Plasma 6 update is disappointing.
More bugs than Plasma 5, at the time of writing I have already filed 3 reports about the task switcher, 1 about the panel, and some others. Minutes ago I filed one about fullscreen crashes. And among them some are about performance issues. Things that were smooth in Plasma 5 is now sluggish and glitchy in Plasma 6.
Honestly I’d pretty much roll back to Plasma 5, but alas I’m using Arch Linux the rolling release distro, rolling back can be difficult, especially given the fact I’m busy irl.
Not having temper here, nor coming here to say KDE sucks after having some unhappy experiences. But I think KDE should notice the situation.
OP missed a comma, he meant that stuff worked fine in 5, but 6 is glitchy.
To OP:
Stop using rolling distros if you value stability as much as you seem to. I’m not saying that Plasma 6 is flawless, not at all, I myself held back and stuck to 5 because I do graphic design and Wayland is a PITA with some workflows. But if you choose a rolling distribution, stop whining; report bugs and deal with the downsides.
Bug reports is the best way to get developers to “notice the situation”.
Yeah I understand, Arch is a rolling release and I have to stick with the latest updates. But I like Arch, so I what I can do is indeed just report bugs.
Those bugs are already reported when I send this post, I just want the devs know there’s sth wrong: Plasma 6 has too many bugs, the dev team probably made a bad decision to make all these happen, and this current situation need their attention.
You should use more than 1 device. I have 5 laptops, 4 are Tumbling and 1 is running Leap 15.6. With the issues (Task Manager) in KDE6 on Tumble, I will be moving another laptop to Leap in the near future.
There are always some disappointments. Certainly the issues surrounding Grid and Overview regressions compounded with some issues switching over from X11 to Wayland…
However, I’m finding little difference in smoothness or glitchy behaviour between X11 and Wayland on Plasma 5 and Plasma 6…
So whilst I’m sorry to hear that you have issues, I’m more interested to see what information you omitted from your post - because many issues are related to hardware, rather than the software.
That’s interesting, I thought these would happen on other’s computers as well, at least with reduced severity of symptom.
What info do you need? For reports there’s a link above to a list of issues reported by me. For hardware, I will list them below:
Basically it’s an old laptop, ~10 years old, NVIDIA GT 750M, Intel i7 3630QM, 16GB RAM.
I looked through your issues. Most are not actually regressions in Plasma 6 (i.e. not regressions or regressions that happened in the past rather than in Plasma 6, and you only noticed them now). The actual regressions I can see only affect people using very old NVIDIA GPUs on X11. That would be why developers didn’t notice them. It’s not feasible for Plasma’s very small development team to test every hardware combination in the world, and we rely on user bug reports, so thanks for providing them.
If I may hijack this thread - I have an on-topic experience too.
Have any of the developers tested global hotkeys with multiple keyboard layouts?
I would like to know if they find the behaviour intuitive or at least usable. And this IS a regression no doubt.
Some tickets over few years (it has been “fixed” and broken like 6 times xDD )
There is ton of others, these are just some i was able to quickly find:
Since I cannot post links, there are IDs
kde#453661
kde#375518
kde#309193
kde#484063
kde#471370
kde#455444
kde#402913
xkeyboard-config freedewsktop gitlab#428
qt#116873
If you follow the rabbit to the hole, you will find numerous MRs and commits that were supposed to fix this or “finally really fix” this in span of 5-10 years. But it appears about twice an year over and over. Last time with the KDE6/wayland switch - custom global hotkeys from KDE5 are forgotten and the default ones work only for english layout.
Also if the change was intentional (hotkeys being assigned to the characters rather than the physical key, which kind of breaks mnemonic usage of hotkeys), I would expect to at least mention it in a blog post or a news article related to the KDE6 release, since this is a huge change in behaviour (and not the first one with this particular case).
I would suggest to both create a new topic for this discussion and more importantly remember that KDE Plasma is a community effort. The transition over to wayland and the new hotkey system is clearly not as mature as one would expect.
That said if you want to help fix this issue you can either contribute yourself or bring the severity of the issue to the attention of kde devs by posting these bug reports in an easy to access topic instead of a reply. I would also encourage not submitting duplicate bug reports as it is unnecessary and these duplicates are closed as such pretty quickly.
