panel configuration toolbar.
* Lots of crashes, most of which are not reproducible. I've had the Plasma Panel crash, System Settings, and other applications.
* Keyboard Layout indicator missing.
* Keyboard State widget disappears from the system tray, no resolution in the KDE forums.

You can use KDE 3D compositing with other DE's

[Sadsfae]

I've switched back and forth to just about every *NIX Desktop Environment since I started using Linux in 1999, loved KDE 3.x, loathed KDE 4.x until it became stable and used KDE 5.x on and off. The good thing about KDE is that the windowing and 3D effects subsystem is modular.

I'm pretty much settled on using XFCE but I'm using KWIN KDE compositing/3D effects with XFCE for a nice compromise between a 'classic' desktop that's rock solid but with the nice themes, windowing effects and features that KWIN (KDE's compositor) brings to the table.