Plasma 5.21 rolls out as one of the best looking Linux desktops available

So is this page still up to date? https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
or what are the major showstoppers still?

Something pretty flat, i'd say.
Luckilly for my taste, oxygen is still available and there are other icon themes out there!

Something pretty flat, i'd say.
Luckilly for my taste, oxygen is still available and there are other icon themes out there!

You can also try QtCurve or Kvantum.

I might have to give this another shot. Two things put me off last time:

1. The shoe-horning of the letter K into just about everything. On the few occasions Gnome devs do the same with G (e.g. gThumb), it annoys me there too. But in KDE, it's like a game of "every app is a bad pun". Thank goodness for Dolphin. Maybe others will help buck the trend.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

In the grand scheme of things, neither are show stoppers, but there were enough other paper cuts 18 months ago to put me off overall (one of which was that I used an Nvidia GPU). So yeah, ding ding, round 2, hopefully.

But I'll probably try Budgie too which might be a better fit for me.

So is this page still up to date? https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
or what are the major showstoppers still?

"This page was last edited on 11 February 2021, at 04:06"

At least two things mentioned here might be solved in 5.22 afaik. And of course more improvements may come before 5.22 is released.


Last edited by Izaic on 16 February 2021 at 4:38 pm UTC

I decided over the weekend to swap out my aging Arch Linux install (I've had it for years, and only boot to it occasionally, as it's now 'slow' since it is on a spinning drive) with a SSD and Garuda Linux. I decided to also give KDE a try, and went with their 'Dragonized' version.

Well, I'm hoping the instability was due to having some old KDE config files sitting around, but it would randomly just crash (the Latte dock) and the video playing through Firefox would stop, while the audio kept going. So I wasn't very impressed. I think after I did a reboot this morning, maybe it's working better, but I'll probably do a review on it soon (a mix of Garuda Linux and KDE).

I'm usually a Gnome guy and not used to the dock causing issues like this for sure. But wobbly windows do make me smile still ha!

I might have to give this another shot. Two things put me off last time:

1. The shoe-horning of the letter K into just about everything. On the few occasions Gnome devs do the same with G (e.g. gThumb), it annoys me there too. But in KDE, it's like a game of "every app is a bad pun". Thank goodness for Dolphin. Maybe others will help buck the trend.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

In the grand scheme of things, neither are show stoppers, but there were enough other paper cuts 18 months ago to put me off overall (one of which was that I used an Nvidia GPU). So yeah, ding ding, round 2, hopefully.

But I'll probably try Budgie too which might be a better fit for me.

Yeah I'm trying to like KDE again, but I'll probably return to Gnome again. There is usually something that irritates me just enough in KDE that I won't use it for a year or two to see if they've fixed it. Beyond the stability issues I've ran into so far, I'll say Garuda is pretty decent. Though I'm getting the feeling that much like most 'based on' distributions, I may end up going back to a strictly Arch Linux install, as it was nice and stable, until I didn't keep it updated for a while.. :P Last time I tried booting into it, things were crashing all over the place, and I had to chroot from my Debian install to get it updated.

Something pretty flat, i'd say.
Luckilly for my taste, oxygen is still available and there are other icon themes out there!

You can also try QtCurve or Kvantum.

I gave kvantum a shot in the past, maybe i can see it again how it performs.
I'd prefer qtcurve, but as far as i know the visual configuration tools are no more, so it is a bit hard to craft a new theme.
In the kde4 era i've had a lot of fun making themes with it :)
https://store.kde.org/p/1005548


Last edited by kokoko3k on 16 February 2021 at 5:41 pm UTC

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?

I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.

I might have to give this another shot. Two things put me off last time:

1. The shoe-horning of the letter K into just about everything. On the few occasions Gnome devs do the same with G (e.g. gThumb), it annoys me there too. But in KDE, it's like a game of "every app is a bad pun". Thank goodness for Dolphin. Maybe others will help buck the trend.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

In the grand scheme of things, neither are show stoppers, but there were enough other paper cuts 18 months ago to put me off overall (one of which was that I used an Nvidia GPU). So yeah, ding ding, round 2, hopefully.

