Hi,
I recently upgraded from Plasma (KDE4) to Plasma 5 due to release cycle of distribution I use. Only to discover it being almost as bad as KDE4.0 fiasco.
The distribution in question is Kubuntu 16.04.
While writing this I managed to find another new annoyance (albeit minor): how to find Plasma version. Going in the Dolphin and System Settings Help->About KDE no longer shows version. After googling I found I could find the version in KInfoCenter (which I never used before). So the Plasma version I am writing about is 5.5.5.

The annoyances I am going to talk about go against the nature of KDE (and one of the main reasons of KDE): ability to configure every aspect of the desktop environment.

Here are the major annoyances:

1) Sound notification: no global mute setting. In addition Plasma 5 does not honour the individual settings: for example I un-ticked every sound notification in the Instant Messaging (and then I un-ticked every single sound notifications in the Notifications Settings), yet I still get annoying bleeps when I receive Instant messages.

2) The Plasma versions (the "systray" widgets) of the KDE apps suck in major way:
2a) Instant messaging plasma version does not honour the grouping of contacts, there are no hover over to determine which contact is which. I have multiple people with two google accounts: work and personal. Both of these google accounts have same First, Last name, the email is only differs by domain (eg: John.Doe@company.com vs John.Doe@gmail.com). The plasma version of the Instant Messaging will show them exactly the same (unless they have slightly different picture, which is not very helpful). This makes this UI very useless, as I have to bring out main contact list and choose the correct contact. I wish I could remove the plasma version in favour the normal contact list. One might ask why I need to differentiate these two contacts if it is same person? Simple: work and personal content separation, I don't want the my employer keeping record of personal information, also I don't want my personal account recording work related information.
2b) The plasma version of volume control is worse than KMix, when installing KMix it stands up identical icon in "systray" while there is no clear way to remove the original plasma version of volume control. The main feature that the volume control plasma app is missing is ability to mute the notifications. Granted that if these are muted in KMix they are not muted anyway (see point 1).
2c) Plasma version of Klipper is **** - it has hard line limit, although that reverted to full klipper after fiddling around, on new installation it as **** as ever.

3) The network manager plasma app ask the WiFi password twice: once in the plasma app and another time in a password pop-up. I am 100% sure I am entering it correctly.

4) A lot of random crashes on freshly installed system (KOrganizer, Instant Messaging, System Settings, etc.), While I was writing this, I got this:

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[65853.089631] ktp-contactlist[7000]: segfault at 7fc961f00600 ip 00007fc978517024 sp 00007ffdea371df8 error 4 in libKF5IconThemes.so.5.18.0[7fc9784ee000+39000]
[67544.981830] systemsettings5[6938]: segfault at 0 ip 00007fd7b94296d5 sp 00007ffeb97420b0 error 4 in libQt5Qml.so.5.5.1[7fd7b9237000+40e000]


5) Instant messaging app: As far as I know there is no way to rename a contact (as work around to 2a). Show contact information in the right-click menu is usleess, the contact information is only available via hover-over (good luck copying that info). There is no option to reconnect automatically: if internet connection is dropped, it simply goes offline. (I know, some these issues existed in KDE4 version of the app).

6) Scaling in the screen setting does not work on multi-monitor setup (there is no dpi per monitor settings).

Regards.

Sergei.

@sergei_franco,

I hear you... But what is even more annoying is that the Qt 5.x are pretty broken - with very little chance of them ever being fixed...

You forgot:

• non-draggable tabs in Kate
• broken session-loading in Kate
• removal of bar chart progress notifications for file copies
• weird full-screen launcher layout - with favourites down the side (why??!!)
• no synchronisation of favourites between menus (i.e. no global favourites) - why would I want different favourites on a different screen?
• blocking of a patch to allow a user configurable system tray icon size (via a slider)
  ...

I'm subscribed to a lot of KDE bugs - none of them are getting fixed... One major cause of this is that a lot of the broken Desktop behaviour is occurring deep in the Qt libraries.

