Tips for Testing and Finding Bugs in KDE Plasma

Hello, community! :wave:

I’m an active user of KDE neon Unstable Edition, using it as my primary system, and I’m actively testing new features of KDE Plasma. However, I want to become more efficient in finding bugs.

I’d love to hear your tips, recommendations, and personal experiences. Thanks in advance for your help! :pray:

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Hi! Folks who are more experienced with direct software development will have better ideas, I’m sure, but some things came to mind when I read this that might start the conversation:

  • First things first - when you do identify bugs, making sure that your issue reports follow the guidelines in Get Involved/Issue Reporting - KDE Community Wiki will give them the best chance of being fixed.

  • Simply use the software for typical daily routines, to help find those critical issues that impact folks’ ability to get their daily tasks done - which it sounds like you’re already doing with your primary system!

  • Make a list of things you use your device for that aren’t daily, and test them even if they’re not due up. That way, you don’t have to wait for the regular cadence of “monthly process A” to find that there’s an issue with something used by that process.

  • Use every device and peripheral that you have access to - laptop/desktop, AMD/Nvidia/Intel, different input devices, etc. - if possible. FOSS developers are inherently constrained in what they can test themselves by all of the permutations of hardware and software out in the world - the more combinations that can be tested by folks who are interested in improving the software, the better.

Bonus: Ask friends and family to perform tasks on your device. Folks who are less familiar with your system layout are more likely to follow a different order of steps, click in different places, move windows differently, etc. This is more helpful for finding usability issues, but can also help expose things that you subconsciously don’t even try - e.g. a kid might repeatedly click on a launcher icon because Minecraft isn’t loading, which could expose a bug that requires multiple mouse click events during high CPU load :slight_smile:

Just a few ideas from a hobbyist user!

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Hi! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and advice — they’re incredibly helpful and insightful! :blush:

I do have some experience with bug hunting, particularly with Ubuntu Daily Builds and ALT Regular Gnome, so I’m familiar with the process. However, I wanted to hear additional tips and strategies to improve my approach.

For example, here’s a bug I recently reported: Bug 498536 - Some issue description. This shows that I can indeed find and report bugs, but I want to ensure I’m covering more ground and being as effective as possible.

To make my testing more focused, I’ve decided to use KDE applications wherever possible. For example, instead of VLC, I’ll switch to KDE apps like Dragon Player or Elisa to spot issues directly in the KDE ecosystem.

Thanks again for your tips! I’ll definitely be trying some of them out. :blush:

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