We no sooner get use to KDE 4 than KDE 5 is released. There were a lot of complaints when KDE 4 was released, it is *NOW* a useful desktop environment. KDE 5 is a disaster. Let me give some examples. In KDE 4.10 I have 10 Virtual Desktops (VD). Each VD is divided in half as I have two monitors. In essence I have 20 VD. Each VD has its own Wallpaper and its own set of icons to launch a specific set of functions, thus each VD is unique. I transition between VD via the the taskbar: ie if I want to go to VD 5 I go to the taskbar and click on VD 5; if I want to go to VD 8 from 5 on click on VD 8 on the taskbar. In KDE Plasma 5?!?

One: I can't assign individual Wallpapers to each VD
Two I can't assign Individual Widgets (icons) to each VD. You add a widget (icon) to the desktop, that widget is copied across ALL the VD defeating the purpose of making things simpler and easier.

I stopped using Fedora Linux because the Fedora Project force feeds its users on technology that is not ready for prime time, rather than giving them options. The force feeding of KDE 5 was the straw that broke the camel's back. Using KDE Plasma 5 I feel I've gone from a sleek roaster back to a horse and buggy, only the buggy has square wheels.

I am a lifelong KDE user (going on 20 years now) and I've seen a lot of changes in that time. What drives me NUTS about KDE is that instead of building on something successful, they feel they have to go back and re-invent the wheel, they then release something that is so primitive compared to what is currently being used, and then wonder why users are angry and unhappy -- we don't get it, or fail to see KDE's grand "vision".

My buddy just installed Fedora 23 (the most recent version of Fedora) as a Virtual Machine and we installed KDE 5.x . Fedora 23 was only slightly improved over Fedora 22 which was when KDE 5.0 was released. We created 4 VD , then tried to add Individual wall papers to each. SORRY Could not be done.

We then tried to add individual widgets (icons) to each VD. SORRY The second you copy a Widget (Icon) to one VD, it is copied to ALL the VD.

If there is a way that you can do these two things then it is horribly documented -- I know I've looked. KDE 4.x -- YES!!! KDE 5.x -- NO!!!

I am all for improving something, but I really thought KDE had learned something from the disaster of their roll-out of KDE 4.0, it was not until KDE 4 reached release 4.6 that it was at all usable, after that it become a more refined and user friendly environment. Apparently KDE learned nothing from their disaster with KDE 4.0 as the user of KDE Plasma 5 has been plunged right back into the stone age... AGAIN. KDE 5.x (whatever version is in Fedora 23) tells me there is still a long way to go before it will be a useful Desktop environment.

I sincerely hope that these two simple tasks -- adding Wallpapers to individual VD and adding Individual Widgets (Icons) to each VD will soon be addressed.

An Idea: Assuming that KDE is going to screw around and release KDE Plasma 6 at some point in the future a suggestion: PLEASE DON"T RELEASE IT BEFORE IT OFFERS THE EXACT SAME FUNCTIONALITY AS IN CURRENTLY IN USE. Users should not be test guinea pigs and thrown back to the stone age each time KDE wants to "update" the GUI.

Your usage may be accommodated by switching from using Desktops to using Activities. They are very similar to each other in that they both provide additional space for organizing your workspace. The difference is that Activities are intended for separating the kinds of things you work on, while Desktops are intended to give you more space for the windows used in a given Activity. Each Activity can have its own wallpaper, widgets and applications, while Desktops within an activity will share the same wallpaper and widgets.

There are a wide range of resources and articles covering Activities and their usages, and a basic overview can be found at https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma#Activities

KDE 4 with Plasma 4 was and is a wonderful, professional and reliable system. Plasma 5 is a degrade.

The saddest part is the design change from oxygen to breeze. Nobody intents to produce bugs, so the developers should not be blamed for this buggy plasma 5. A design on the other hand is made with purpose. The designers did a grotty job. What happened to them? Are they using apple devices and want KDE look as ugly as them?
My opinion is: breeze is truly bullcrap. I want the old design back - each and every pixel.

