5 months and nothing is fixed

Help
1

Dear KDE dev team. I hate like hell to whine and complain, but while obscure bug fixing is important, so is fixing the gross problems we have all been expressing for the past five months:

  1. Flaky notification boxes that either resize to be tall and thin or a small square box, both with truncated information, that appear all over the place, not by the tray as instructed.
  2. App dialogs that open on the wrong monitor when using multiple displays.
  3. Apps themselves not able to identify the proper display, and opening on the wrong one, especially games that are supposed to open on the “Primary” display, or apps like Kodi that can define the display internally.
  4. full screen apps like games that cannot capture the mouse allowing the mouse outside the game/app and causing all kinds of weird problems due to clicks happening where they should not.
  5. Inconsistent font rendering in KDE apps, EG the font in Ksettings being ugly, dull, and blurry when the same font in Krusader is bright, clear and sharp.
  6. KDE crash reporter never works.
  7. Occasional (and now constant) Plasma crashes upon login. With the exception of the wallpaper and lock screen image, my system is bone stock. No fancy themes. No custom tweaks.
  8. The Discover update icon always reporting new updates when none are actually available and never hiding.

In 2024, the use of multiple displays is commonplace, as it having more than one GPU in a system with many laptops having 2 and many performance oriented media creation/ mining/A.I. compute boxes using upwards of 4 GPUS, many with attached displays.

All of this used to work fine in Plasma 5 and X11. Much of it does not work properly with Plasma 6, and not at all with Wayland.

Many users like myself with somewhat more obscure hardware configurations have offered our time and machines for testing, but rarely are those offers ever taken up. This is hard to fathom as the common reason expressed by devs is that they do not have the equipment to test things properly with. Why then are you not reaching out to us?

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Far out man . Wow.

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I might be missing something, but, do you need special permission to test and report/contribute? e.g. if you:

  • Care about KDE Plasma being able to fulfill your needs
  • Have a hardware configuration that (it seems) isn’t well-covered by the limited resources that developers possess
  • Have direct experience with bugs that are preventing you from successful use

Then you seem like a perfect candidate for making sure that there are fully-detailed, effective bug reports for each of the issues you’re facing?

If you’ve already submitted bugs, or contributed any helpful context that you have to existing bugs, then, awesome! Now, do you have any proposed solutions you can contribute? If so, it’s open source - head to the source and dive in! If not, are you a KDE Supporting Member to help enable the core KDE team to hire people and pay the bills that enable working on those things?

I can appreciate that things which you use and are not working on your personal device is frustrating. However, if I were one of the developers working on this community-driven project (KDE Plasma is generally not used/supported by the major enterprise distros, so mega-companies with deep pockets aren’t often lining up to pay for features/fixes), I might feel disheartened to have resolved 2,547 user-reported bugs over the past five months, and find that the sentiment is “5 months and nothing is fixed”.

This isn’t a corporate situation where the “KDE dev team” has a boss, who is going to say “team, take care of these issues or customers won’t renew their contracts!”. It’s a community - not all of us can write literal code, but there are multiple ways that non-coders can still constructively contribute to help everyone have access to independent, non-MS/Apple-dictated computing experiences. Being a user alone is fine - but engaging with the community about problems you’re experiencing comes (IMO) with a duty to seek out where to help and to do so constructively.

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Thank you for your stock and expected reply.

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I spent about 30 minutes writing that reply, because I wanted to actually check the things that I assumed for myself - hence why I put links within the text (that was from my digging around while writing). So, I am not copy-pasting boilerplate text when I say those things.

I genuinely was not trying to discourage, but was trying to see if a situation in which you seemed defeated could be turned into one in which you could feel included and empowered. Hopefully that can happen for you someday.

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I thought for a sec you meant me.

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So where did you send this hardware so developers could test it?

I have never heard this from KDE devs. I have heard “we don’t have the resources [read time and people power] to test all use cases”. This is quite a different problem.

So… developers have to somehow divine you are having trouble then take the trouble of reaching out to you to solve them?

This makes no sense.

8

Do you have some bug numbers for us to follow up on?

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Last year, an update broke the GPU sensors in Plasma due to a small error in the GPU count checking routine (I use dual dedicated NV GPUs with 4 displays - two per GPU). Turns out the check started at 1 and not 0. After months of waiting, posting a bug report, and not ever seeing it fixed, I came here and complained, much as I have done now. That got the notice of a dev, who then worked with me to identify and solve the problem which we did in a matter of hours, a fix was found, tested, the commit was made, and the changes went out to the whole thing.

I have a source-build setup, and I have compiled Plasma many times. I do not need to send my hardware anywhere (as I use it) as I can do the testing myself, which frees up devs time. It is win win.

