Just installed 42.1 (clean), and saw KDE Plasma 5 for the first time. It’s pretty, but I really miss a certain feature (different widgets on different virtual desktops). According to the bug tracker, this is not a bug; the feture has been removed and will never be supported. Is there a good way to downgrade to Plasma 4, or would I be better off just starting over with 13.2?
I agree! However, as well as not liking Plasma 5 compared to the 13.2 desktop, there is a much bigger problem and that is the fact that Plasma 5 has a massing memory leak. The memory leak is well publicised and affects other distros too but is not yet fixed.
The only server I updated to Leap 42 has to be rebooted once per week whereas it used to be one per year. The 16GB of memory is being consumed by Plasma 5 at a visible rate. We are now at 10GB is six days. This system has an SSD and never used to swap but I am now faced at looking at the swap strategy as I don’t think swapping to an SSD is a god idea.
I’m sure Leap is ok but the install doesn’t give me the choice of taking the earlier 13.2 KDE - just Plasma 5 or XFCE etc.
Now I have tried it I have decided that LEAP 42 with Plasma 5 is not production ready. How can any system stomach such a memory leak?
I have been using SUSE since V6 (on mini-floppies) and I cannot remember an update that I didn’t like and didn’t implement. That has just changed all in the name of a flashy “Windows-like” desktop.
So, I too would like to downgrade Plasma. I will try the method offered here but I would rather is was just a YAST option. If all else fails then, for the first time. I will have to revert to a prior release.
The how to from the title has been described, but IMHO betting on a dead horse. The KDE devs have been clear on that. Of course Qt’s release policy plays it’s role here too.
AFAIK the devs are currently looking at reimplementing the wallpaper per virtual desktop. The same effect though CAN be achieved, tried that, done that. And separate widget sets per virtual desktop.
Well, I guess it’s a matter of personal attitude ( no judgement intended ). IME ( ~12 hours per day, work, home, hobby ) Plasma5 is stable and ready for production, though I won’t ignore the fact that it has it’s glitches ( mainly on NVIDIA hardware ).
Well, that memory leak has been publicised, yes.
But it’s not a general problem, I don’t see it here e.g.
And similar “memory leaks” have been reported for KDE4 as well, and even Xorg.
One example was a bug in polkit, that I could reproduce on an intel system, but not radeon. A fix for this has been released though.
So unless you file a bug report about your particular “memory leak” (upstream), I don’t really see a chance of it being fixed.
Might even be a problem with the used graphics driver, or some particular application.
Thanks got me out of a difficult situation. Multiple monitors, multiple graphic cards with Xinerama, and an upgrade to Leap 42.1, resulted in a KDE desktop with no task-bar or right-click. Could not find a fix, and apparently this is an issue with QT5.x. So downgrade only option, and got things working again…thanks…
Actually upgrading would be an option too.
Qt 5.6 is now available from KDE:Qt5.
But you’d probably have to upgrade Plasma5 and KF5 too, from the KDE:Frameworks5 repo.
FYI, we added a patch to fix a memleak to 5.5.1 before, but that hasn’t been released as update for Leap 42.1, and I don’t know whether it would fix your problem.
I could provide a package for you to test if you want though.
(then it could also be released as update for Leap, I’m not sure if we will release 5.6 as update…)
The root-cause of this question is the lack of wallpaper per virtual desktop issue, imho the main design flaw in LEAP, with accompanying arrogance if the developers.
There have been so many requests for having different wallpapers, with so many replies addressing or explaining why this is such a wrong idea.
Personally, I cannot digest the standard reply “you can do it with Activities” anymore. It is so not true and so misleading and so patronizing and arrogant.
Activities: different icons, widgets etc. that are appropriate for the certain flavour of task (e.g. “photo editing”, “code development”, etc. ) A great idea. I use it and I love it. I find myself needing only a few, however (say 2).
Within a certain Activity, one can have several different virtual desktops. Also a great idea, although not new, of course. This is what we had, used and loved for ages.
However, the philosophy changed, telling you is that you don’t need to be able to distinguish these desktops, although they are different. Curious concept! I find myself uselessly switching between desktops within the same activity, being desoriented because all the desktops are the same.