It is so sad the developers do not let the users choose their design. I've searched for possibilities to get back to oxygen, but in the end plasma 5 did not look like version 4.

@hateshark

Well you've confused me because I have:
- Oxygen theme
- Oxygen window decorations
- Oxygen widget style
- Oxygen icons
- Oxygen cursor theme

Is your issue you don't have access to Oxygen options or that you feel there's something amiss with it as implemented in Plasma 5?

I'm on Kubuntu 16.04 and "Oxygen theme" was not available for me (just Oxygen-Air). Maybe I will get it elsewhere without the automatic installer, but why do I have to do these hassles. The design of plasma was fine as it was. It seems to me KDE designers favor trends more than consistency.
There are a lot settings that can recover parts of the old design, right, but there are many glitches like:
- Icons are missing
- Icon themes are mixed
- Plasma crashes when I try to change some settings

The designers should not have moved from a consistent to a non-consistent design and make the non-consistent the default while not letting the user get the consistent design back flawlessly. Thus, oxygen should be the default and breeze should be optional. This is the biggest amiss to me.

For me the most annoying feature of Plasma 5 is the impossibility to switch off snapping widgets and icons to grid. I hate gridded layout of desktop and never used it in no one OS I ever used in my life for more than 20 years. Now it is the main reason for me to stay sticked to KDE 4. I would like to hope VERY much that possibility to move icons on desktop in free way without gridding will be implemented one day. Especially it concerns "Folder view" desktop layout.

Another extremely unpleasant thing is that in Plasma 5 the setting "System settings => Input devices => Mouse => Double click for opening files and folders" effects only symlink icons in "Folder view" desktop layout, but does not effect widgets in "Desktop view" such as application launchers, Trashcan, etc. I strongly prefer that everything in my desktop would be launched exclusively by double click, and single one must just select the current item. And especially single-click launching is irritating in case of Trashcan.

And the worst thing is absence of korganizer events in calendar widgets, but it seems, that this feature could be implemented soon.

Now I have for everyday usage Mint 17.3 with KDE 4.14.2 and for testing purpose the Neon Project developers' unstable branch installed from repo over Kubuntu 16.04 Xenial, and also KaOS to see the last official Plasma 5 releases as soon as possible.

I'm in 100% agreement with the OP. I've been using KDE as long as I've been using Linux, since well back in the 90's. The one feature it had above all others was the ability to configure different wallpapers and widgets on different desktops. I've been using Linux Mint 17.3 for a while now. They just released Mint 18 Cinnamon and they'll release the KDE version soon, but it will be on Plasma 5.x. You've lost the one thing that truly differentiated yourself among the desktops. There's no reason to use KDE anymore, so I may as well just switch to Cinnamon.

What has KDE done that I didn't need? Activities. I've found no use for them, even though I have tried. I see no advantage to them over just adding another VD. If Activities were truly isolated from each other, could be fully configured independently, and would hibernate when not needed, then they might, but they don't. The aren't completely isolated from each other and often cause strange interactions. It was unneeded complexity that probably forced simplicity in other areas losing features we really wanted. How many requests did you have for activities before you implemented them? Who was the one user that just screamed he needed another set of desktops? Activities are not as easy to use as VDs.

I guess it's time to move on. Hard to believe that Windows actually has a better desktop than KDE now. I would stay on Mint 17.3, but some applications I use are moving forward so it's just time to settle on the next LTS.

