Common widgets not available for Plasma 5?

[steelsnake]

It appears that Plasma 5 is missing a whole lot of pretty basic plasmoids that existed for Plasma 4:
* No temperature monitor?
* No picture frames?
* No Konsole profiles widget?
* No weather widget?

Seems all very basic at the moment, with so much missing all over the place. Control panel modules missing (No notification volume controls, UFW module doesn't work etc.pp)

Am I missing something or is this release a repeat of the KDE4 release fiasco?

[Wheel Inventor]

These things will take time...

Porting the addon plasmoids to Framework 5: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=289&t=124937

Plasma 5.3:
- http://notmart.org/blog/2015/02/gett...ystem-monitor/
- http://notmart.org/blog/2015/03/gett...s-back-comics/


...and a quick test ride with the Kubuntu CI / Plasma 5.2.90:

[NoWorries]

I was debating as to whether I would list all the aspects of Vivid that I thought should be included so that it provided a better GUI interface than Utopic. I decided not to complain but just sit and wait for these to be added. As far as I am concerned, I will not switch to using Vivid as my main system until all these features are provided.

I will limit myself to deal only with Widgets. It would be nice if Widgets could be positioned against the right side of the desktop. On Utopic, the control handles switch sides when near an edge. With Vivid this does not happen so it is impossible to located a widget close to the right side.

Off the current Widgets, my main problem is with the Analogue Clock. It does not provide the ability to define multiple time zones. This is useful while travelling and also helps with the calendar Kontact.

[claydoh]

What should be provided and what can be provided will not line up 100 percent.

It is not expected to, but highlighting what ain't there, particularly as we get closer to release, will be helpful for many folks.

[steelsnake]

I wouldn't expect all widgets to be present by any means, but it's kinda odd to see fairly basic ones missing entirely. Things like picture frame and such I'd consider "minor", but temperature for example is quite useful especially on laptops. For Plasma being labeled 5.2 I feel it's still quite buggy and immature, it feels more like an early tech preview rather than anything ready for day-to-day use.

Aside from the pitiful set of widgets, there's many other areas where things are still lacking, far too many to list here. Plasma 5 still crashes relatively often, glitches in weird ways and has some very un-intuitive ways to do things. I realize that Plasma 5 is largely about back-end updates, but to an end user it feels more like breaking things for the sake of breaking things. In other words, a repeat of KDE4 as I said before: Releasing it as "usable" when it really should be flagged beta, if that.

I'll leave it on my laptop for the time being, as a largely unproductive tech preview of sorts. My main desktop will go back to 14.10 or LTS, my desktop at work is on LTS anyway as a matter of policy. I just can't shake the "what were they thinking?" feeling, sorry.

[ronw]

We all have different needs, and tolerance for issues.

To this end user, Plasma 5 on Vivid is excellent, stable progress. Vivid has been my daily OS since Alpha 2.

Kubuntu.org labels it "Tech Preview" and Vivid Beta, so I don't get the complaint about "should be flagged beta, if that."

[claydoh]

I wouldn't expect all widgets to be present by any means, but it's kinda odd to see fairly basic ones missing entirely. Things like picture frame and such I'd consider "minor", but temperature for example is quite useful especially on laptops. For Plasma being labeled 5.2 I feel it's still quite buggy and immature, it feels more like an early tech preview rather than anything ready for day-to-day use.

Aside from the pitiful set of widgets, there's many other areas where things are still lacking, far too many to list here. Plasma 5 still crashes relatively often, glitches in weird ways and has some very un-intuitive ways to do things. I realize that Plasma 5 is largely about back-end updates, but to an end user it feels more like breaking things for the sake of breaking things. In other words, a repeat of KDE4 as I said before: Releasing it as "usable" when it really should be flagged beta, if that.

I'll leave it on my laptop for the time being, as a largely unproductive tech preview of sorts. My main desktop will go back to 14.10 or LTS, my desktop at work is on LTS anyway as a matter of policy. I just can't shake the "what were they thinking?" feeling, sorry.

As someone who jumped into KDE 4 very early, I can safely say that this time it is nothing like that at all. Nothing.

"What were they thinking?" Well, with 14.04 LTS and 14.10 available, now is the best time to go into Plasma 5, get a couple of releases with that under our belts before the next LTS.

I might chalk up crashes and such more to the Ubuntu underpinnings still being hammered out, it seems to me that those using Vivid are having a fairly stable time overall.


I use it on my daily driver old laptop, and I just upgraded to it on my PC, which usually sticks to the previous version for a while after the latest version is out. It has been that solid for me.

