Monday 27 March 2017

Living with Plasma 5 and Linux


The Plasma 5 on Mint 18.1 KDE experience continues.

Now that the major wrinkles, like the unwanted mouse trails, have been ironed out, the overall Plasma 5 experience is bearable.

The lack of separate wallpapers for workspaces, and the loss of a lot of the fun settings in desktop configuration is sad, but overall it is ok.

There is one exception to the 'Only one wallpaper across all workspaces'.  I can run one instance of a video wallpaper, say and mp4, on a single workspace, while the others are running the usual single image.

 The screen capture above and the one below are from a video running as my desktop wallpaper on one workspace in Plasma 5, while the other three workspaces are showing the wallpaper in the top picture.

At present the most annoying daily problem with Plasma 5 is that it takes almost an entire minute to boot.  I am used to KDE4 which is really quick to boot to the desktop, but with Plasma 5 it is just one black screen after another, with the occasional KDE gear logo or once in a while a mouse cursor.  The rest of the time, it is simply wait, wait and wait for the black screen to go away.

A few programs seem to crash regularly.  KODI is probably the worst offender.  I opened Dolphin the other day to find a while collection of KODI crash .log files.

Overall, once it is running, Plasma 5 is ok.  But it remains to be seen if the Plasma team ever bring it back to the nice polished experience of KDE4.  Here's hoping.

No comments:

Post a Comment