Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Plasma Next is pretty darn stable

Today I wanted to share some of my experiences with using Plasma Next for the past couple of weeks. Since I had been working on some frameworks development (just a small bit here and there), I thought I'd try running Plasma Next a couple of weeks ago to see how things were coming along and to be able to work on and test some things I helped with back in KDE 4.0 days.

I have to say I'm very impressed with the stability.  I hit two issues since then, and one of the issues has been fixed. The issue I hit that has already been fixed was a crash in yakuake or konsole when closing a tab that caused the whole application to crash. I looked into the Konsole codebase with Eike Hein's guidance, but Argonel ultimately found the best patch to fix the problem.
The second issue I hit with Plasma Next has to do with disconnecting and reconnecting an external monitor. I don't do that very often at all, but when I tried last weekend I got a variety of issues. For example sometimes when disconnecting Plasma (or maybe KSmServer?) crashes and I am taken back to the sddm login screen. Other times when connecting my external screen my panel ends up floating on the external monitor but nothing on it is clickable.

I just realized this post probably sounds like a rant or complaining about Plasma Next, but that's not what I intended at all. The main point I wanted to get across is that I haven't used Plasma more than once in the past 2 weeks since Plasma Next is stable enough for my usage.

Now for the obligatory desktop screenshot:

So good job to all the people that have worked on this new iteration of the Plasma Desktop.

P.S. One other minor thing I miss from plasma is the ability to show multiple timezone's times in the clock's tooltip. I'll see if I can get that fixed though. :)

1 comment:

Rsh said...

Plasma1 has the same issues with crashing when monitors are being connected/disconnected.