Is it known to the developers that only different wallpapers are required? So the same widgets, icons, everything that makes an Activity an Activity. Except for the wallpapers! Why is this such a difficult thing?
How long do we have to beg, before this design flaw -there is no other name for it- will be fixed? When done, the resulting desktop would be by far the best I know. Now it is not.
You’re barking up the wrong tree. What you’re describing is not “in Leap”, it’s in KDE’s Plasma5 desktop. Like any modern distro, openSUSE does nothing but package KDE’s Framework5 and it’s applications.
On the topic: I don’t think there’s many KDE users out there that don’t want this feature back. And, it’s being worked on. Simply a matter of “someone has to actually do it”.
Yes, indeed, and that “someone” also has to be able to set the time aside, from their other many duties, to work on it. So, the work progresses as time permits.
If anyone wants the work to progress any faster than that “someone” can do it, they would have to do it themselves?
Like those users who want that feature back, that “someone” fell victim to those who decided to scrap that feature in the first place.
Now, if he belongs to the latter, he deserves to have to spend some extra-time now.
If not, he will be the hero of many unhappy KDE-users - a nice reward.
My general impression of KDE for some time now is that there seem to be many talented people who know how to do.
But few who know what to do.
KDE4 (the desktop) is dead since last August, face it.
The 4 openSUSE packagers just cannot keep on the work of 100s of upstream developers and keep it alive, in addition to the packaging work they are already doing.
And the crash reports against it at bugs.kde.org are rising in my impression, and are being ignored of course.
Some parts (e.g. kscreen, plasma-nm) even cannot be built any more and would require patching, which again would be additional work.
But sure!
AFAIK the development-guideline for Leap was “solidity first”.
Respecting this simple rule would have excluded Plasma 5 from being the default DE.
P5 should have been given more time to mature in Tumbleweed and then - if really up to the task - could have been considered for Leap 42.2.
Just take a look at the headline of this thread. How come people are looking for ways to downgrade from P5?
KDE4 (the desktop) is dead since last August, face it.
Not here. Still alive and kicking. And very reliable.
The 4 openSUSE packagers just cannot keep on the work of 100s of upstream developers and keep it alive, in addition to the packaging work they are already doing.
And the crash reports against it at bugs.kde.org are rising in my impression, and are being ignored of course.
Some parts (e.g. kscreen, plasma-nm) even cannot be built any more and would require patching, which again would be additional work.
Investing more time and manpower here would have saved time and effort elsewhere.
It is. At least, KDE is selected by default in the installer. If you don’t want to regard that as “default desktop”, so be it.
and I for one had little problems with plasma 5.
Well, I had: crashes (e. g. Dolphin), missing or crippled features, blurred fonts, higher CPU-usage, higher memory-usage. Disappointing. Definitely not what I expected of Leap.
Are you serious here? Hey, I’m not a software-archeologist.
if you don’t like plasma 5 LEAP provides a large choice of other desktops including kde4
You don’t say. We all know that. But desktop is not desktop. They don’t differ just by stability and nothing else. So - obviously - your suggestion is beside the point.
I really don’t get what you’re complaining about, plasma 5 is not LEAP, yes plasma 5 has issues with some hardware but the Desktop is not the OS, if you want kde4 it’s still there just replace plasma 5 with kde4base packages.
The reason kde4 is not an official desktop choice is because the kde devs abandoned it for an unpolished project so maybe your anger is misplaced try here
What can I tell you I installed leap a week before the iso was officialy released as the online repo was active and the only problem I had was in that week before nvidia published the propiatory drivers as novou does not like plasma 5 but I installed a few other desktops, after nvidia published it’s driver I had no real plasma 5 issue, I still miss some features but that’s not up to the openSUSE maintainers but the kde developers
The openSUSE team is great the same day kde released the plasma 5.6 source we had working LEAP packages, you want kde4 they provide kde4 packages even tho they didn’t plan to, you want kde3 it’s there, or go the gtk way you can try LXDE/Xfce/Mate/cinnamon/gnome/…