I'd suggest installing the KDE Neon repo's... Your version of Plasma is really, really old. Things are generally improving a bit on the stability front (not features sadly)... Naturally an in-place upgrade will probably break everything Probably best done in a chroot...

I'm running Gentoo - with the latest builds... Things are still sucky on Qt 5.7.0 / KDE Plasma 5.7.2. More stable? Feels like it...

Bob

Another issue with default plasma volume control (not Kmix) is that the hardware volume control buttons don't work.
Meanwhile Kmix does everything perfectly. It is a bit sad to see Kmix being demoted as volume control app in favour of something that does not even come close.
I think the developers should simply ditch the plasma app for volume control and bring back the Kmix.

P.S. It looks like Kmix successfully shutup the notifications sounds! Yay!

I've been running Plasma 5.5.5 that comes with the latest Kubuntu (by the way, why don't they include Plasma 5.6, which has been released? Any why doesn't the announcement say anything about how to upgrade Plasma?). Anyway, I've upgraded to Plasma 5.6.5 and I see far more serious issues:

0. The display tearing is terrible! I have a Core i5 laptop with an Intel HD graphics card, and Mint and Unity are butter smooth. Plasma though tears the display even when I just scroll this forum page with only text in Chrome! I've tried setting the Compositor to reuse the screen, which promptly brought the OS to its knees (it does mention that it has severe performance issues).

Also, fonts look hideous in 5.6.5. Here's GitHub in Chrome by default:


(full image here- what's up with the lack of attachment and silly limitation to 720px on this forum?)

What magic antialiasing setting do I need to change, and why isn't THAT the default out of the box? UPDATE: this is the only issue from this list fixed in 5.6.5.

1. Dual-monitor support is ridiculously broken - drop down items appear on the other screen, the Application runner shows up in weird places if you reconnect an external display, the taskbar disappears when you disconnect the monitor etc.

2. Kubuntu's Discover is a joke. You can't search for apps. This seriously hurts adoption for new users.

3. You can't activate the launcher menu by pressing the Super key, after YEARS of complains from users, and apps like ksuperkey being developed. Every other DE supports this.

4. The Alt+Tab task switcher displays by default all the windows in the LEFT SIDE of my large monitor. This is plain stupid. I switch among 4-6 apps, and I need to look away from my work in the center, and even scroll in that list sometimes. That defeats the point of quick task switching. You can run Task Switcher and change the layout, but every single visualization sucks! It's quite amazing. A good task switcher would show the window list with previews (they help distinguish between multiple windows of the same application, e.g. Chrome windows), and all windows at once, without having to scroll through the windows. The former condition excludes "Breeze Dark" (which BTW has nothing to do with "Breeze"), "Compact", "Informative" (which isn't any more informative than Breeze Dark and in fact looks exactly like it), "Small icons" and "Large icons". The latter excludes "Cover", "Flip" and "Thumbnails". The only visualization left is "Grid", which is as big as the entire screen. If you have a huge monitor, your eyes have to scan the entire screen to figure out where the window you want to switch to is. This defeats the point of quickly switching among windows.

Not sure how to put it any other way, but all these task switching visualizations are just inferior to the simple window list in Windows 7.

5. You can't switch among windows by pressing Super+0..9. Unity and even Windows support this productivity feature that can save you about an hour a day. I filed a feature request for this.

6. You can't copy text in Konsole with the normal shortcut keys that every other terminal app uses... why?!

7. My Amazon Echo won't connect over Bluetooth no matter what. It works just fine in Mint 18 and Ubuntu Unity on the same laptop. **UPDATE**: turns out the Bluetooth adapter was not visible by default. Go to "Adapters" and make it temporarily or always visible. Again, this hurts adoption, and I'll never get back the half hour I wasted trying to troubleshoot why Bluetooth was working for SOME devices.

8. Speaking of sound, Phonon's "categories" is another joke. No app seems to respect Video or Music, so it's an overly complicated dialog to select whether you want your sound out of this or that device.

