[PLASMA 5] Plasma 5 coming to 15.04 [heads up]

[claydoh]

It looks like Plasma 5 packages are building and moving to Main for Vivid, so I would expect some breakages and missing packages until the whole set is completely built and in place.

[GreyGeek]

That's why I added 15.04 as a guest OS ... to watch the progress and report problems.
Let the games begin!

[claydoh]

I doubt there will be problems other than the dependency waits as they build and move into the repo.

Ima gonna wait for a couple days to upgrade this laptop to Vivid

[NickStone]

@claydoh, As you are observing the development of plasma5 in Kubuntu can you see if there will be similar problems transitioning from plasma-desktop (kde4) to plasma5 like what happened with KDE3 to plasma-desktop?

[Worzel]

I updated to plasma5 a couple of weeks ago and so far it has run without problem.

The first try was a mess because I had a lot of 4.14 stuff still installed. Did a clean install of 14.10 then did the upgrade in console using apt-get. This was when I saw a message about running "apt-get autoremove" during the upgrade - which obviously cleared away all the stuff I had lying around the first time.

There is an option to remove plasma5 if it doesn't play.

Jim

[Rog132]

With the Ubuntu core - installing the plasma-desktop & kde-baseapps ... seems to work.



..but the kubuntu-desktop from the vv repositories still have hiccups...

Log of sudo apt-get -s install kubuntu-desktop
Tue Nov 11 17:24:46 2014

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
kubuntu-desktop : Depends: kde-window-manager but it is not installable
Depends: kde-workspace but it is not installable
Depends: klipper but it is not installable
Depends: plasma-netbook but it is not installable
Recommends: about-distro but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: acpi-support but it is not going to be installed
...

----EDIT---

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/vi...er/001381.html

kubuntu-meta (1.314) vivid; urgency=medium

* Refreshed dependencies, the big switch to Plasma 5
...

----EDIT---


Waiting the KDE 14.12: https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/A...lease_Schedule

[claydoh]

@claydoh, As you are observing the development of plasma5 in Kubuntu can you see if there will be similar problems transitioning from plasma-desktop (kde4) to plasma5 like what happened with KDE3 to plasma-desktop?

Basically..........no

Everything is done the same way as before, in pretty much the same places. It just has a different appearance

So far, and it is still early, these are things that I have noticed as missing:

• Widgets- there are not that many widgets available for Plasma 5, as they need to be re-written using qml. The core, official ones seem to be there, however. It is the user-contributed ones that will not work until re-done.
• Plasma desktop themes seem more hit and miss in how they look or if they even work, but then again that is currently the case for many of them found in kde-look and thus available from Muon Discover or the theme installer. Currently, for me the theme Details section for customizing the theme does not work.
• A couple of things missing in System Settings, that need to be re-written include Bluetooth configuration, and probably some other things I have not noticed or used.
• There are are only two selections for Desktop Layouts - the stock Desktop and the Folder (or classic) . I am sure not many will notice this one lol! I have no idea if these are planned for a return.

To be honest, there isn't a whole ton of new stuff, and the applications for the most part are and still will be 4.14.x series a lot of us are currently using ( the whole naming and versioning scheme sucks terribly, but I can sort of understand why it is so. Plasma, Framweworks, Applications all having differing numbers is a ball of fun )

I know the missing things are being ported, and we have seen plenty of frameworks and plasma updates from KDE, so there will be fewer and fewer things to be concerned about, imnsho.

I must put the caveat in here that I was a huge, HUGE early KDE 4 adopter and fanboi (apologist, whatever) and hugely supported Kubuntu's decision to jump in early with switching to it. I am here, too, though I don't think I will have to be an apologist this time out. I do expect the internet whiners, muckrakers, linkbaiting "journalists", and persistent sticks-in-the-mud to overinflate everything to an extreme, as is the norm these days.

[claydoh]

Also having said the above, I must note that I don't see any issues with the upgrade to Plasma 5 in terms of configurations and such - I did my initial install as an early, pre-release 14.10 upgrade, followed by an immediate switch to the Next ppa. There were some packaging glitches at the time, nothing huge as far as I recall, but not at all unexpected due to the early version I was using.

Desktop settings will likely default to the stock KDE ones, so wallpapers and the look-and-feel stuff will probably be the only thing the user will have to redo. At some point I will upgrade my media center box to Plasma 5, it has some custom kwin window rules for a few things, and more personalizations compared to my laptop. I will likely wait for a bit, probably the first or second milestone alpha, once all the kf5 and plasma 5 stuff settles into place.

[Snowhog]

I thought that I had seen/read somewhere, that you could install Plasma 5 'alongside' your existing Plasma 4 and select which to use from the KDM login. Is that true or not?

[claydoh]

I thought that I had seen/read somewhere, that you could install Plasma 5 'alongside' your existing Plasma 4 and select which to use from the KDM login. Is that true or not?

Nope.
That was possible using the special Project Neon repo that had custom environment settings and such to separate them. Neon is going away, possibly to be replaced with something else, but the standalone option seems gone for now

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post361892

[GreyGeek]

I had installed Vivid 15.05 as a guest OS. It has been regularly updating.
Today I did another update. When I rebooted I got a black screen after logging in.
I rebooted and pulled up the recovery option, connected the network and logged in as root.
Then I changed to my user account and directory and issued "sudo startx". This time the Plasma5 desktop came up but nothing worked. The mouse arrow disappears and the keyboard doesn't provoke any actions.
Will wait for the next update.

[67GTA]

Just installed daily 15.04 server image and installed kubuntu-desktop. Plasma-desktop wasn't pulled in, and had to manually install it to get plasma session.

[GreyGeek]

I installed 15.04 about a week before the Plasma5 updates came down the line. It was KDE4 and as solid as a rock. Since the plasma5 udpates I have not been able to achieve a stable desktop. IF the desktop displays the panel and its components, all I have to do is click on one of the components. It may work, but when it is closed it makes the panel invisible. Clicking in the blind where the components should be occasionally brings one up ... partially ... but it never works. When that component goes away so does the panel.

Today I had a single update. Since my user account plasma5 desktop crashed irretrievably I have been logging on as root and doing the upgrades. Today, I decided to run startx as root in root's account and got the complete plasma5 desktop. After clicking the application launcher I got the usual listing. When I moved my mouse away from the launcher gui the panel disappeared. The launcher displayed a title when I clicked where its icon should be, but that action froze the desktop and I had to use VirtualBox's bailout switch to shut down, since the mouse and keyboard became inactive.

I think I will wait a month to give 15.04 a chance to move into Alpha and reinstall it as a guest OS. It is not yet stable enough in my environment to run as a guest OS.

[GreyGeek]

Just found a bug report which stated that "(1371651) does not boot into graphical interface after installation on VirtualBox"