I need to vent off some steam because I updated to KDE 6 yesterday. Today I’m already so fed up with this environment that it has gotten to a point where I feel the need to voice my frustration of shipping what feels like a beta-test to a wide audience as a full release.
Plasma 6 is utterly unusable for me. I am using X11 because I have had repeated trouble with Wayland in the past, such as waking my PC up from hibernation to find my entire graphical setup glitched out to the point of being unusable and looking like I had a broken GPU, to constant crashes and a laggy interface.
I stuck with X11. Now obviously when I first booted up Plasma I forgot that it puts Wayland as a default. So I already had some mild annoyance over the fact I had to change that.
But it was soon about to get way way worse.
The next time I booted up my system the wallpaper on my second monitor was pushed up about 60% of the height of the screen. That black area was essentially dead although the vertical task bar I had was still ontop of that and I could move my mouse there. I couldn’t click or anything, it just sat there. After a restart it was my other monitor being pushed 40% the width of my screen to the right, to the point where the desktop on the left monitor suddenly overlapped with the one on the right. A restart for a THIRD time finally fixed that.
As a developer I also tend to use a few IDEs and I had to use JetBrains for one of my projects. It has some insanely frustrating behavior where the Window shows that it is supposedly open, but you can’t click on anything and it doesn’t react. Calling the window up again to try and click again yields the same result, the window is effectively dead.
I can’t just sit around and restart my IDE every 15 minutes.
After that I ran into an issue where I get a laggy task bar and laggy window switches if I have more than 7 windows open at a time. It becomes extremely chuggy and unresponsive.
I understand that programming an entire desktop environment is a mammoth task and extremely complex to achieve. But if you ship a display driver in an unstable condition such as this where I can tell on the second day of using it that this is simply unusable in my day to day operations then I seriously have to question why this wasn’t made into a beta release. It’s extremely frustrating to me to have to deal with so many obvious issues in a product which I rely so heavily on because this wasn’t tested enough. I really enjoy some of the changes that were made but the negatives far overshadow the positive sides.