9. "Bookmarks" are separated from "Places" and are hidden under a toolbar button. You can favorite directories, but not documents, and the Recent list is very short. Also, some apps don't use the proper File dialogs, e.g. Pinta, so you won't see your Places.

10. The fancy "Okular" document viewer doesn't support one of the most basic graphics formats - animated GIF.

11. You can't add drivers. This means you're stuck with the default display drivers that lead to vertical tearing when you move windows around, and to horizontal tearing when you scroll even simple text pages in Chrome. Also, none of the display output options in SMPlayer managed to remove video playback tearing.

And finally, say you want to file a bug against Plasma. Go to the bug tracker, and type "plasma" in the description... you'll be told to file bugs against the "plasmashell" product, which isn't in the list! See the screencast. Turns out that even the bug tracker has a huge bug that just isn't acceptable nowadays - search only looks for prefixes, not for any word in the product description. <facepalm />

PS: say you want to switch away to another distro and want to burn an ISO to your USB thumbdrive... good luck with that! K3b doesn't support anything but optical drives, despite the team being aware of this since 2010 and UNetbootin can't burn it either.

dandv wrote:I've been running Plasma 5.5.5 that comes with the latest Kubuntu (by the way, why don't they include Plasma 5.6, which has been released? Any why doesn't the announcement say anything about how to upgrade Plasma?).

Kubuntu: Such is the nature of fixed release binary distros, most of them never do major upgrades and barely follow point releases. Which means you are stuck with bugs for ages, unless they backport the hell out of it (which becomes silly at some point instead of simply doing the major upgrade). 5.5.5 means you are almost two full major cycles behind (latest release is 5.7.4).

Upgrade: Why should it? That's your distro package management's business.

dandv wrote:1. The Alt+Tab task switcher displays by default all the windows in the LEFT SIDE of my huge monitor. This is plain stupid. I switch among 4-6 apps, and I need to look away from my work in the center, and even scroll in that list sometimes. That defeats the point of quick task switching. I had to run

Then change that, there are several Alt+Tab switchers to choose from.

dandv wrote:2. You can't activate the launcher menu by pressing the Super key, after YEARS of complains from users, and apps like ksuperkey being developed. Every other DE supports this.

In Plasma 5.8 - we'll see if that fixes (3) as well.

dandv wrote:9. "Bookmarks" are separated from "Places" and are hidden under a toolbar button. Also, some apps are incompatible with the concept, e.g. Pinta.

Surprise, Pinta is a GTK+ application. It's not the first, and won't be the last, package that does not integrate well in desktop X, and vice versa. You can use KDE's Kolourpaint, or Krita, which use native Qt/Frameworks file dialogs, which support Places.

dandv wrote:And finally, the bug tracker doesn't even have a component for Plasma 5 bugs (!).

It's clearly there.

I've upgraded to Plasma 5.6.5 via the backports PPA in the meantime and have updated my original post significantly.

None of the issues I had found were fixed.

a17r wrote:

dandv wrote:I've been running Plasma 5.5.5 that comes with the latest Kubuntu (by the way, why don't they include Plasma 5.6, which has been released? Any why doesn't the announcement say anything about how to upgrade Plasma?).

Kubuntu: Such is the nature of fixed release binary distros, most of them never do major upgrades and barely follow point releases. Which means you are stuck with bugs for ages, unless they backport the hell out of it (which becomes silly at some point instead of simply doing the major upgrade). 5.5.5 means you are almost two full major cycles behind (latest release is 5.7.4).

Alright, what do you suggest in order to get the latest KDE updates?

a17r wrote:

dandv wrote:1. The Alt+Tab task switcher displays by default all the windows in the LEFT SIDE of my huge monitor. This is plain stupid. I switch among 4-6 apps, and I need to look away from my work in the center, and even scroll in that list sometimes. That defeats the point of quick task switching. I had to run

Then change that, there are several Alt+Tab switchers to choose from.

