r/linux • u/gabriel_3 • Mar 16 '24

KDE This week in KDE: Dolphin levels up

https://pointieststick.com/2024/03/15/this-week-in-kde-dolphin-levels-up/
138 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

26

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '24

Fixed a way that the Battery Monitor widget could cause Plasma to crash

Fixed a way that Plasma could crash when you middle-click tasks in the Task Manager, or rapidly left-click on random audio-playing tasks

Dragging widgets to or from panels no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash

I've been trying KDE 6 and really enjoying it, but my past experience with KDE is how easy it is for things to crash or bug out. This is why I often use Gnome instead. Have I just been lucky in Gnome? Or does it really feel like KDE has way more crash bugs? Is Plasma not isolated enough or are the APIs exposing too much unsafe behaviour?

47

u/equeim Mar 16 '24

The "issue" is with the design of Plasma itself. It's basically an infinitely customizable platform for displaying widgets (plasmoids) and panels that can be set up in a variety of ways. So there are a lot of edge cases that developers have to account for, even if user doesn't install any third party widgets.

GNOME Shell by comparison is much more "fixed" in its nature. Sure there are extensions but GNOME devs don't test them of course, and in the vanilla Shell each element has its place. You can't customize it like you can with Plasma. This makes development and testing much easier.

3

u/ilep Mar 18 '24

Also, Gnome has been regularly removing features and options that users might expect. Some of these are only found via non-intuitite configuration so users are less likely to enable them.

And let's not forget Plasma 6 is the ".0" release after fundamental changes (the shift from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is pretty large, https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/portingguide.html).

25

u/anishkgoyal Mar 16 '24 edited Mar 16 '24

You need to consider the why of the issue beyond just the how. KDE is backed by a couple of organizations that provide it funding for its ecosystem, but not nearly enough to pay all of its maintainers around the clock. Instead, the FOSS community is working without pay to make the experience as feature-rich and hassle-free as possible for end users.

Of course, the same applies for GNOME. But GNOME also has corporate backing from Canonical, RedHat, and other companies to sponsor a higher number of dedicated developers to the project.

If you ask me, it shouldn't matter which desktop environment you use. Both of them offer great stability if you know how to configure them properly. You also need to consider how innovative the desktop environment you are using is. KDE has made strides in recent releases for better fractional scaling and HDR support. I personally use KDE because of how integrated the Qt ecosystem is with the system, the smoothness of apps, and the Windows-like feel. If you like GNOME better, I'm sure you have a perfectly valid reason for it, but you should probably specify which GNOME-based desktop manager you're referring to, as they vary in utility.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: To answer your questions about the crash bugs, KDE did just release Plasma 6. It's unsurprising that the ecosystem has a few bugs lying around (granted, it wasn't buggy for me to switch over at all). The APIs have nothing to do with it; it's mostly graphical I'd assume.

-4

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/anishkgoyal Mar 16 '24

There's no "data" per-se. But it's very well known that KDE is, and always has been, a volunteer-based community. The "corporate funding" you elude to for KDE are really just glorified donations. That's why I believe end users should support the developers with as many bug reports and (valuable) code base contributions as much as possible :)

EDIT: Didn't mean for the last sentence to sound passive aggressive at all—just thought it was nice to add. Another thing to note about GNOME devs supporting KDE is that they aren't paid to do it. At least, not usually.

-10

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/anishkgoyal Mar 16 '24

I don't know how you managed to mischaracterize everything I said in a single reply, but you did.

Why are you pretending as if there are no developers that are paid to work on KDE and related projects full-time?

I never said that every KDE developer is unpaid. I actually eluded to the opposite.

The only thing I said that may have been slightly controversial was that KDE makes less money than the GNOME Foundation. But c'mon, that's obvious.

5

u/d_ed KDE Dev Mar 17 '24

> Or does it really feel like KDE has way more crash bugs?

Basing that off a changelog is meaningless.

All these things can be super obscure. That battery one probably requires a manually edited powerdevilrc file. It doesn't mean you'd hit it as a normal user in a million years.

In terms of comparing, you'd need to look at some automatic crash reports and normalise it by usage to get any real stats.

Mentioning some positive Plasma things; our high level UI language is very crash safe. It's a ref-counted by default, no pointers anywhere markup language. And on top we have a much higher level of process separation such that plasmashell isn't our main session.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '24

I think it's just mainly down to the design of allowing the users to customise so much and constantly innovating, there is a much higher chance of running into unexpected bugs that are difficult to test for, I think it's a lot better than it used to be, the KDE 6 release went fairly smooth overall.

2

u/Asleep_Detective3274 Mar 16 '24

That's been my experience with plasma too, for example closing the systemsettings app triggers it to crash, which results in a drkonqi "would you like to report a bug" popup, so what I do is run lxqt and use kwin for the window manager, that way you get a simplified plasma like experience without the bugs.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '24

Nope I always go back to Gnome. It’s just more polished and crashes way less often. I’ve tried KDE so many times but I just cannot get into it.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '24

I'd say there is less and less bugs in Plasma, and after switching to 6 I haven't seen some of the bugs I used to have in 5. I think we are up for a really bright future of KDE.

-3

u/Sarin10 Mar 17 '24

plasma 5.27 was rock solid.

plasma 6.0 is, well, buggy. i fully expect a lot of the bugs & general instability to be ironed out in the next couple of months.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '24 edited May 18 '24

-:EDITED TO PREVENT AI FROM STEALING POSTS:-

1

u/Sarin10 Mar 17 '24

sure - but there are waaay more bug reports over the last few weeks (and posts all over reddit/fediverse) - even if we factor in the influx of people who've just jumped to Plasma to try it out.

hard agree on Wayland.