KDE Plasma 5.8.1 Experiences

[NoWorries]

Today, there was an upgrade to 5.8.1 and it has resulted in my system having improvements in one area and misbehaving in another.

Initially I had frequent crashes of my desktop when trying to configure my external display. I have deleted all the files in my ~/.local/share/kscreen and set my external display on the left. I can now configure it and it stays with the settings I have defined. With 5.8.0 this didn't happen and my external display was always blank, ie black.

The only current outstanding problem relates to the fact that I have and empty panel which contains quick access to frequently used applications. When booting my system now, this is totally blank. If I click on one of the invisible entries in this panel, I get an error message Malformed URL. I have tried deleting this panel and remaking it, but on reboot, it appears to be empty again. I use the Oxygen theme and I tried changing it to other themes such as Breeze and that did not alter anything.

I will be interested to know the experience of other neon fans with KDE Plasma 5.8.1. As it is early days, I anticipate that some of my problems will hopefully be resolved.

Keep up the good work.

[woodsmoke]

287 updates as I type this! :0

I HOPE that my system doesn't misbehave! :0

woodfastandfurioussmoke

[claydoh]

I've had zero issues with the update.

[NoWorries]

Do you have an empty panel with applications added such as a Browser, Email Client, Word Processors, etc?

[claydoh]

No, just a standard panel with an added widget or 2.

[NoWorries]

I have just updated my Wife's Laptop (218 packages) and I had no problems like those I experienced with my system. I am very pleased with how well her system is working.

I have configured all desktops such that the empty panel has 13 applications. These are all shown and not blank as on my system. If I were to put all these 13 applications on the default panel, which also has widgets for time, printer and weather, I would be running out of space to show active applications.

[woodsmoke]

mine is ok after the updates

woodsmoke

[NoWorries]

I have just updated my Wife's Laptop (218 packages) and I had no problems like those I experienced with my system. I am very pleased with how well her system is working.

Sorry to say that I have just rebooted my Wife's Laptop and the Empty Panel with applications is blank.

Another aspect that I have just noticed is that the login screen does not show dots as the password is typed.

I am on my Wife's Laptop because I just did an update on my Laptop and the new packages resulted in my desktop failing to start. I cannot even get an NFS connection to it. Hopefully tomorrow is a better day for me.

[Tahaan]

After updating about 180 packages I still see version 5.8.0 both on the start-up spash screen and in Kinfocenter, even after rebooting (which I didn't think was needed but did in any case because there was a kernel upgrade in there)

[vinnywright]

Sorry to say that I have just rebooted my Wife's Laptop and the Empty Panel with applications is blank.

Another aspect that I have just noticed is that the login screen does not show dots as the password is typed.

I am on my Wife's Laptop because I just did an update on my Laptop and the new packages resulted in my desktop failing to start. I cannot even get an NFS connection to it. Hopefully tomorrow is a better day for me.

I have no probs so far with the update ,,,,,,,,,but I have no extra panel ,,,,,,tell me how you made it (the steps YOU took) and I will see if the quirk exhibits it's self @hear

VINNY

[NoWorries]

I have no probs so far with the update ,,,,,,,,,but I have no extra panel ,,,,,,tell me how you made it (the steps YOU took) and I will see if the quirk exhibits it's self @hear

VINNY

I certainly appreciate you being willing to give this approach a go. I hope the following works for you.

I right mouse click and select + Add Panel > Empty Panel. This normally places the empty panel at the top of the screen.

I then select the Application Menu, which in my case is a "launcher based on cascading popup menus". I choose an application, eg Firefox and drag it to the empty panel using the left mouse held down. You will see a faint square in the empty panel that it will occupy and it is dropped into the empty panel when the left mouse is released.

I then repeat this process for all the other applications that I use. For example, I have Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Dolphin, Libreoffice Write, Libreoffice Calc, Kdenlive, System Settings, KsysGuard, Synaptic, Konsole, Screen Saver Start, Screen Saver Pause.

You will need to reboot after doing this because after doing the above setup, everything is visible, but it is blank after a reboot.

I will be very interested to know if you can repeat what I experience.

[NoWorries]

After updating about 180 packages I still see version 5.8.0 both on the start-up spash screen and in Kinfocenter, even after rebooting (which I didn't think was needed but did in any case because there was a kernel upgrade in there)

At the download site https://neon.kde.org/download, there are three options, ie User Edition and two in the Developer Edition. I am using the Developer Edition, Git-Stable.

Did you select the User Edition as this could explain the difference you are experiencing?

[claydoh]

Most definitely there will be differences. The User edition is made up of stable,
officially released stuff. The others are testing code and things like what you see are to be expected. The git-stable is ideally less messy than the git-unstable

sent from my LG V10 using Tapatalk

[Snowhog]

I've been running the Developer Edition from the beginning, and for me it has presented no problems at all. Now, I'm not using it as my main OS, so I don't have stuff configured that I would if it were -- I don't have Kontact/KMail setup in it -- so I can't say that if I did, I wouldn't experience some of what is being expressed by NoWorries.

[acheron]

I don't use KDE PIM, but if I did I would not rely on the dev unstable version for it.

PIM gets changes that cause potential breakage too often.