I had a happy, prosperous life with KDE 4 until last week, when I got a new PC, installed a new system on it and decided to look forward and use KDE 5 on it.

While on 4 everything worked perfectly, I spent the last week trying to fix the thousands of glitches and issues 5 gave me. My work is piling up, my customers are getting impatient and I'm still wasting time trying to make it usable... and for most issues, the only answer I found anywhere is that "there is no fox", or the proposed universal fix doesn't work for me, and there is nothing else.

Please tell me, why are you advocating migration, dropping support and announcing end of life for 4, when 5 is still full of issues, and is unstable? This defies common sense! Why are you trying to force me to move from something that is stable and works, to something that's unstable and is broken?

Just a short list of the mosts annoying issues I have, that I did NOT have with KDE 4, that I couldn't find a working fix for:
- Plasma keeps crashing all the time
- Firefox keeps crashing all the time
- The little run box that appears on top of screen when pressing F2 keeps closing itself while I'm typing into it, and often it doesn't come up at all.
- Despite installing every possible appindicator package could find, several important apps, including Dropbox still don't have a systray icon
- Wine apps have their tray icons appear in a separate window instead of the tray
- File type associations cannot be properly edited, for several types they just get reverted.
- If I open a JPG from Krita, then JPGs will only ever open with Krita, which now has an unremovable, unmovable association entry on the top, which can only be killed by deleting krita.desktop in my home.
- The last phase of the splash screen hangs for more than a minute, which sucks given I cold-boot from SSD under 20 sec.
- Skype doesn't integrate into my dark theme, no matter what. It somewhat integreates if I use Breeze Dark color scheme, but with any other scheme Skype will be all white (with light text on it!) except for the window decoration.
- Session restore does not work on Qt apps, only on GTK apps
- Several styles render incorrectly on the panel
- Volume mixer doesn't show running apps' controls, they are hidden under settings making it extremely inconvenient to use, and there is no option to tell it what to display in the tray icon's popup.
- Volume control for microphone is broken, it can only be changed from settings, from the tray popup it cannot be moved, it's stuck in one place.
- Some app specific volume controls are changing on their own.
- Some icons are missing
- Some icons are randomly changing between logins, even though I didn't touch icon themes since several days

And there are more.

Note: I'm not asking for support for my issues in this thread.

I want to start a discussion about the general problem of pushing KDE 5 when it's still far from stable and reliable.

Well, address that to your distro, you do not have to install Plasma5, you can stay with KDE4 as long as you like. There are plenty of distributions out there who still ship KDE4 for quite some time.

And since you don't even specify the exact version of Plasmay5 you are talking about, your post is nothing more than a pointless rant.

I have talked to some people on the KDE IRC, and many others have complained about Plasma 5 being unstable and unreliable, people with various distros so I don't think blaming it all on my distro is right. As for version, the latest up to date Arch packages.

I can stay on KDE 4, right... but you are offering me a choice between two bad options: Stay on a dead system that's not developed anymore (apart from whatever patching-up the distros can whip out), or move to one that's not yet ready at all. I feel like sitting in a lifeboat with water running out, having to decide if I want to keep sitting here and wait for someone to save me, or try to swim for the shores through a stormy sea.

I like most of the new stuff in 5, and there are some things I just love, like the new, much more logical system settings, and I can live with it being a bit unfinished, but there is a difference between a "bit unfinished" and "broken all around".

All I'm saying is that I think you shouldn't have dropped support for your old product before the new one is more stable. Abandoning something before the replacement is at least generally stable is not a good idea.

I didn't blame your distribution for instability, read again! I said you do not have to update, and you can easily enough choose to wait until Plasma 5.x has the stability you want. If your distribution chooses to ship the latest bleeding edge releases like Arch does, do not complain about it, because you get what you were looking for... If you want stability you should not choose a rolling release distribution, but go for a long term support distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or Opensuse. And KDE4 is not dead, because various distributions offer support for way into 2016, and it is stable and not falling apart last I tried (I run it daily on my work computer). So no leaking ship or lifeboat and no storm ahead AFAICS

Still, you are talking about an unspecified Plasma 5 version, there are huge differences in stability between e.g. Plasma 5.2 or Plasma 5.4. So far Plasma 5.4 with KDE Applications 15.08 runs very smoothly on my laptop, and there really is no instability I could complain about. And I am talking about Kubuntu 15.10 beta here, not something labeled as stable

So please, if you complain about some instability, give the exact problem, the version number of the application, and then one can talk, everything else is pointless. There is nothing more annoying than complaints about problems without versions, because it makes it impossible for us support people or the developers to react upon.
Did you file bug reports for the crashes you experienced or any other of the problems you mention?