I agree with most of the posters here. I've been a die-hard KDE user since 2000. I used it because it was a fast desktop with advanced features that no other desktop had and it had better integration then all the other desktops. KDE Ideas and technologies were always a step above, ambitious and edgy. I absolutely loved KDE 3.5.10 at the time it was a perfect desktop. When KDE explained the desire to move to KDE4, I understood what they were trying to do, and why the needed to build the pillars and to integrate all those different facets (phonon, solid, Decibel, strigi, akonadi and SVG Graphics, etc, etc). They sold me on their vision and they mentioned it would be a near rewrite. I was happy and unhappy at the same time. I was happy because I was seeing the limits of the KDE 3 series and thought something somewhere needs to be incrementally improved. I was unhappy because that meant that the feature innovation that KDE had would lose some momentum because it would take time for KDE4 to gain feature parity with KDE 3.5.10. I had such an amazing workflow and I kept looking forward to the newer versions of the KDE 3 serious because there was always a cool feature that would come out with each release which no other Desktop had (open source or proprietary). I waited soo long for the KDE 4 series to come back to where KDE 3.5.10 left off. It wasn't until KDE 4.8 that I felt KDE was as useful as KDE 3.5.10. In the meantime, I never switched Desktops. I would often try the other desktops for a week or 2 (Gnome, XFCE, Unity, Cinnamon) just to get a pulse of what the desktop landscape looked like, but nothing came close to the functionality of KDE 3.5.10 or the vision/implementation of KDE 4.8+.

Today I use Linux Mint 17.3 with KDE 4.14.2 and it is absolutely amazing! Both in Stability, Functionality, Design, Speed and Usability. I regularly have uptimes of 120 days before reboots (usually Kernel updates). With confidence, I can leave a Kate session open for weeks without even saving its contents and know that nothing (outside of a power failure) is going to disturb or disrupt my sessions. The integrated search is great, not only for my hard drive files but also my emails in Kontact, recent web searches and everything advertised in Krunner. I'm really, really enjoying the functionality and features of the Promise that KDE 4 had set out to do. I've been boasting and promoting this desktop relentlessly because its pretty close to perfect. And my workflow is amazing: quick and smooth.

With KDE5 however, I'm really disappointed. Why do I have to go through this huge rebuild period AGAIN? I waited so long for KDE4 to reach its promise-land and now with the move to QT5/KDE 5 we have to go through this again??? All this precious time for advancement in features and usability is being wasted once again. This stagnation period is very disappointing. I've been sitting on this KDE 4 desktop now for a good year and half with barely any updates to its feature set. I'm (impatiently) waiting for KDE 5 to catchup, but its taking very long because it seems to be riddled with problems and for some reason, the blame is being put outside of the community rather than on KDE themselves (i.e. Intel + QT). The other desktop projects don't seem to be suffering. What's going on here?

What I really want to see is KDE to continually improve its product rather then going back to the drawing board and waiting through a whole rebuilding phase for the whole thing! I'm looking at Cinnamon right now, and it has has continually improved release after release, and has almost reached feature parity with KDE 4.14 series and its way ahead of KDE 5. And they've done this with not even 1/10th of the experience, community and developers. If Cinnamon integrated Baloo into its desktop, then I do not see what advantage KDE has anymore...

I installed Kubuntu 16.04 with KDE 5.6.4 over the weekend and it was not a positive experience. It was still very buggy and not very useful. The Plasma Widgets on the desktop are not as advertised and not close to parity of what the KDE 4 Plasma Widgets offer. I had great trouble moving them and even resizing them. The options to resize would not pop up when I hovered my mouse over it or on its edges. The System tray Integration of other apps is also not working correctly by default. Dropbox, Skype, Insync (Google Drive replacement) and Owncloud are some of the applications that I use regularly, and in order for me to get those Icons to show up in the System tray, I had to install external libraries for them to be supported. The promise of the snappiness of QT5 isn't their yet; KDE4 still seems faster.

I'm not going to make a big deal about it being Ugly by default (I don't like the flat look they've got), but that can always be customized. What I'm really concerned about is the Functionality, Features and Stability. KDE 5 seems to lack in all those departments. Maybe the new KDE Users are ok with this, but the Experienced Users who have already been through all the trials and tribulations are getting pretty tired of how this desktop is progressing. KDE 4.14 is still the best desktop at the moment, but honestly, KDE should be waaay ahead of where its at now. At this pace, Cinnamon will be ahead of KDE in one years time.