As a policy, I never stick to LTS because that moniker does not automatically mean stable, it just means security updates for a while, to me as a regular joe desktop user.

[NoWorries]

Aside from the pitiful set of widgets, there's many other areas where things are still lacking, far too many to list here. Plasma 5 still crashes relatively often, glitches in weird ways and has some very un-intuitive ways to do things. I realize that Plasma 5 is largely about back-end updates, but to an end user it feels more like breaking things for the sake of breaking things. In other words, a repeat of KDE4 as I said before: Releasing it as "usable" when it really should be flagged beta, if that.

While I would agree with you regarding the status of Widgets, I have found Plasma 5 very stable.

I am wondering what you mean by Plasma crashing. Are you dealing with a window appearing to submit a bug report or are you dealing with applications not working? For example, KSysGuard used to hang the system and a fix for this has been found. Also, in the past the Partition Manager would not work and a fix for that has been found.

I am wondering what you mean by very un-intuitive ways to do things. Are you referring to submitting a bug report or something else? I must confess that to submit a bug report you have to jump through many hoops.

I hope you can provide some clarification to the above queries by me and others.

[steelsnake]

Crashing: Plasma 5 seems to be very picky when it comes to drag&drop mostly. I tend to drag programs I use often right onto the panel. This seems to work reliably on my laptop, but on my desktop (which has multiple monitors, not all of which are always on) it fails every once in a while with a plasma crash (with crash reporter, though I tend to just close that). I'm not quite sure what causes the other crashes, but after prolonged use and especially after suspend/wakeup the plasma desktop just disappears, crash reporter appears and plasma restarts (just plasma, not the whole session).

Then, not necessarily a crash but a definite oddity: Some parts of the UI suffer oddball corruptions. The application launcher randomly loses its bottom navigation panel, KMix loses some of the volume controls and so on and so forth. Rarely, fonts get corrupted but I am not sure what that's from, and this only happened on my desktop never on my laptop.

I'll post some of what I consider un-intuitive later.

To be clear: I don't mind the development of Plasma 5, nor the "out with the old" approach that the KDE devs take. All I complain about is the introduction of Plasma 5 as the KDE flavor in this Kubuntu cycle, it could have used another 6 months to mature IMO.

[vinnywright]

All I complain about is the introduction of Plasma 5 as the KDE flavor in this Kubuntu cycle, it could have used another 6 months to mature IMO.

you do realize that 15.04 is not even a release yet and IS still in development ,,,it's a beta.

Quote

Introduction

We are preparing Kubuntu Vivid Vervet (15.04) for distribution on April 23rd, 2015. With this Beta 1 pre-release, you can see what we are trying out in preparation for our next (stable) version. We have some interesting things happening, so read on for highlights and information.
NOTE:
This is Beta 1 Release. Kubuntu Beta Releases are NOT recommended for:

• Regular users who are not aware of pre-release issues
• Anyone who needs a stable system
• Anyone uncomfortable running a possibly frequently broken system
• Anyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable

Kubuntu Beta Releases are recommended for:

• Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugs
• Kubuntu, KDE, and Qt developers

14.10 is the last release .

VINNY

[NoWorries]

Crashing: Plasma 5 seems to be very picky when it comes to drag&drop mostly. I tend to drag programs I use often right onto the panel. This seems to work reliably on my laptop, but on my desktop (which has multiple monitors, not all of which are always on) it fails every once in a while with a plasma crash (with crash reporter, though I tend to just close that). I'm not quite sure what causes the other crashes, but after prolonged use and especially after suspend/wakeup the plasma desktop just disappears, crash reporter appears and plasma restarts (just plasma, not the whole session).

When you say that you add programs (ie Applications) onto the Panel, I assume that there is sufficient room for the application icon to fit.

I have a separate panel that I scale to fit what I want to add and place it on the left side of the screen. If I try to add an application that does not fit, the process fails. With all the latest updates, I have not had this approach cause a crash.

You commented that you sometimes have multiple monitors connected. I assume that you have the monitors connected via 15pin vga sockets, as separate screens defined with a primary screen. As I am currently away from where I can connect multiple monitors I cannot, at this stage, comment on what will happen. My past experience is when I used hdmi connection the system created one big screen, which was impossible to control.

[steelsnake]

I've not had VGA sockets in years... DVI, Display Port and HDMI, mixed outputs with changing on/off states. A simple multimedia setup, multiple monitor outputs, multiple sound outputs, multiple camera inputs. With 14.10 it works fine, with 15.04 it works reasonably well _aside_ from occasional crashes and glitches. mostly in Plasma. Sleep/Wake generally corrupts the screen for example, but since Linux boots from power-on to desktop in ~10 seconds or less it isn't a common problem.

