Well I'm finally on Plasma 5. After finally retiring Shizuku (my venerable desktop PC of eight years) and replacing her with the brand-new Tomoko, the time finally came to ditch the equally venerable Plasma 4 in favour of the new Plasma 5.

Some of you might actually remember that I made a topic some seven years ago about my many problems with KDE Plasma 4 as it stood. Over time most of those issues were fixed and I eventually came to like KDE 4 as much as I'd liked KDE 3 previously. So, how does Plasma 5 stand up by comparison? Well not too bad actually, though that's partly because I've jumped in at version 5.7 and Plasma 4 had actually matured to the point where I was mostly happy by that point, but first I will talk about some of the good stuff so far.

First, the jump from Plasma 4 to 5 was actually not too wrenching. Fewer unnecessary changes, not as much stuff broken, overall just pretty decent. This was what was promised by the Plasma developers, but then they promised a lot of things in the past. Still this promise was on the money, so good work there. Also Breeze is not as ugly as I thought it'd be. It's still not good looking, but the preview images made it look like an absolute monkfish. Finally the new K Menu (if we're still calling it that) is quite nice. I was using Lancelot before and thought whatever KDE 5 would bring couldn't match that, and it can't, but I think it may at least be good enough to live with. I'll have to see how it deals with a large quantity of applications, but I'm at least okay with it for now.

Now for some bad news. This is a very new install so I'll start with what's fundamentally broken right now. First is compositing. It seems to work fine with KWin, but not at all with Plasma for some bizarre reason. This may be a side-effect of my using the Debian experimental Nvidia drivers (a necessity given my graphics hardware) and right now I'm waiting to see if it fixes itself since this not catastrophic.

Also Akregator crashes on exit, failing to save changes to feeds, which appears to be caused by Debian bug #836011. Now this is a grave functionality bug causing crashes and data loss, so they are of course waiting for the next version to come out before fixing it. I wouldn't actually be so bothered by this, except for the fact that my previous Plasma 4 system also had an Akregator crash-on-exit bug, and I'm pretty sure I've seen at least two other crash-on-exit bugs with Akregator, one of which caused the exact same data loss as this one. Yet Akregator still only writes changes on exit, which seems the most likely time for it to crash and lose data. It's a nice application otherwise, I'm just tired of this groundhog day bug.

Now for problems definitely not related to Debian, and it's a fairly short list. I'll start with Konqueror, which remains my file manager of choice (I've long since accepted that me and Dolphin are just never going to get along) but I find myself very unsatisfied with khtmlimage, the in-built image viewer. In Plasma 4 this was quite a nice thing, scaling and centring the image for me, also providing some basic zooming options. It was helpful. In Plasma 5 though, there is none of this. Images are displayed at the top left and at native resolution (no matter how massive they are). This is, of course, a minor issue and I could probably work around it but I consider it a disappointment that features in the previous version are missing now. If there is some way to re-add this functionality or an alternate file manager that can do what I want I'd love to hear about it.

Now, notifications. Notifications in Plasma 4 were annoyingly frequent and difficult to configure (at least in my opinion). In Plasma 5 they are now even more frequent and still pretty obtuse to configure. Also in Plasma 4 they popped about just about my bottom panel, covering up part of any applications at the bottom right of my screen. In Plasma 5 they pop up directly over the right-hand side of my bottom panel, covering up most of the system tray instead. Smooth. I suppose I'll wrangle this one into submission in time.

Next, Breeze. I do have to come back to this because of the scroll bars. At first I thought they were going to be quite hard to use, because of how narrow they are. Now I know that they're actually the same as on Oxygen, just misleading because the graphics make them look very narrow, but the parts that look like you shouldn't be able to click on them are actually clickable. This is just dumb. Also there used to be an option to fix GTK+ applications to have the double bottom arrows on scrollbars that are such a classic KDE feature, but now there isn't. But the problem still remains. I'm guessing this is because the double arrows themselves are no longer a default feature so this is not considered a priority any more. That doesn't get rid of the problem though.

Finally, the panels. I've had scaling issues with panels for what seems like forever and the latest is with they system tray. I prefer a two row system tray to save on space and Plasma will do that if the panel is large enough, but the size I need to scale the panel to now seems much higher than with Plasma 4. If I were to guess I'd say this is because the system tray icons themselves have been made longer (a change Choqok, my Twitter client of choice, seems unhappy with if the artefacting on its tray icon is any indication) but I've no idea how to change this, if it can be changed at all.

So that's it for now. Definitely a shorter list than with Plasma 4, which can be taken as an indication of how much happier I am with the changes made to Plasma 5. I still haven't tested all of the features yet but what I've seen has impressed me for the most part.