I can't imagine switching desktops after 16 years of use, and it will be a very sad day if I do. I wish I could offer more to the community at the moment and in the future I'm sure I will. I'm very thankful for everything they have offered everyone so far, but my hope is that the KDE Leaders observe the past and try to lead KDE to the position that it should be: Stratospheric Levels way beyond all the other desktops.

It's funny what all we think is important and what is needless. For some it's appearance. For other's it's something else.

For me THE killer-app was activities. I left gnome behind for good when I figured them out.

I am often working on multiple projects at the same time. They all use the same basic stuff, but different links. So the 10-02 web link is different than the 10-04, for example. The 10-02 budget is a different file than the 10-04 budget. The rosters are different, etc. By using activities, I could have the same icons in the same places, but all linked to the appropriate places. Switching projects was a breeze. The widgets could have a different color, so I had a fast visual que of what project I was on. Glorious!!!!

Of course, I also had my general activity, my programming activity, and my game activity.

All of this was made possible because widgets could go UNDER an edge panel. So I could have all my fast links close by without having to move windows. I could have the music player with cover art on the default activity, but without cover art on the development activity. Etc, etc, etc. Bind the right-mouse button to the activity menu, and I could switch activities so quickly.

Now, with plasma 5, that critical ability to put a widget in line with a panel is gone. Now, activities aren't that much better than VDs.

Not surprisingly, the appearance of the widgets is meaningless. I use my desktop, I don't spend a lot of time looking at it.

Anyway, KDE team, please either let widgets go under a panel again, or give us per-activity customization with panels. Thanks.

I personally think, we need another release of KDE SC 4, even just another LTS bugfix release.
I am still using KDE 4.14 because, many features, I use, are not available in Plasma 5.x
Some of the "new" features in Plasma 5.8 and soon Plasma 5.9, are things KDE 4 has had for years.

A lot of things I use in KDE 4 are non-existant in Plasma 5.x:
Numerous widgets are not available(Homerun, Lancelot, Homerun Fullscreen(the older version), Bouncy Ball, Blackboard, Eyes, Luna, Potd, and several others).
Some of the old live wallpapers are gone(ASCII Animals, Virus, Globe, Mandelbrot, Pattern, Picture Of The Day, Weather).
Some scriptengines, for running widgest are gone(Javascript, Python, Ruby, SuperKaramba, WebKit/OS X Dashboard).
Missing KCM's(including but not limited to UFW).

KDE Plasma 5 - so raw and unstable, i get new freezes each update, tested on customers.
very disappointed after solid v4

xsor wrote:KDE Plasma 5 - so raw and unstable, i get new freezes each update, tested on customers.
very disappointed after solid v4

Maybe give some examples that can be duplicated?
I'm running KDE Neon with about a dozen+ installed apps (some older versions) and I don't have any serious issues with functionality...certainly no freezes. Perhaps it's an issue with your base and KDE on top?

So far my only beef with Neon is that the calendar starts the week on Monday instead of my preference for Sunday, and I can't find a way to change it so far without changing languages/regional settings, which I want to keep as US English. Beyond that, I'm very happy with the stability and speed of Neon.

It's a terrible thing for me to make my first post a complaint about the system, especially when my experience warns me not to expect much. I have been a unix and linux programmer since the 80s. Some of their greatest strengths were configurability and a programming culture which encouraged innovation and utility. Agile software was valued in this community long before it became a buzzword. I finally abandoned Unity in favor of KDE when I replaced my hardware a few years ago. I was thrilled. I could not believe how useful such a simple concept as activities was!

