Aight, hear me out. I've used Plasma for a long time. Briefly used it for maybe 2 weeks back in 2018 or so, and am now using it regularly on my main PC.

I feel like Plasma continues to get worse each update. For example, there was that one update a few weeks back that changed up those system monitor widgets. And that is genuinely my least favorite update yet. For me, the widgets are SUPER buggy. I have to completely reload plasmashell in order to actually apply changes to widgets, because when I change the type (i.e. text to pie chart) it completely disappears. Also, they look WAY different from what I like. Before this update, my widgets looked GREAT. But now I don't have these preconfigured widgets that just work anymore. To get them back to what they were like I have to do a TON of configuration. And I'm not doing that. PLEASE bring back the old widgets.

So that one was a pretty big example. And pretty much the only "good" one, per se. But I've also noticed it becoming "bloated". Back when I started regularly using it (late 2019), the shell overall took up about 100 MB of RAM, which is about on par with the other DE I always use, LXDE. But now, it takes up around 200-300 MB after a reboot, and doesn't get any better after that. Considering I've always got memory-intensive applications like Discord, Firefox, GIMP, and VSCode open most of the time, memory is already a pretty big issue, and it doesn't help that it's using triple what it used to.

So, that may not exactly be bloat, but it's a genuine problem nonetheless. Well, you know what's probably my biggest problem with Plasma as a whole?

It's that it is literally getting slower. Back in late 2019, plasma was really fast--booting up would take about 3-5 seconds tops. Now it takes upwards of 10-15 seconds. Thats already a problem, but the BIG issue is with the Plasma applications. For example, KSysGuard is great and lightweight, but nowadays it's using up at least 15% of my CPU, and opening it up takes 2x as long as it used to. Spectacle now takes up to 5x as long to take a screenshot than before.

Those are the 2 most extreme cases. Now, you might say that it's just regular system rot (after all, this is a 10-year old PC running Intel), but are you saying that an application becoming 5x slower in the span of 7-9 months is natural system slowdown? Yeah, no.

Plus, everything else on my system is actually speeding UP over time, while Plasma is slowing down.

Anyway, this is NOT just to bash Plasma. I love Plasma and will likely continue to use it for a while (Might switch to LXQt or LXDE if they fix lxpanel). This is simply a small little post to share my thoughts of Plasma getting worse over time, nothing else. Thanks for reading, and feel free to spam angry comments at me.

The old monitoring widgets were nice and useful. The new ones are useless and ugly. I tried to use the chart graph to imitate the old look, but with no luck. Everything with more than one source is a colorful mess (cpu cores, network interfaces, disk activity, disk space usage). I doubt anybody can get any information from this. Please consider getting the old widgets back. Thanks.

mot wrote:The old monitoring widgets were nice and useful. The new ones are useless and ugly. I tried to use the chart graph to imitate the old look, but with no luck. Everything with more than one source is a colorful mess (cpu cores, network interfaces, disk activity, disk space usage). I doubt anybody can get any information from this. Please consider getting the old widgets back. Thanks.

Yeah, the new widgets are so terribly buggy it's actually insane. Now, I have to resort to writing my own custom things. Luckily, the "System Load" widget is a good enough replacement. But the loss of network activity is a huge problem. Thanks for replying!

I just downloaded the old version and place the appropriate widgets in the home directory, which override the system widgets.
See this post
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=166482#p434810

mot wrote:I just downloaded the old version and place the appropriate widgets it in the home directory, which override the system widgets.
See this post
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=166482#p434810

Ah, that works. Thanks, now I don't have to waste any more time on this, because God knows how much time I've spent trying to figure out how Qt works.