I had a brief (really brief, like an hour) stint with KDE5

[Eadwine Rose]

I am fiddling around with fresh installs and such on different SSDs in my system. Finding out LOADS of things and learning way more than I bargained for, but so far.. despite it being annoying at times, it still is fun.


So.. today I decided to put a clean install to tinker with on one of the SSDs. And then to install KDE5 on it using MXPI.

The install went just peachy, updated everything, then installed KDE5 and even found out how to log into it (which I forgot to look up how to but DID remember it was somewhere on the screen with the login fields).

In this brief hour long stint I managed to:

• 1. make it freeze all save for the mouse, needing a hardware reset, simply by adjusting the panel height.
  2. lose my main screen's desktop background, dunno why that happened but needed to log out and in to get it back.
  3. find out that root actions in Dolphin are teh gone. Needs installing an extra package to get that back, thank you to Richb for knowing which one.
  4. find out that to start Synaptic it wants your USER password. Entering your root pass like you would expect it to makes Synaptic unresponsive and throws up the screen "do you wish to end or wait?"
  5. finally get into the syslog, only to see that kde throws these errors in there about org.kde.runners.baloo, in fact riddling syslog with that.
  6. really realize that xfce is more stable to use, that even as a noob it never did the 1&2 on me even though I did stupid bleep back when.
  7. run right back to mama

Yeah.. my experimenting days.. err minutes! with KDE5 are over

[Head_on_a_Stick]

The Plasma desktop is utterly gorgeous (and pretty lightweight these days) but it's too fiddly by far — even the knobs have knobs on them

Baloo is the indexing system, turn that off unless you have an SSD:

Code: Select all

balooctl suspend
balooctl disable

[Eadwine Rose]

I have 4 SSDs.. so.. can't turn that off.


In any case.. not going back in there. Not even poking it with a ten foot pole

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I have 4 SSDs.. so.. can't turn that off.

Well it's not needed for SSDs, it just won't slow the system down so much if you have them.

Indexing stores the location of all of the files on the system (and their contents as well if desired) to speed up searches from the desktop.

Anyway, I don't like Plasma either :P

[Stevo]

If we ever did an official Plasma release, I don't doubt we would have it preconfigured to work around those problems, like we've had to do with Debian's XFCE.

You could also have tried one of the unofficial KDE MX respins to see if those are less problematic, even in a Live session or in a virtual machine.

[Eadwine Rose]

True, I could have, but I wanted to do it myself

[junoluna]

nice that we have choice

i installed KDE a week or so ago as an experiment and have found it brilliant..

in my case, it is using 15% of my 3,5 gigs of ram at start up compared to xfce's 23% ....

it also uses far less RAM once I have apps running... i have tried comparing with the same 5 apps open and a torrent client open for 2 hours ... )42% compared with 62%)
left on overnight the difference is even greater with the same processes running

I like KDE so much that i have now installed it on my other systems .... though i also like xfce ... it's the operating system that is most important for me ... think i can cope with any DE ... (except Gnome and anything that involves tiling)

[Eadwine Rose]

That is the great thing about this huh.. the choice we have :)

[junoluna]

yes ... the choice is wonderful

now if only i could get roadblox to work on MX, i could fully convert my daughters .... they pretty envious of all the tinkering we can do with linux but that dam game has them bound to windows

[asqwerth]

I like the fancy frosted translucent glass effect you can get in Plasma on dolphin, konsole, and the right click context menus. I have that on my KDE Neon install.

But it's true there are just tons and tons of control and tweak settings available. It can be overwhelming.

I'm just not as familiar with Plasma compared with gtk-based DE.