I didn't blame your distribution for instability, read again!

Sorry, I misunderstood that, may bad.

And if I read it right, it's 5.4.1

I'm constantly looking for possible fixes for my various issues (also there are updates every day which may, or may not fix something) and I'll post forum threads or bug reports where I can't find one, but there are lots of them, and in the meanwhile trying to get some work done as well. So far I'm trying to see if I can fix my system up, or I have to revert back to KDE 4.

So far I posted one thread about Session restore not working, and I got told I have to patch Qt manually because there is a bug not fixed for a while now.
(Here is the thread, in case you would like to look at it, or may have information regarding fixing it: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=128387&p=342216 )

But my original argument was that development of KDE 4 stopped before 5 was ready, leaving a gap in between.

The reason for stopping the development of KDE 4 is because there is a limited supply of (developer) resources to devote to either maintaining/adding features to KDE 4 or building KDE 5.
Of course, maintenance on KDE 4 has not stopped altogether. If there are bugs reported against KDE 4, they still get attention. It's just new feature development that has switched from KDE 4 to KDE 5.
Hopefully soon, if not already, KDE 5's stability will be to the point where even LTS users may be able to switch over (a time which I look forward to, being on (K)Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for at least another year, most likely).

The problem isn't Plasma 5 not being stable compared to KDE4.
The *real* problem is that at every new version (like for example, moving from KDE3 to 4, 4 to 5 ecc.) the new desktop is *never* as stable as the older.
The same thing happened when switched from KDE3 to 4. It took some time to made KDE4 stable and then instead of keeping the desktop stable, the new one is newly buggy.
I don't know why this happens, but certanly this is a problem. We will ended up waiting a lot of time for Plasma 5 to be stable and then with Plasma 6 (or KDE6) things will be broken again and again...That's pretty sad

Don't get me wrong, I like KDE and I never used or will use another DE and I think Plasma 5 offers huge improvements, but IMHO for most people stability comes at first place.

gnastyle wrote:... IMHO for most people stability comes at first place.

Are you sure about that? I bet a good number of KDEians are early adopters. We could get a rough idea from how many people downloaded the alpha ISO.

Nevertheless stability is an important aspect; I had to adopt my environment to deal with a bug. Running also Arch I can confirm some and found solutions for other. But for a few you should not blame KDE devs (I guess you are aware of this).

My advice: take the time to fix what's not working and you will get rewarded greatly

This time distributions took a much more careful approach with Plasma 5, many not adopting it until it was at least version 5.2.

@Heiko Tietze
No, I don't think so. I am happy to see how many improvements Plasma 5 has made (first off it consumes the same or less amount of ram than KDE4 and this is pretty good) but if I cannot use it decently this isn't worth it (and the bugs aren't few. On a laptop I have I can use KDE4 and it runs smoothly, with Plasma 5 it is no way usable. Said this I don't want to file a bug, just let know the fact that the bugs are somewhat serious).
The alpha ISO doesn't mean anything, because I can test P5 just for curiosity/helping fixing bugs but the majority of users just want to use a DE, not to hack it. We are not all hackers.

I know your policy to help fixing a bug instead of complaining (and I agree with this), but this isn't completely right. If I'm a hacker and I encounter a serious bug I will fix it and still use P5. If I'm a casual user (probably the majority of the users) I will probably change DE.

And what about Plasma Mobile? I never tried it and I don't critizise something I don't know about, but put case (and this just is an hypothesis) that is stable as Plasma 5.4, usable but sometimes with some glitches. You think users will change .conf files on a smartphone? Helping fixing it? They will just throw it and buy an Android

This is my personal opinion and you can disagree with me, but please next time you made a DE (I'm referring to Plasma 6) don't chage too much if this means broken the desktop I mean KDE has not the same resources as bug tech companies and making a DE of this level is certainly incredible, here because you should avoid changing too much if you don't have the man power.

@einar
I know but Plasma 5.2 isn't stable enough, maybe 5.4 is good enough but, as Storm was saying, either you extend support of KDE4 until P5 is usable or release Plasma 5.4 as 5.0.


Please don't take those critics personally, just wanted to express my opinion about this. The point of my comment wasn't to blame KDE devs (that do a great job) but to ask to not change too much if this means not mantaining the same level of quality.