I did, but every single visualization sucks! It's quite amazing. A good task switcher would show the window list with previews (they help distinguish between multiple windows of the same application, e.g. Chrome windows), and all windows at once, without having to scroll through the windows. The former condition excludes "Breeze Dark" (which BTW has nothing to do with "Breeze"), "Compact", "Informative" (which isn't any more informative than Breeze Dark and in fact looks exactly like it), "Small icons" and "Large icons". The latter excludes "Cover", "Flip" and "Thumbnails". The only visualization left is "Grid", which is as big as the entire screen. If you have a huge monitor, your eyes have to scan the entire screen to figure out where the window you want to switch to is. This defeats the point of quickly switching among windows.

Not sure how to put it any other way, but all these task switching visualizations are just inferior to the simple (thumbnail + icon) window list in Windows 7.

a17r wrote:

dandv wrote:And finally, the bug tracker doesn't even have a component for Plasma 5 bugs (!).

It's clearly there.

Not when filtering by description for "plasma". Here's a screencast.

Anyway, looks like none of the problems I reported have any solution. Task switching is mediocre, and newer versions of Plasma are still just as broken. All my issues stand.

Plasma 5.7.4 is the current version, not 5.5.5, not 5.6.5.
Kubuntu's update policy has always been broken but now that even the Backports PPA is ostensibly unmaintained, KDE users should IMO abandon that distribution ASAP.
Among the distributions that ship recent KDE software are Fedora https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/ and openSUSE Tumbleweed https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Tumble ... stallation

If you are still affected by bugs, report them to https://bugs.kde.org

KAMiKAZOW wrote:Plasma 5.7.4 is the current version, not 5.5.5, not 5.6.5.
Kubuntu's update policy has always been broken but now that even the Backports PPA is ostensibly unmaintained, KDE users should IMO abandon that distribution ASAP.

Thanks, would you mind leaving an answer at http://askubuntu.com/questions/820613/u ... tu-16-04-1 too?

Also, how about KDE neon?

Neon also ships the latest KDE software but AFAIK is not yet complete, i.e. some KDE modules could be missing (I'm not too familiar with Neon, so I might be wrong).
Although Neon is also based on Ubuntu, the Neon FAQ says that converting a Kubuntu installation to Neon is not supported.

dandv wrote:Alright, what do you suggest in order to get the latest KDE updates?

I'm not really the one to give advice on binary distributions, but one of your own links revealed that Kubuntu can provide 5.7.2 via staging repositories. Again, not sure what makes them stay two point releases behind.

dandv wrote:I did, but every single visualization sucks! It's quite amazing.

I seem to get by with flip switch quite fine, so let's just state that it doesn't suck for everyone.

dandv wrote:1. Dual-monitor support is ridiculously broken - drop down items appear on the other screen, the Application runner shows up in weird places if you reconnect an external display, the taskbar disappears when you disconnect the monitor etc.

That won't change unless Kubuntu update to a recent Qt release as well, among Plasma.

dandv wrote:6. You can't copy text in Konsole with the normal shortcut keys that every other terminal app uses... why?!

Works for me in regular konsole window as well as yakuake.

dandv wrote:7. My Amazon Echo won't connect over Bluetooth no matter what. It works just fine in Mint 18 and Ubuntu Unity on the same laptop. **UPDATE**: turns out the Bluetooth adapter was not visible by default. Go to "Adapters" and make it temporarily or always visible. Again, this hurts adoption, and I'll never get back the half hour I wasted trying to troubleshoot why Bluetooth was working for SOME devices.

If that half an hour was required to teach you about Bluetooth visibility, then it appears to me that is just the lesson you had to learn. I'm sure it won't happen again to you.

dandv wrote:10. The fancy "Okular" document viewer doesn't support one of the most basic graphics formats - animated GIF.

Okular is a document viewer. GIF is not a document. Gwenview is your image viewer.

dandv wrote:11. You can't add drivers. This means you're stuck with the default display drivers that lead to vertical tearing when you move windows around, and to horizontal tearing when you scroll even simple text pages in Chrome. Also, none of the display output options in SMPlayer managed to remove video playback tearing.