But I'll probably try Budgie too which might be a better fit for me.

I don't think they name new applications with a K anymore. The ones that I do have installed on my system I am okay with like Konsole and kRunner.

Executing Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.

Good enough reason for me

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

Executing Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.

Good enough reason for me

Yeah, that was their "little joke" at the time - the user is an unfixable security vulnerability. Why are devs? Just... why? They can absolutely get in the bin with that attitude.

This has annoyed me all over again, so I'll spitefully not bother trying KDE after all.


Last edited by scaine on 16 February 2021 at 6:37 pm UTC

1. The shoe-horning of the letter K into just about everything.

The use of K for branding was dropped a long time ago.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo.

You don't need to run Kate with sudo. If you really must, you can do the sensible thing and use sudoedit, but Kate will prompt for authorisation when saving a privileged file when run as a normal user anyway.

Not having an easy solution for privileged use of Dolphin is a pain: some file management tasks, particularly as a new user, are much less error-prone when done in a graphical file browser. But you wouldn't have been using sudo with Dolphin in the old days anyway: it would have been kdesu.

[quote=scaine][quote=KohlyKohl]

Yeah, that was their "little joke" at the time - the user is an unfixable security vulnerability. Why are devs? Just... why? They can absolutely get in the bin with that attitude.

This has annoyed me all over again, so I'll spitefully not bother trying KDE after all.

Oh Kome on sKain, what's the problem with a little joke?

For the most part I don't interact with any of the K-commands directly that I know of. I tend to stick with xterm rather than their console FWIW.

[quote=rcrit][quote=scaine]

Yeah, that was their "little joke" at the time - the user is an unfixable security vulnerability. Why are devs? Just... why? They can absolutely get in the bin with that attitude.

This has annoyed me all over again, so I'll spitefully not bother trying KDE after all.

Oh Kome on sKain, what's the problem with a little joke?

For the most part I don't interact with any of the K-commands directly that I know of. I tend to stick with xterm rather than their console FWIW.

I've been using Tilix for so long now, that Konsole and gnome-terminal seem last century...
Anyhow, just trying to give KDE an honest try. Wonder how long I'll be able to deal with it until I switch again. Usually lasts about a week ha.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?

I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.

SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit <file>

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?

I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.

you don't need to run kate as sudo, you just do "kate path/to/file" and when you save it'll ask for the password, I think this was done to prevent any buggy code to be potentially used for privilege escalation.

2. Dolphin and Kate can't be run as sudo. I get the reasons why they did this, but absolutely screw any DE or app which takes the law into its own hands.

Out of curiosity, is it allowed at least under Wayland?

I wouldn't think so. But I ran into the 'no kate as sudo' issue yesterday as I was trying to edit the mirrorlist on garuda linux as the installer kept messing up something. Vim wasn't installed, Nano wasn't installed... tried kate, but it wouldn't let me open it with sudo... talk about annoying.

Finally managed to get something working.

SUDO_EDITOR=kate sudoedit <file>

Ha this would have helped when it was busted. Now I can use vim :)

you don't need to run kate as sudo, you just do "kate path/to/file" and when you save it'll ask for the password, I think this was done to prevent any buggy code to be potentially used for privilege escalation.

It didn't do that for me this weekend. I was trying to update my grub conf files for a hard drive switch. It would just give a "denied" error message.

I ended up just doing it in nano, at least the terminal allowed some cut and paste of UUIDs.


Also for those that thought the K and G brandings weren't so bad, I have one word for you.....

Galculator

Enough said.

The team dedicated this release to Gustavo Carneiro, a KDE contributor from Brazil that died in January of COVID-19