KDE Plasma continues improving to stop you breaking things

Quoting: STiAT[edit] they even have a steam repo... with nvidia and steam I'm well done, I think I can switch properly to their repos. They even have Spotify. Steam, Spotify, NVidia are usually my software issues ... all covered. Nice.

The multimedia repo also contains all smaller repos, so just including this one should be sufficient for your use case.

PS: Spotify is also on flathub/flatpak, that’s even more convenient if you dare to use flatpak :)


Last edited by jens on 6 February 2022 at 8:53 am UTC

Quoting: amataiYeah, Plasma keep breaking thing on my computer so that I don't have to break them I suppose.

I keep giving KDE another chance every few months, but it's just never been a good experience for me. I love a lot of the KDE ecosystem, but for some reason basic stuff that just works in GNOME, like pairing a Bluetooth gamepad or, like, playing audio in Firefox, does not work in KDE on the same machine for no reason I can easily discern. And then, when I go back to GNOME, I have to spend extra time fixing the stuff KDE broke that it shouldn't have been able to break.

I think KDE is improving though. The frequency of breakage is lower than when I first starting using it.

At least for me, the most common breakage is during updates, which would be negated by the Steam Deck's image update plan. So it's not a big deal. Besides all it really needs to do is display Steam, pretty sure all the DE's can do that with no fuss. Everything else is extra, in a sense.

I'm surprised the Steamdeck team chose KDE for the DE, and not something simpler and less resource heavy like XFCE. Being that it's a battery powered device (sometimes) I would think they'd want to squeeze every single compute cycle they could and isn't KDE the heaviest DE out there?

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: NanobangFlashy, fast, and flexible. Yeah, I can see why Valve might've chosen it for the Steam deck.

I'm strangely thrilled that the Discover upgrade will be including version dates.

I think knowing a version number may be helpful, but knowing the age of that version is immediately useful when I'm considering a bit of software.

Kudos KDE!

Yeah, I think more and more developers are realizing that arbitrary numbers for their software is kind of pointless. I think that the trend toward YY.MM.patch_level is quite useful. On the other hand, you have people who misinterpret what CentOS was doing with their 7.9.2009... as that's Major.Minor.YYMM. Someone tried to explain to me that they don't have point releases anymore and just use the year/month... Doesn't help that RHEL doesn't follow that versioning... Anyhow, just a bit of a rant as I've ran into this...

I would think most of the software uses something sensible one as that's easier than to invent something new. There are quite odd ones though. TeX for example adds digits to π. Also can't even assume that version number increases. Wikipedia mentions SmartEiffel that has decreasing version number.

FreeBSD has actually mechanism that can be used when the whole scheme changes

No wonder we need a dialog that displays also date

Quoting: JarmerI'm surprised the Steamdeck team chose KDE for the DE, and not something simpler and less resource heavy like XFCE. Being that it's a battery powered device (sometimes) I would think they'd want to squeeze every single compute cycle they could and isn't KDE the heaviest DE out there?

It's really not surprising. KDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment, but in reality, it's a very mature and well optimized piece of software that is highly configurable.

Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: amataiYeah, Plasma keep breaking thing on my computer so that I don't have to break them I suppose.

I keep giving KDE another chance every few months, but it's just never been a good experience for me. I love a lot of the KDE ecosystem, but for some reason basic stuff that just works in GNOME, like pairing a Bluetooth gamepad or, like, playing audio in Firefox, does not work in KDE on the same machine for no reason I can easily discern. And then, when I go back to GNOME, I have to spend extra time fixing the stuff KDE broke that it shouldn't have been able to break.

I've been using KDE for a long time and I've never had any trouble connecting stuff via Bluetooth or hearing audio in Firefox. And even if I did have such issues, it'd be a given that they wouldn't be KDE problems bur rather a problem with the Bluetooth stack or the device drivers in the former case, and Firefox or the sound stack in the latter; so I'd begin my investigation with them.

Not to mention, if you have both Gnome and KDE installed on the same system and/or sharing configuration folders, if KDE breaks stuff for Gnome then maybe Gnome also breaks stuff for KDE and maybe that's where the root of your problems lies. Have you tried using KDE on a clean system?

Quoting: JarmerI'm surprised the Steamdeck team chose KDE for the DE, and not something simpler and less resource heavy like XFCE. Being that it's a battery powered device (sometimes) I would think they'd want to squeeze every single compute cycle they could and isn't KDE the heaviest DE out there?

Well, apparently they wanted the best balance between technologically advanced, user friendly and flexible; and there is nothing out there that can beat KDE on all these areas at the same time. And no, KDE hasn't been a resource hog since ages (if it ever was in the first place), I've seen metrics that show it as consuming less than 180MB on boot on a fresh system.