That's not even remotely related to Plasma. You can install any driver you want using your distro's package manager (provided they have it in their package management).

dandv wrote:PS: say you want to switch away to another distro and want to burn an ISO to your USB thumbdrive... good luck with that! K3b doesn't support anything but optical drives, despite the team being aware of this since 2010 and UNetbootin can't burn it either.

`dd` is all you need. (EDIT @below: It makes no sense to follow that sub-topic on its own, but do note that your link's 'advice' comes down to a matter of taste, unless any technical reason given)

a17r wrote:`dd` is all you need.

Here's the thing...
I've switched to using ddrescue following Martin Wimpress's advice...
See here: Ubuntu Mate - How to create a bootable USB Drive ...

YMMV...

KAMiKAZOW wrote:Neon also ships the latest KDE software but AFAIK is not yet complete...

Try Maui Linux: http://distrowatch.com/9517

Maui is Netrunner based on NEON, but providing all (or most of) the apps Neon doesn't. Maui offers a complete system for the getgo.

KAMiKAZOW wrote:Although Neon is also based on Ubuntu, the Neon FAQ says that converting a Kubuntu installation to Neon is not supported.

Yeah, okay, it's not "supported" by NEON. Who cares? It works. My system is two upgrades of Kubuntu converted to Neon. Works fine. I wasn't about to reinstall everything.

I just installed Neon today and unfortunatelly I must agree that the dual-monitor settings are broken. All widgets change places (on the other monitor) for every new reboot. There's a guy with a youtube channel called A J Reissig who made a whole video about how to fix this issue in Opensuse. He made some changes to a file called 50-monitor.conf located under root/etc/x11/xorg.conf.d (If I recall correctly). However I cannot find the xorg.conf.d in x11 in Neon. Does anyone know where I should look for this file?

signahl wrote:I just installed Neon today and unfortunatelly I must agree that the dual-monitor settings are broken. All widgets change places (on the other monitor) for every new reboot. There's a guy with a youtube channel called A J Reissig who made a whole video about how to fix this issue in Opensuse. He made some changes to a file called 50-monitor.conf located under root/etc/x11/xorg.conf.d (If I recall correctly). However I cannot find the xorg.conf.d in x11 in Neon. Does anyone know where I should look for this file?

The standard Xorg-Server configuration files are stored in:

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/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

Which is just a directory of configuration files which replaces the venerable xorg.conf file.

See Arch Wiki: Xorg Configuration ...

You will be booted to a TTY console login if you screw up your X configuration files - you've been warned!!

Bob

In all honesty I didn't read everyone's replies before I wrote this, but you CAN disable the Plasma Apps and use the Non-Plasma apps like Kmix and Klipper easily just by right clicking on the "^" on the system tray and choosing "System Tray Settings", then under 'General' go ahead and UNcheck the Plasma apps you don't want to use like "Audio Volume" (Unchecking this will let you use Kmix without ending up with duplicate volume indicator icons in the system tray), "Clipboard" (Unchecking this will let you easily use Klipper instead of the Plasma Clipboard manager app), and so on for other Plasma Apps. Regarding Notification sounds (and notifications in general) you can manage most of those in "System Settings" under (appropriately enough) "Notifications", in there you can disable sound notifications for many of the various notifications just by selecting the specific notification and then in the lower panel UNcheck "Play a sound". As for the WiFi password issue if you don't NEED to store it in the KDE Wallet system (personally I hate the KDE Wallet system so I disable it), you can manually save your WiFi password in an unencrypted form by editing the file named after your WiFi connection located in:

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/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/

and adding the password to the "[wifi-security]" section in the following format:

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psk=yourpasswordhere

Keep in mind that you need to edit that file as root in order to be able to make changes to it.

I don't use the Instant Messaging options in KDE myself so I can't really help much with how to do anything with those though, but the above information hopefully will help you and anyone else who stumbles across this thread.

PS-Sorry if this seems like a bit of a 'necro post'.