KDE Plasma 5.26.x Stability Inquiry

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Hello fellow Plasma users,

I am starting this thread specifically as a followup to the thread KDE plasma bugs after each update [Stable Update] 2022-09-12.

To summarize the issue, Plasma 5.25 was clearly not a good generation of our beloved desktop environment — even the KDE developers themselves acknowledged that it wasn’t their best work — and as you can see in the KDE plasma bugs after each update [Stable Update] 2022-09-12 thread, a number of us chose to skip the upgrade from 5.24.6 to 5.25, and have in the meantime also upgraded 5.24.6 to 5.24.7, due to 5.24 being an LTS release and thus continuing to receive updates.

I am now starting this thread here as to inquire who of the people who were active on the KDE plasma bugs after each update [Stable Update] 2022-09-12 thread and had problems with 5.25 have now upgraded to 5.26.2, and what their experiences are, because @philm has informed me that the upcoming upgrade to KDE Frameworks will require a rebuild of the kwin package.

I am specifically pinging…

  • 5.26 is about as good as 5.24.7.
  • 5.26 has potential, but it’s not quite there yet.
  • 5.26 is just as bad as 5.25 was.
  • 5.26 is even worse than 5.25.
  • We is afraid of trying 5.26, Preciousss. We awaits the arrival of 5.27 LTS.

0 voters

Of those of you experiencing the same or even worse problems with 5.26 as with 5.25, I would like to ask that you elaborate on the problems on the thread below. Thank you. :slight_smile:

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I just don’t think I have seen the upgrade to 5.26 in my branch (Stable) yet, so for the moment I’m contend to wait and not in any hurry.

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5.26.2 was in the most recent Stable update, though. :arrow_down:

But of course, in order to get those updates, you have to comment out the following section again in your /etc/pacman.conf… :arrow_down:

(For those who simply ignored the plasma group) :arrow_down:

IgnoreGrp = plasma

(For those who installed a local repository for 5.24.7) :arrow_down:

[plasma-lts]                                # ← new section
Server=file:///var/cache/pacman/plasma-lts  # ← new section
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll                # ← new section
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Aah, well, I didn’t see it in the announcements so it’s obvious that I’m going blind. Will check and report back.

So far, so good. Will let you know if anything changes.

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For me, it’s all good. Desktop Grid and Present Windows effects are nice again. Other things are smooth. I don’t use any widgets. About theming, only Global Theme and Color are customized. Other things like Plasma Style, Window Decorations are all Breeze.
I upgraded to 5.26.2 from being held 5.24.6. No nvidia btw.

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Will chime in, short rant, even tho i wasn’t invited to the party :stuck_out_tongue:

On unstable, where i’m more close to a vanilla KDE Plasma, it reset everything to default twice, that when 5.26.2 came in. Still could not find the cause of that, and didn’t happen again.
On testing, where i do all my work, had many issues with my workflow once the 5.25 came by and i recommended way back then to keep things in place with 5.24.x, at least on stable because many things got out of place with that update. Now with 5.26.2 i had no bad experiences, like none, and i feel again @home doing my daily tasks. :partying_face:

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Oh but you are more than welcome, my friend. I just didn’t explicitly ping you because I wasn’t aware that you had also skipped the 5.24→5.25 step. :wink:

This is a valuable recount, and one that sounds hopeful, thank you. :slight_smile: :+1:

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On my primary computer, I’m sticking with 5.24.x for now.

On my secondary machine, I did a full system update, which pulled in KDE 5.26.2.

While I did notice there were improvements from 5.25 → 5.26, one thing that stands out is the animations (especially “present” and “overview”) are still not as smooth nor intuitive as 5.24. This is a feature I rely on a lot.

I’ll keep playing with 5.26 on my secondary machine, but my primary computer is like my “stalwart”, which I favor stability and predictability over fancy new features and the “highest version number”.

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I’m facing the problem (since 5.26.2) that the whole desktop environment seems to bug out.
Starting with some windows and popups suddenly rendering all-black (with or without desktop effects enabled) and resulting in a complete freeze of the complete visual part of the desktop (including mouse movements).

Sounds still play and it seems like keyboard strokes go through on the last active window.

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Thank you for that. This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. :+1:

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Make sure it’s not a theme or window decoration or some such. a Windows decoration did this for me, and I didn’t think to check it. Caused me one heck of a headache.

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Looks like 5.26 breaks multimonitor configurations. I had zero issues with 5.25, but on 5.26 only one of my 3 monitors is working. The other two are locked in the disabled state. Other users reported similar problems.

Those who don’t have any issues with 5.26 probably use only one monitor

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I have 3x144hz Monitors and the propriatary nvidia driver - no issue regarding disabled monitors.

I would suggest (if you use nvidia) to go into the driver settings, enable the monitor and save the config file according to the manjaro guide

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I use a dual monitor configuration, and my config is :100:

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Thank you for this post. This is great. I am still on plasma 5.24.7 which is super stable even after the big update yesterday. It was awesome that this local repo was created and I bow the person who did it!!!

To elaborate, my system is using frameworks 5.99 and Qt 5.15.6, kernel 6.0.6-1, and x11 using the Nouveau video driver (coupled with xcompmgr for compositing.)

I too am very interested in the status of 5.26.x and will follow every post in this thread carefully.

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I had no issue previously with 5.25 series, but latest update on 5.26 I noticed issue with my main monitor on DP on Nvidia, after letting the PC sleep by itself and coming back later, the main monitor would not receive any output, and secondary monitor was messed up it was showing mouse cursor but there was no window or anything working. Since 5.26 I went back to Plasma 5.24 LTS as it was an option now.

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I have something similar here. After using for a few hours, suddenly all activites get blend together. It is not possible to move windows around, use menus etc, but the programs are still working fine.

–

UPDATE: just to add that I have 2 monitors and I am using an Intel HD Graphics 610.

UPDATE 2: disabling the compositor (alt+shift+F12) takes way longer to appear the black artifacts to me.

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Maybe I missed it, but was a remote repository created for KDE 5.24 LTS, in which we can point to it in our .conf file?

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No, @philm built the 5.24.7 packages on GitHub and offered the .zip file for download, and then you have to download it, set up a local repository, use repo-add and point /etc/pacman.conf to the directory with the unpacked .zip.

However, as @philm pointed out, when the next update to the KDE Frameworks comes around, the 5.24.7 packages will need to be rebuilt against that, and especially so kwin. So unless someone is willing to maintain the LTS packages, we’ll eventually have to migrate to 5.26.

And that’s why I am now inquiring as to the usability of 5.26. Personally, I don’t have multiple monitors, nor Nvidia hardware, but the crashing — with data loss — and the black screen were the showstoppers in 5.25, and if those are not fixed in 5.26, then 5.26 is no good.

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Fingers crossed, but in light of recent patterns with upstream KDE development and maintenance, my optimism remains cautiously at bay. I hope I’m wrong.

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