15.04 Stability [or lack thereof]

[Goobley]

Hey,

I was wondering how stable everyone's been finding 15.04. I moved over about a week ago (because it looks pretty) and have had a load of trouble since. Much worse screen tearing than I've ever had before (especially in Chrome even with vsync set to refresh the whole screen), plasmashell crashing at least once every 2 hours (and a lot more if I use system settings or applications based on libsdl2).

Just an hour ago I had a bug which required me to delete .kde as I was logging in to a purely black screen (and failsafe wouldn't log in at all). I also had to mess around with .cache and .config.

Am I missing something elementary here or is the stability of KDE5 really so far off KDE4?

Cheers!

System Info
i3 4130,
Radeon R9 270 - (using proprietary drivers or the fan stays continuously above 40% (same on all distros))
Asus MoBo, 8GB RAM.

[Buddlespit]

There have always been heartaches when there's a transition from one milestone to another. KDE3 to KDE4 was full of hate and vitriol. There is even a spin-off desktop based on KDE3 (Trinity).The transition from KDE4 to Plasma5 isn't any different. Some things don't work. Some things work differently. Some things are just borked. Give it time, it'll get fixed. These are just birthing pains.

[claydoh]

Personally, I find it solid and stable, one old laptop (dell d630 from 2008) and two less old machines (2010-ish vintage): a dell laptop 830 with meager intel graphics and a core 2 duo cpu (fresh install, and my daily driver), and an HP with a low profile fanless Nvidia GeForce GT610 using the proprietary graphics (upgraded every 6 months successfully since Raring, a media center mainly).

Upgrading to the kubuntu-backports ppa imo is vital, and will likely make a more pleasant, stable experience.

Many seem to have had problems with config files, but I have not seen this myself, and have not seen much in the way of Plasmashell crashing since well before the official release.
I may be blessed (or touched? lol!) , and was even accused in Google Plus of not using my Plasma 5 hard enough since I didn't see each and every issue someone had.
I can't go out and proclaim that 15.04 is super duper rock solid, because obviously for you it isn't. It is for me, though.

(note that has zero to do with missing options, changes in UI, and other problems that are unrelated to actual stability - that is even more dependant on the user's own use cases)

[SteveRiley]

I...was even accused in Google Plus of not using my Plasma 5 hard enough

Curious accusation. I'd probably be guilty of same, though. I simply don't use most of what Plamsa offers -- widgets, activities, containments, etc. Just a simple stack of a few windows and one panel with one system tray on the right edge. Probably the fanciest thing I have is Yakuake

[ukdave]

I agree with claydoh, using kubuntu backports is a wise thing to do as you will be getting the bug fixes etc issued from the kde team.

As to stability, the only problem I have had is system settings crashing when I have changed windows decorations, I don't like the flat mud coloured breeze thing. To be fair it only happens with some themes as I guess they are not plasma 5 ready. The real pain is windows decoration setting crashes every time I try to us it to reset the decoration. Oxygen seems to be OK which I much prefer than breeze. Other than that things seem fine here.

Cheers
Dave

[Goobley]

Thanks for the replies people. I just want to clarify that I'm not having a go at KDE5 in any way, I just wanted to see what other's experiences have been. I assume I'm fairly edge-case for hardware, being forced to run the AMD proprietary drivers (which certainly do cause bugs with some compositors such as Compton). I don't use KDE very "hard" either, just one task-bar, menu, clock etc., no external widgets.

I'll give back ports a go today, and if it doesn't really help then I'll drop back to 14.04 LTS until 16.04 appears.

Cheers!

[Buddlespit]

... I just wanted to see what other's experiences have been...

Ahhh... I misunderstood. I thought you were telling us of your experience. I started testing Plasma5 in 11/14. It was god-awful buggy and crashed if I looked at the monitor hard. In April of this year, I changed over from KDE4 to Plasma5 permenantly. I still get the ocassional crash (becoming rarer with every KDE/Plasma update), but now they're easily recoverable. I did have to recompile a couple apps with qt5 vs qt4, because qt4 apps just look like ****. I also had to get rid of kscreen/qtgraphicseffects, becuse of a bug causing my dual monitor system to boot into mirrored mode 3 out of 5 times. I haven't checked to see if qtgraphicseffects has been fixed, but I do know that there was a bug report for it.

[ronw]

I also had to get rid of kscreen/qtgraphicseffects, becuse of a bug causing my dual monitor system to boot into mirrored mode 3 out of 5 times. I haven't checked to see if qtgraphicseffects has been fixed, but I do know that there was a bug report for it.

I tried kscreen and qt5-graphicaleffects again when the 5.3.2 updates rolled in. Still buggy for me with two monitors so I uninstalled it again.

If I understand the bug reports correctly, Qt 5.5 will have the fix(es).

Packages (2) qt5-graphicaleffects-5.4.2-1 kscreen-5.3.2-1

[Goobley]

Well, it's early days yet, but I haven't had any libSDL2 "inspired" crashes yet, and vsync hasn't broken in Chrome yet after upgraded to the backports versions. Thanks and fingers crossed!

[claydoh]

Curious accusation. I'd probably be guilty of same, though. I simply don't use most of what Plamsa offers -- widgets, activities, containments, etc. Just a simple stack of a few windows and one panel with one system tray on the right edge. Probably the fanciest thing I have is Yakuake

Thing is, I use activities and widgets and multiple panels and a custom window rule here and there.

I do think I am smiled upon by the Linux, kde and Kubuntu fairies, though.

Sent from my LG G4

[xennex81]

As to stability, the only problem I have had is system settings crashing when I have changed windows decorations, I don't like the flat mud coloured breeze thing. To be fair it only happens with some themes as I guess they are not plasma 5 ready. The real pain is windows decoration setting crashes every time I try to us it to reset the decoration. Oxygen seems to be OK which I much prefer than breeze. Other than that things seem fine here.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345675

[ukdave]

Thanks for the pointer xennex81. I should have checked myself but have been a bit busy recently.

[xennex81]

Not at all, I just happened to have that link in my email, it was an impossible to find bug since they rename it to something only a initiated programmer can know. That bug has been filed a million times, don't worry.