Also, XFCE does not (and probably will not in the foreseeable future) support Wayland.

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: JarmerI'm surprised the Steamdeck team chose KDE for the DE, and not something simpler and less resource heavy like XFCE. Being that it's a battery powered device (sometimes) I would think they'd want to squeeze every single compute cycle they could and isn't KDE the heaviest DE out there?

It's really not surprising. KDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment, but in reality, it's a very mature and well optimized piece of software that is highly configurable.

Quoting: Nocifer

Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: amataiYeah, Plasma keep breaking thing on my computer so that I don't have to break them I suppose.

I keep giving KDE another chance every few months, but it's just never been a good experience for me. I love a lot of the KDE ecosystem, but for some reason basic stuff that just works in GNOME, like pairing a Bluetooth gamepad or, like, playing audio in Firefox, does not work in KDE on the same machine for no reason I can easily discern. And then, when I go back to GNOME, I have to spend extra time fixing the stuff KDE broke that it shouldn't have been able to break.

I've been using KDE for a long time and I've never had any trouble connecting stuff via Bluetooth or hearing audio in Firefox. And even if I did have such issues, it'd be a given that they wouldn't be KDE problems bur rather a problem with the Bluetooth stack or the device drivers in the former case, and Firefox or the sound stack in the latter; so I'd begin my investigation with them.

Not to mention, if you have both Gnome and KDE installed on the same system and/or sharing configuration folders, if KDE breaks stuff for Gnome then maybe Gnome also breaks stuff for KDE and maybe that's where the root of your problems lies. Have you tried using KDE on a clean system?

Quoting: JarmerI'm surprised the Steamdeck team chose KDE for the DE, and not something simpler and less resource heavy like XFCE. Being that it's a battery powered device (sometimes) I would think they'd want to squeeze every single compute cycle they could and isn't KDE the heaviest DE out there?

Well, apparently they wanted the best balance between technologically advanced, user friendly and flexible; and there is nothing out there that can beat KDE on all these areas at the same time. And no, KDE hasn't been a resource hog since ages (if it ever was in the first place), I've seen metrics that show it as consuming less than 180MB on boot on a fresh system.

Also, XFCE does not (and probably will not in the foreseeable future) support Wayland.

So I was watching a video last night that was suggesting that instead of recommending distributions to potential new users, we should be suggesting the Desktop Environment. I agree partially. Each DE seems to have a 'best in class' distribution behind it.
If you want to suggest Gnome, I would likely show them Fedora or Debian. If you want to show them a customized Gnome, Pop or Ubuntu.
If you want to suggest KDE, maybe OpenSUSE? Or Debian.. I mean Debian is pretty much a good representation of 'this is how the DE looks without customization.' But there are definitely Distros that specialize in specific DEs, so part of the issues with anything related like audio or Bluetooth can come down to the packaging of that DE by that particular distribution's maintainers.

Quoting: Mountain ManKDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment

KDE 4 had the same problem as early Gnome 3: it had bugs that affected performance, which led people to assume that it was too heavy for their machine, and it's got lots of options so it must be heavy, right? They fixed the bugs and KDE 5 is an entirely different beast to KDE 4, but once you've decided that something's a particular (and unappealing) way, it's very unusual for anyone to check it again.

Quoting: jens

Quoting: STiAT[edit] they even have a steam repo... with nvidia and steam I'm well done, I think I can switch properly to their repos. They even have Spotify. Steam, Spotify, NVidia are usually my software issues ... all covered. Nice.

The multimedia repo also contains all smaller repos, so just including this one should be sufficient for your use case.

PS: Spotify is also on flathub/flatpak, that’s even more convenient if you dare to use flatpak :)

I am not a friend of flatpak (in that case, not of snap or any other similar containering too) to be true. I use it if I must... but that's about it. It does nothing for security, and I do not see why I'd need an abstraction layer to run Spotify unless it's spotify themselves maintaining it.

I see it as additional dependencies, an additional system, I see it as additional usage of libraries, additional RAM-Uage, worse integration.... Flatpaks often still use libraries which are known to have security issues due to lack of updates.

So if I can avoid them I do.. but I'm aware that we're running this direction (ostree for the system, flatpacks for the apps). But I hope that's some years off and until then it runs, works and integrates nicely :D.

Fedora is basically preparing for that switch already with silverblue, but I hope to get a few years out of "normal" fedora yet though, and I only have to switch when it's really well integrated and the corner cases covered.


Last edited by STiAT on 6 February 2022 at 10:28 pm UTC