Now that the dust has settled, how are people getting on with Plasma 5?

[Feathers McGraw]

Whenever there is a big change like Plasma4 -> Plasma5, there's bound to be things you like and things you don't.

Now the dust has settled, what are your feelings? Good, bad, or much the same?

[xennex81]

I haven't used 15.04 for long. I'm not gonna install it until I know for certain it can completely install Oxygen icons and preferably also if a better Window Decoration theme were available, imo they all SUCK most are way too transparent to be any good and makes you wonder who these &@*%! are that never have windows maximized? Half or more of themes have transparent title bars that completely ruin the readability of two windows placed on top of each other.

[GreyGeek]

I am running 14.04, which has not upgraded to Plasma5 yet. However, I recently tried out the latest stable release of openSUSE as a guest OS and it's Plasma 5 desktop is beautiful and stable.

Edit: Looks are deceiving! What I thought was Plasma 5 wasn't. OpenSUSE 13.2 is using KDE 4.14.2 with a theme that looks like Plasma 5.

[oldgeek]

I have been using plasma 5 on my netbook (32-bit version) and it hasn't given me any trouble, although I must admit that I use the netbook mostly for testing and not for daily work. As for my desktop, I think I'm going to stick with 14.05 LTS until the 16.04 LTS vesion comes out next year. Not because I'm worried about plasma 5 but because this LTS version works so well I don't see any reason to change it. I like the new graphic scheme on Plasma 5 but haven't tinkered with it. So far, it seems to me that apart from the visual changes I haven't seen any real difference in performance, although I suspect that might be because I don't use the netbook very much (too slow) and so haven't seen it in a variety of different usage patterns.

[Rod J]

I've been trying out Plasma 5 in a virtual machine. It started off quite stable but either I did something to the Virtualbox settings that upset it or something else (update regression maybe?) has made it too crash prone lately. Kwin seems to be the culprit. I'll keep experimenting with it.

It's nice, but I'll be sticking with Plasma 4 for the time being as I prefer the LTS releases.

[dtr]

This choice I think is wrong "Plasma 5 is generally worse than Plasma 5" - I think you mean Plasma 5 is generally worse than Plasma 4

[Snowhog]

This choice I think is wrong "Plasma 5 is generally worse than Plasma 5" - I think you mean Plasma 5 is generally worse than Plasma 4

Corrected on behalf of the OP.

[bsniadajewski]

I am on 15.04 with Plasma5. I find it's par for the course. It looks good. I've had some issues with some of the effects, but I don't know whether it's the nouveau driver or something else.

[Feathers McGraw]

Corrected on behalf of the OP.

Thanks

[jpenguin]

It's pretty good, although it's missing: search and launch, sreensavers, Widgets per desktop...

[notabug]

I have 15.10 Alpha installed on a 9 year old Lenovo X200 with 8 GB of RAM and a dual core Centrino processor. So far I haven't had any problems, no freezes, etc. I will be glad when the apps and widgets catch up with Plasma 5 though.

[Teunis]

I have all kinds of problems with Plasma5, some are to do with still missing applications, others are more fundamental and have to do with system lock up.
Part of the problem seems to be a lack of integration between the nVidia card I use and Plasma.
Like I have to reboot the computer to get a working system, after the first (cold) boot it will eventually lock up.
Even a reboot from Windows works...

But I do like the looks and layout, very pretty and that's important as it is what I see for several hours per day.
I really don't understand what xennex81 is talking about, (I wish I did) but I see no problems with either icons nor transparency or windows decorations.
But this is with the Oxygen theme, Breeze has too many problems in GTK applications like Firefox and Thunderbird.

One of the main uses of my computer is photo editing and because Gwenview has not yet been ported to Plasma5 I need to log in to Kubuntu 14.10 what works flawlessly.
Gwenview in Plasma5 is horrible, no way to set keyboard shortcuts, the KIPI plugins do't work and it doesn't understand auto rotate.

Go for Kubuntu 14.04, if still scared just install it, including Grub, on an external drive and play with it.

One last remark, you don't waste time looking for solutions, you are learning!

[sithlord48]

while i would have newer uses use plasma 4 (because its more mature) i have been using plasma5 on my arch laptop for about 2 months or so now and its been great.there are a few things that are annoying currently but they are missing features i expect to return. (like telepathy seams broken atm.) As more kde parts move to KF5 and plasma5 matures it will only get better. Think about how plasma 4 was for version 4.3 (since current plasma5 is 5.3) plasma 4.3 was just staring to be useable and iirc 4.4 or 4.5 was around when it was working solidly with 4.8 being the next stand out in my mind since it started to become less resource intensive.

[TiberiusDuval]

I'm pretty much impressed, works well enough on my configuration, especially Plasma 5.3. Certainly better than Plasma 4 when it was brand new.

[xennex81]

Thing is, plasma 5 was supposed to introduce all these new features or architectural possibilities. But from the viewpoint of this forum, it is all a black box. No one talks about those features, we don't know about them. To us, plasma5 is just plasma4 that looks differently and works worse. I don't see what was added, and neither does anyone I believe. If we were truly objective, people would be objecting to that and noticing that. But it's too much blind hope.