Moving to Plasma 5.4

[Rich Oliver]

I've been using Plasma 5 on Tumbleweed on my desktop and I've installed it on Arch on my Laptop, although I never actually do anything on it apart from "pacman -Syu". Because of various problems, my Kubuntu installs have ended up as 14.04's, which is also my default install for other people. Anyway I'm keen to start playing around with Wayland. I started to work though the Hello World Wayland app some time back, using Weston and Gnome (yuck ).

Now I believe 15.10 beta is out later today, so what would the good people of the forum recommend? Should I install the 15.10 beta or is safer to back port plasma 5.4 to 15.04? A few months back I installed 15.04 on a friend's Asus. It was OK but then I back ported 5.2 (or it might been 5.3) and then the desktop didn't boot.

[NickStone]

I would say "go for it". I would be interested in hearing about your Arch install. If 15.10 beta is going to be a problem for you, you could try Manjaro Plasma Next which also has Plasma 5.4. You can get it here -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/man...5.08/kde-next/

[GreyGeek]

I'm running Arch fullscreen as a guestOS under VirtualBox. It's Plasma5 is nice, it's stable, but it's selection of widgets is still limited. After playing with it off and on for several months I must say that I still prefer Plasma4 as expressed by Kubuntu 14.04. If the Kubuntu bruhaha turns out to be a storm in a tea pot then I'll revert to my original plan of staying with 14.04 until its EOL in April of 2019. At that time I'll re-evaluate Plasma5.

That assumes that this Acer 7739 is still operating. If not what I'll do at that point is up in the air. After obtaining an iPhone + with 64GB last December I've put everything I've done with Kubuntu onto it and much more. It's down sides are that I have limited access to app data, such is the walled garden, and the display form factor is very limiting ... there are several activities that are MUCH easier to do on my 17" Acer display, which is when I revert to Kubuntu. My iPhone and the GDrive is with me everywhere I go. My Acer is too big to haul around and three hours of battery life is too limiting. Even my wife's 10" diag Acer 0D521 is too large for lugging around. I may be at a sea change.

[guest007]

aptitude search plasma | grep ^i
i kdeconnect-plasma - connect smartphones to your KDE Plasma des
i kdeplasma-addons-data - locale files for kdeplasma-addons
i libkf5plasma5 - Plasma Runtime components
i libkf5plasmaquick5 - Plasma Runtime components
i libplasma-geolocation-interface - Plasma Workspace for KF5 library
i libplasma3 - Plasma Library for the KDE Platform
i plasma-dataengines-addons - additional data engines for Plasma
i plasma-desktop - Tools and widgets for the desktop
i plasma-desktop-data - Tools and widgets for the desktop data fil
i plasma-framework - Plasma Runtime components
i plasma-nm - Plasma5 networkmanager library.
i plasma-runners-addons - additional runners for Plasma 5 and Krunne
i plasma-scriptengine-javascript - JavaScript script engine for Plasma
i plasma-wallpapers-addons - additional wallpaper plugins for Plasma 5
i plasma-widget-kimpanel - KIMPanel widget for Plasma
i plasma-widgets-addons - additional widgets for Plasma 5
i plasma-workspace - Plasma Workspace for KF5


aptitude show plasma-desktop
Package: plasma-desktop
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 4:5.3.95-0ubuntu1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/kde
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 7,777 k


Kubuntu 15.10 seems very stable to me, I have used it for weeks without a single problem.
The default icons could be clearer or more detailed but a very minor detail. I'm very happy to keep using Wily without any hesitation.

[Rich Oliver]

Kubuntu 15.10 seems very stable to me, I have used it for weeks without a single problem.
The default icons could be clearer or more detailed but a very minor detail. I'm very happy to keep using Wily without any hesitation.

Oh maybe I'll go with 15.10 then, but I think I'll wait till the Kubuntu forum opens for 15.10. Is there any problem using WINE on the cutting edge Kubuntu? I want to simplify my distro set up and use the same set on my desktop as my laptop, as I don't have the time to really learn the full workings of one distro. So I just want one version of Kubuntu. Anyway the Ubuntu installer makes it a pain in the neck to try multi-boot multiple Ubuntu derivative distros. I want to erase my Arch distros, the one on my desktop stopped booting a while back. If the Kubuntu 15.10 was stable then I could erase Tumbleweed as well and just run Kubuntu 15.10 and Suse 13.2, which still wins on partitioner, usb distro image installation and boot up speed.

[GreyGeek]

THis thread is old but seems to be a good place to report on the upgrade to Plasma 5.4.1 in my Arch guest OS. I just completed a 408 app udpate and rebooted.
Two words: Beautiful and fast!
Did I say it was fast? I am posting thise using firefox in Arch. FF, Dolphine, the desktop ... everything is running faster in Plasma 5.4.2 in the guest OS than Plasma 4 does running on bare metal.
Sweet!

[NickStone]

THis thread is old but seems to be a good place to report on the upgrade to Plasma 5.4.1 in my Arch guest OS. I just completed a 408 app udpate and rebooted.
Two words: Beautiful and fast!
Did I say it was fast? I am posting thise using firefox in Arch. FF, Dolphine, the desktop ... everything is running faster in Plasma 5.4.2 in the guest OS than Plasma 4 does running on bare metal.
Sweet!

We have a convert!

The only thing stopping me from upgrading to plasma5 is the photo/picture widget that allows you to view photos on the desktop. Silly reason not to upgrade I know.

[GreyGeek]

Plasma4 still has more features, power and widgets than plasma5, but this last update was an unbelievable advance for plasma5.
Convert? Indeed! I also noticed that the latest Arch included Btrfs. Without it I would never bother even to test a distro.
Now, for the time being, I can switch to plasma5 guest OS and know that I won't suffer speed penalties!

[Rich Oliver]

Much appreciation to those working the cutting edge, but for myself, I'm putting it on the back-burner. I installed Opensuse Leap RC and plasma still kept crashing. I have to say I think Opensuse 13.2 really should go down as one of the all time great distros. Its been so solid and so fast. With hindsight its a bit of a shame there is no Systemd Kubuntu spin using Kde 4, as I fear it will be some time before plasma 5 gets back to where plasma 4 reached. I shall probably encourage others (less technical users) to install Kubuntu 14.04 right up until Kubuntu 16.04 is released. That's assuming there will be a 16.04 of course.

Although I guess when 15.04 final comes out I won't be able to resist trying it on my laptop.

[GreyGeek]

OpenSUSE is a really great distro. I made a guest OS of it to test both Btrfs and Plasma5.
It's Plasma5 wasn't, at the time, any better than Kubuntu's version, but its implementation of Btrfs was well polished. However, I found Kubuntu's version was implemented better, IMO.

I ran SuSE from Sept of 1998 till Novell spoiled it, purchasing 23 copies from their Windriver vendor over the five years I used it.
I then switched to other distros that used the RPM but they were less satisfactory - too often I encountered version flopping due to to a form of "dll hell". When I sampled a deb based distro using apt the quality of behavior amazed me. I doubt I will ever use an RPM based distro again. I recently checked out a guest OS of Arch using Plasma5. It's neither RPM nor deb but works well.