KFontView also seems broken (fonts don't render, not even in the control panel), though I haven't checked on a second system to see if it's a problem on one PC and not a systematic error.

[NoWorries]

Sounds like your problems could be related to your video drivers. I am wondering what video card you are using. You may be getting out of the area of my expertise.

I have an Nvidia card as well as an Intel card and at the moment I cannot use any of the Nvidia drivers as they are built for the Unity/Gnome system and not KDE.

[claydoh]

I have an Nvidia card as well as an Intel card and at the moment I cannot use any of the Nvidia drivers as they are built for the Unity/Gnome system and not KDE.

Video drivers are not built for a particular desktop. That does not mean that they work well for everyone, of course. I'm running an nvidia one right now, just got it recently. Works great, for me with the recommended driver, even after upgrading to Vivid.

[NoWorries]

I have tried a number of different drivers and if I issue sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 I get a list of unity/gnome packages to be installed, ie

 [FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]:~$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 [/COLOR]
[sudo] password for xxxxxx:  
Reading package lists... Done 
Building dependency tree        
Reading state information... Done 
The following extra packages will be installed: 
  apg avahi-utils bbswitch-dkms build-essential cgmanager cups-pk-helper dconf-cli dkms dpkg-dev evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common 
  evolution-data-server-online-accounts fakeroot g++ g++-4.9 gcc gcc-4.9 geoclue geoclue-ubuntu-geoip gir1.2-atk-1.0 gir1.2-freedesktop gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 
  gir1.2-gnomebluetooth-1.0 gir1.2-gnomekeyring-1.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-ibus-1.0 gir1.2-notify-0.7 gir1.2-packagekitglib-1.0 gir1.2-pango-1.0 gkbd-capplet 
  gnome-bluetooth gnome-control-center-shared-data gnome-menus gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session-bin gnome-settings-daemon-schemas 
  gnome-user-share gsettings-ubuntu-schemas ibus indicator-applet indicator-bluetooth indicator-datetime indicator-keyboard indicator-messages 
  indicator-power indicator-session indicator-sound lib32gcc1 libaccount-plugin-1.0-0 libaccount-plugin-generic-oauth libaccount-plugin-google 
  libaccounts-qt5-1 libalgorithm-diff-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-merge-perl libasan1 libatomic1 libc6-i386 libcamel-1.2-49 libcgmanager0 
  libcilkrts5 libcuda1-340 libebackend-1.2-7 libebook-1.2-14 libebook-contacts-1.2-0 libecal-1.2-16 libedata-book-1.2-20 libedata-cal-1.2-23 
  libedataserver-1.2-18 libfakeroot libfcitx-config4 libfcitx-gclient0 libfcitx-utils0 libgcc-4.9-dev libgdata-common libgdata19 libgee2 libgeocode-glib0 
  libgnome-bluetooth11 libgnome-menu-3-0 libgnomekbd-common libgnomekbd8 libgoa-1.0-0b libgoa-1.0-common libgtop2-10 libgtop2-common libgweather-3-6 
  libgweather-common libido3-0.1-0 libitm1 libjson0 liblightdm-gobject-1-0 liblsan0 libnm-gtk-common libnm-gtk0 liboauth0 libpackagekit-glib2-16 
  libpanel-applet0 libsignon-extension1 libsignon-glib1 libsignon-plugins-common1 libsignon-qt5-1 libstdc++-4.9-dev libtimezonemap-data libtimezonemap1 
  libtsan0 libubsan0 libunity-control-center1 libunity-settings-daemon1 liburl-dispatcher1 libwacom-bin libwacom-common libwacom2 libxklavier16 lightdm 
  mousetweaks network-manager-gnome nvidia-340 nvidia-340-uvm nvidia-opencl-icd-340 nvidia-prime nvidia-settings ocl-icd-libopencl1 pkg-config python-notify 
  python3-aptdaemon.pkcompat python3-bs4 python3-cairo python3-html5lib python3-lxml python3-smbc python3-xdg screen-resolution-extra 
  signon-keyring-extension signon-plugin-oauth2 signon-ui signon-ui-service signon-ui-x11 signond system-config-printer-common system-config-printer-gnome 
  systemd-shim ubuntu-system-service ubuntu-touch-sounds unity-control-center unity-control-center-signon unity-greeter unity-settings-daemon upstart-bin 
Suggested packages: 
  bumblebee debian-keyring evolution evolution-data-server-dbg g++-multilib g++-4.9-multilib gcc-4.9-doc libstdc++6-4.9-dbg gcc-multilib autoconf automake 