If this is community driven software development, then you need to reach out to and participate in the community. You need to listen to, and respond to, OUR needs.

The truth is these niggly little complaints are stuff that you see when you launch Plasma. Broken dialogs, notifications, kwin weirdness, all play to livability. Plasma 6.1 feels incomplete, buggy, and untested.

I am not going to get into semantic debates of the meaning of “resources”. Many devs have stated the lack of testing hardware prevents them from checking all scenarios, even if you have never seen it. In that case, the solution is not to beg for more hardware, but to reach out to us. It is not hard to post a quick message here in the forum asking for help in that regard. Many of us have said we are here to help.

If you do not reach out, if you do not utilize the resources available to you, then don’t get upset when we get fed up with bugs that effect us daily. Everything I mentioned in this post is being experienced by others, and they are all coming after updates.

That is where this complaint is coming from.

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I appreciate the clarity. For me, after 30 years of using Linux, and 25 years using KDE (from 0.9 beta), it gets tiring every time I make a post like this (which is relatively rare) and somebody comes along with the assumption that I am somehow ignorant about what is going on. Open source and community development is not about begging for more money, its about utilizing the community resources. It is about cooperative engagement.

Not everybody is a great coder. I am not. I am a photographer and filmmaker. My skills do not translate well to development. But I do have tons of cool equipment that can be used for testing, and I do have kde source build and have compiled my own Plasma (and an entire system from Kernel up). I am a skilled user.

1 Like
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No, I was not sure if you were serious or mocking (it felt a bit like mocking) so I just ignored it.

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Well, no. And nobody involved in putting Free Software on the Internet does. This may help clarify things:

I am not Supplier

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https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472434
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473758
473532 – Does not Respect "Primary" screen on Wayland (this is also true for x11).
463088 – [Wayland] Pointer confinement not working with subsurfaces (this is also true for x11)
483756 – Plasma crashes after login screen nvidia (similar, but with x11)
488108 – Fonts are blurry in KDE application menus (regression, suspected in 6.0.4 -> 6.0.5) (similar)

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https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472434

I fear this isn’t very actionable in it’s current form. Generally speaking whenever a report is missing extensive steps to reproduce and someone from the community managed to reproduce it there is very little hope of it ever getting any traction. To that end you can be the person to help make things actionable Guidelines and HOWTOs/Bug triaging - KDE Community Wiki

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473758

I’ve proposed a solution for this just now.

473532 – Does not Respect “Primary” screen on Wayland (this is also true for x11).

Sadly, as far as I know lattedock is not maintained anymore.

463088 – [Wayland] Pointer confinement not working with subsurfaces (this is also true for x11)

I believe this is actually being investigated.

483756 – Plasma crashes after login screen nvidia (similar, but with x11)

This too isn’t very actionable. Generally speaking any sort of crash that doesn’t have an associated backtrace is mostly impossible to act on since the problem can be literally anywhere.

488108 – Fonts are blurry in KDE application menus (regression, suspected in 6.0.4 → 6.0.5) (similar)

Seems to me most of the data in there suggests the regression isn’t in KDE code but deeper in the stack.

  • KDE crash reporter never works.

This has no bug report? I am keen to have crash reports working for obvious reasons :wink:

In fact, I fear there’s a broader issue here. You should be making reports for those issues you named. Just because something sounds vaguely related doesn’t mean it is the problem you experience. For example you haven’t listed a bug report for “notification boxes that either resize to be tall and thin or a small square box, both with truncated information” or “apps like Kodi”. Pointer confinement not working on x11 is also not in your listed bugs. “The Discover update icon always reporting new updates when none are actually available and never hiding.” isn’t actually the bug report you linked to either.

I appreciate it’s disheartening to not see “your” issues getting worked on, but honestly you first need to tell us about “your” issues in the form of bug reports. This is even more important when you mention that you can kdesrc-build stuff yourself, it gives us an incredibly powerful avenue of investigation even without reproducing the issue on developer systems.

Obviously having a bug report doesn’t mean it will get fixed any time soon. There’s only so much time in a day. We must pick and choose issues to work on. An issue that causes data loss is simply more important than the letter e getting rendered poorly. Some issues seem trivial but are n fact hugely complicated to solve. It’s a balancing act to be sure.
But!
Having a bug report with good information, reproduction steps, and the like does make it infinitely more likely someone will be able to look into the issue and fix it.

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There is so much to consider and do to actually file a bug report. No wonder I have never done it.

The info in this thread should be a “sticky” if it is not one already.

Vektor

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In a very roundabout way, you could consider reporting bugs as the “payment” for the free software you’re using.

Here’s old blogpost of mine that should help with bug reporting: How I report bugs

It’s very general, as in, fits more than just KDE projects, but maybe it’ll help.

6 Likes