Well actually I know only a part of my issues are regressions, and I didn’t want to mean most of them are. Sorry if it was confusing.
Yes I understand the team won’t test every hardware, especially old ones. It was because at first I thought these affect other users with new hardware, at least with descent modern hardware as well, only after you looked into them I know they might only effective to old hardware like mine, and also X11.
Thanks for your effort by the way, I see you started investigating my reports the moment I post my issue list, that’s really appreciated!
Yeah, at first I didn’t know and even expect some of them are only effective to old hardware and X11, I only know this after Nate Graham started looking into my reports. This is why I felt the update was a bad one, I thought there were regressions going on. Now everything is understandable, Plasma 6 is no longer disappointing for me.
About the duplicates, I didn’t mean to post duplicated reports. Sometimes existing duplicated reports are hard to find by searching.
And for contribution, I’d like to if I have the ability, sadly I’m not so spared in coming months, and my coding skill still requires more practice. So what I can do is only filing reports.
In my case plasma 6 is working perfect except for Discover, just since the update to Plasma 6.0.3 broke and does not work, I have to update by terminal but well it is something minimal, I saw that many have the same problem so I hope it is resolved soon.
I’m sorry, but hardware is always going to trip up a small percentage of users.
Sadly, this likely also correlates to users who squeeze every ounce out of their hardware and don’t have much money to spend… yet such users still insist on buying laptops (which I always, and still do, consider a fairly premium option).
If you buy an iPhone, it’s gonna work well for 6 years, not so well after 7.
With an Android device the lifespan will vary even more.
The same story applies with your mobile device, you’re looking at 10 years PLUS it’s a notebook version Nvidia.
I bought a low end HP Pavillion desktop with a core2duo, and never made the jump to a laptop - instead just adding a new PSU and a cheap used nVidia 6800 GT (from 2004) to play Crysis (badly).
2013 - ditched the nVidia and went with an i3-4130 which brought me a superb smooth and fluid desktop (with Compiz at that time) with HD4400 graphics. No games… computer gaming has always been a comparitively expensive game.
Finally, 2 years ago came the Ryzen 5600G. So even without dedicated graphics, it’s good to upgrade hardware after 10 years if it’s not just a play CPU running servers (I’m sure my initial Core2duo would still work well for many things - but I wouldn’t use Plasma on that).
Now, just for fun, divide the cost of your mobile device by 10 years and let’s see what the rate is.
So whilst I do sympathise with you, I must say that nobody should be buying a laptop and thinking it’s something it isn’t… similar to folks buying phones, tablets - you’re limited in upgrading components which makes for a more limited lifespan. Can’t switch out the motherboard and CPU, more importantly, can’t switch out the graphics unless you pay a good deal more money for an advanced laptop.
So really, what’s disappointing you is that you have to face the fact that the hardware is reaching some limits with Plasma.
Just as your Nokia Lumia would be struggling, or even the iconic iPhone 6.
If money is an issue, then buy yourself an ATX box and start filling it up - at least then you will never have to replace the whole thing in one go, or ditch the whole thing - including your keyboard/screen when the time comes.
I’m sure we’re all aware of the (lack of) upgradeability of mobile devices. I don’t see how that’s particularly relevant if OP’s reported bugs are actually bugs, which they seemingly are: the majority of them are either marked as confirmed or resolved.
That’s not a sign of their hardware reaching its limits then, their issues will most likely be gone by the next time they upgrade plasma.
telling laptop users they should have bought a desktop PC instead is about the same level as the “just buy multiple devices” advice. Laptops serve a different purpose. How can you give this advice without knowing OPs use case better than you do? Maybe they need to travel with their device.
Not that it would even help if you were right about their purchase being a mistake, now that they clearly already have the laptop and it’s probably past the return window.
Uh plasma6 works with wayland. you prefer x11 plasma5 to wayland plasma6 just cuz of some bugs? I mean ok but I’ve been waiting a loooong time for wayland and I’m super happy to have it. I’m on kde neon and the bugs don’t bother me a single bit with the smooth scrolling and super snappy windows. windows open like lightning now. ok ok ok i’ll shush