Now, with Plasma 5, it feels like Unity all over again, and I'm not sure I'm willing to try to invest the time and effort I put into Unity. Don't get me wrong. Plasma is not Unity. This feels like that because of the elimination of previously configurable features. One example. Plasma 4 sticky notes? OK. I might find them handy three times in a year, so set them up as a panel widget rather than via a center mouse click on the desktop. Plasma 5 sticky notes? You can configure them to any color you want, and that's about it. Can't set them up on the panel. Can't stop them from appearing whenever you hit the wheel over the desktop without disabling the ability to middle button paste. Can't disable them. Can't remove them from the system.

I used to bemoan this sort of thing as lazy programming, but it really isn't. It's not because the developer was too lazy to include these configurable options. The features were there before, and they were removed. The problem is because of a culture of programmer arrogance. Programmers are now encouraged in schools to develop a programming philosophy, but it is a very rare job candidate who acknowledges that programming is a service industry. Whenever a contract dev asks me why we have requested a feature, I always respond with the hope that they might come up with a better way to accomplish our goals, but I don't remember the last time that happened. They are asking me why because they don't think we need it, and then they try to get away with producing software without it. This is the sort of attitude that produced Unity and Windows 8, and it feels the same going from Plasma 4 to Plasma 5. Please fight this culture of arrogance. Maintain your options, and then set those defaults which you believe will attract the most new customers.

I too dislike my first post here to be negative, but if there is no feedback then corrections can't be made.

I'm sorry, I tried to like KDE5, really I did, but I just can't. I'm sure some (most?) of the developers won't care about this, but I have to say that the lack of options on appearance was a bad decision. I tried over 10 different themes that billed themselves as looking like KDE4, oxygen, or whatever, and none of them helped. No matter what I tried I always got the "flat design". I couldn't find any way to change that.

To those who like the flat design, I'm glad it works for you -- really I am, but I'd like to know why the rest of us have to suffer that. KDE has always been known for giving the user options, but I guess that's changed. I'm sorry, but it's not "a clean and visually clear user experience" for me (from http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0). It's ugly and confusing and hard to use -- in short, a UI failure. Where do I click? I can't tell because there are no borders on buttons and other things I need to click on. Is that text there a link or not? I can't tell. Where are the controls? I can't tell, hidden I suspect. (KDE5 has all the stuff I [sorry to use this word] hate on the flat design and anti-skeuomorphic web sites, the sites I leave immediately without using.)

I had some real trouble setting up the bottom panel too. The details probably don't matter and I can't remember them anyway. I'd try it again just for documenting the issues, but KDE5 won't play nicely with other versions according to the web page.

I've used Linux since before KDE existed, when twm was all we had. I started with KDE back in the 2.x days. It's sad to give up the cutting edge, but I can't take looking at it -- it literally hurts my eyes. The Trinity project is doing nicely (KDE3) and it feels like "home", so I guess I don't have to totally give up KDE.

I'll revist when KDE6 comes up -- maybe. I don't understand why the KDE devs didn't learn from their mistakes with KDE4 and released so early as well as didn't allow for choice in visual appearance. Sigh...

I'm a long time Opensuse & KDE user and when I talk about KDE, I mean the KDE
desktop environment, the KDE framework, (Plasma,) KWin, the modified Qt libraries and all
applications like Dolphin, Kate, Okteta, etc. that have dependencies to one of the former.

Will there ever be a stable version of KDE that will be supported for at least another
3 years by major distro's?
Supported as in: fixing bugs and backporting them and offering them as automatic updates
to the stable version?

KDE is unstable and full of bugs. When most bugs have been fixed and KDE is finally stable,
support stops and a new major version is offered which again is unstable and full of bugs.
At that moment Opensuse stops offering the old stable version.

The distro managers point to KDE and KDE points to the distro managers.

KDE users are guinea pigs for ever, all for the pleasure of programmers who prefer to introduce
new features and experiments but don't feel like fixing bugs because it's boring.

And no, a rolling distribution is not a solution in a production environment where things need to
be stable and tested.