  libtool flex bison gcc-doc gcc-4.9-multilib gcc-4.9-locales libgcc1-dbg libgomp1-dbg libitm1-dbg libatomic1-dbg libasan1-dbg liblsan0-dbg libtsan0-dbg 
  libubsan0-dbg libcilkrts5-dbg libquadmath0-dbg apache2.2-bin libapache2-mod-dnssd ibus-clutter ibus-doc click powerd unity-system-compositor 
  unity-greeter-session-broadcast fcitx libstdc++-4.9-doc url-dispatcher network-manager-openconnect-gnome network-manager-openvpn-gnome 
  network-manager-vpnc-gnome network-manager-pptp-gnome opencl-icd python3-genshi python3-lxml-dbg python-lxml-doc gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio 
  libcanberra-gtk-module lightdm-remote-session-freerdp lightdm-remote-session-uccsconfigure remote-login-service metacity x-window-manager graphviz 
  upstart-monitor 
The following NEW packages will be installed 
  apg avahi-utils bbswitch-dkms build-essential cgmanager cups-pk-helper dconf-cli dkms dpkg-dev evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common 
  evolution-data-server-online-accounts fakeroot g++ g++-4.9 gcc gcc-4.9 geoclue geoclue-ubuntu-geoip gir1.2-atk-1.0 gir1.2-freedesktop gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 
  gir1.2-gnomebluetooth-1.0 gir1.2-gnomekeyring-1.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-ibus-1.0 gir1.2-notify-0.7 gir1.2-packagekitglib-1.0 gir1.2-pango-1.0 gkbd-capplet 
  gnome-bluetooth gnome-control-center-shared-data gnome-menus gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session-bin gnome-settings-daemon-schemas 
  gnome-user-share gsettings-ubuntu-schemas ibus indicator-applet indicator-bluetooth indicator-datetime indicator-keyboard indicator-messages 
  indicator-power indicator-session indicator-sound lib32gcc1 libaccount-plugin-1.0-0 libaccount-plugin-generic-oauth libaccount-plugin-google 
  libaccounts-qt5-1 libalgorithm-diff-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-merge-perl libasan1 libatomic1 libc6-i386 libcamel-1.2-49 libcgmanager0 
  libcilkrts5 libcuda1-340 libebackend-1.2-7 libebook-1.2-14 libebook-contacts-1.2-0 libecal-1.2-16 libedata-book-1.2-20 libedata-cal-1.2-23 
  libedataserver-1.2-18 libfakeroot libfcitx-config4 libfcitx-gclient0 libfcitx-utils0 libgcc-4.9-dev libgdata-common libgdata19 libgee2 libgeocode-glib0       
  libgnome-bluetooth11 libgnome-menu-3-0 libgnomekbd-common libgnomekbd8 libgoa-1.0-0b libgoa-1.0-common libgtop2-10 libgtop2-common libgweather-3-6            
  libgweather-common libido3-0.1-0 libitm1 libjson0 liblightdm-gobject-1-0 liblsan0 libnm-gtk-common libnm-gtk0 liboauth0 libpackagekit-glib2-16                
  libpanel-applet0 libsignon-extension1 libsignon-glib1 libsignon-plugins-common1 libsignon-qt5-1 libstdc++-4.9-dev libtimezonemap-data libtimezonemap1         
  libtsan0 libubsan0 libunity-control-center1 libunity-settings-daemon1 liburl-dispatcher1 libwacom-bin libwacom-common libwacom2 libxklavier16 lightdm         
  mousetweaks network-manager-gnome nvidia-331 nvidia-340 nvidia-340-uvm nvidia-opencl-icd-340 nvidia-prime nvidia-settings ocl-icd-libopencl1 pkg-config       
  python-notify python3-aptdaemon.pkcompat python3-bs4 python3-cairo python3-html5lib python3-lxml python3-smbc python3-xdg screen-resolution-extra             
  signon-keyring-extension signon-plugin-oauth2 signon-ui signon-ui-service signon-ui-x11 signond system-config-printer-common system-config-printer-gnome      
  systemd-shim ubuntu-system-service ubuntu-touch-sounds unity-control-center unity-control-center-signon unity-greeter unity-settings-daemon upstart-bin       
0 to upgrade, 151 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade. 
Need to get 123 MB of archives. 
After this operation, 487 MB of additional disk space will be used. 
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n 
Abort.
[/FONT]

The alternative is to use sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install nvidia-331. I have tried this and it does not work. I have also tried installing the recommended drive nvidia-346 and that also failed to work for me.

I should point out that I am using the repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa.