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Just my 2 cents, but I still occasionally play Loki games' Alpha Centauri, Kohan: Immortal Sovereign, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Rune, SimCity3000 and others. They all still play fine on my slackware-current (as of today) system.
Alpha Centauri came out in about 1997 or 98. Heroes and SimCity were 1999 I think.
I say that because Plasma 5.13.1 on top of Qt-5.11.1 works well from this POV with no X.org configuration tuning. No artifacts and no effects disabled on reboot.
I am in measure to confirm that upgrading to Plasma 5.13.1 fixed both issues about graphic artifacts and KWin effects disabling, with no additional configuration of X.org or disabling graphics acceleration or switching to EXA.
I am in measure to confirm that upgrading to Plasma 5.13.1 fixed both issues about graphic artifacts and KWin effects disabling, with no additional configuration of X.org or disabling graphics acceleration or switching to EXA.
Distribution: Slackware64-current with "True Multilib" and KDE4Town.
Posts: 9,167
Original Poster
Rep:
While looking through new posts to this site since my last visit, I stumbled across the following and thought this thread as good a place as any to post a link to the article.
The author starts by saying,
Quote:
For several reasons (including curiosity), a few weeks ago I started using Xfce as my Linux desktop. One reason was trouble with background daemons eating up all the CPU and I/O bandwidth on my very powerful main workstation. Of course, some of the instability may be due to my removal of some of the RPM packages that provide those background daemons. However, even before I removed the RPMs, the fact is KDE was unstable and causing performance and stability issues. I needed to use a different desktop to avoid these problems.....
Beyond the question "Is Plasma5 Ready for Inclusion in Slackware?" there is another question: "Is Really Good to Include Plasma5 in Slackware?"
Let's look at Plasma5: wants to be its own ecosystem (and a huge one) and has a release cycle of one freaking month.
Le't look at Slackware: is a relative small distribution, which has a release cycle of 2-3 years.
Excuse me, but a 2 years old Plasma5 is just as obsolete like the Middle English, on which Shakespeare written his dramas.
In 2 years there will be released around 24 versions of Plasma5. In 3 years there will be released around 36 versions of Plasma5.
I know, I know, you will raise the LTS flag. BUT, I do not know if that LTS is worth something for Plasma5. Let's take a look at the LTS variant and the 5.13.1 variant published of Eric.
Comparing them, the 5.13.1 is dramatic better.
BUT IT IS LTS! SO what? This is a excuse of bad functioning and running ancient code?
LTS or NOT, probably the Plasma5 will become quickly obsolete, and the users will jump again in the Eric's KTown.
To accommodate the Plasma5 release cycle, I believe we need an official KTown, endorsed by our BDFL, and will a faster release cycle than the 2-3 years of main distro. A much faster, as something like 6 months between stable releases.
This splitting of Plasma5 in its own repository and release cycle has many other advantages, as leave the main distribution cleaner and more easy to customize, and Plasma5 get the attention which deserve.
I believe that we should grow up, and to understand that an official KTown, along with the one managed by Eric, still represents official release. Still represents Slackware.
Heck! IF you include everything which Ubuntu ships, you need a BlueRay around 80GB, and for real, fully installed Ubuntu has around 200GB. Yet, it is shipped at the dimension of a CD.
How they do that? Separate repositories. Same thing we can do also us, and get advantages in all parts. And a much more modern Plasma5.
OK, you will talk about "burden" as usual. Of course is not simple to maintain Plasma5, but that burden will be equal, either with Plasma5 maintained in the main tree, either in a separate repo.
Finally, a separate repo will permit to Patrick to give to it access to a close collaborator (and there I see no one other than Eric), and to share the burden to maintain this.
Last edited by Darth Vader; 06-25-2018 at 11:38 AM.
To accommodate the Plasma5 release cycle, I believe we need an official KTown, endorsed by our BDFL, and will a faster release cycle than the 2-3 years of main distro. A much faster, as something like 6 months between stable releases.
This sounds interesting.
I too had similar thoughts although it was more about security patches.... where maybe an updated slackware installer image would be released with nothing more but baked in security updates. (don't get me wrong, if i need to spin up a new VM i can install the updates, but it would be convenient)
I cannot not note there that the Eric's "testing" 5.13.1 tree (I prefer to ignore the "latest" as it works really bad), as in x86 and x86_64 binaries + sources has 4.7GB, a size worth to be released on its own DVD.
Imagine that 2 times per year, our BDFL can release a special DVD of "The Plasma5 for Slackware" and interested people can subscribe to and buy it.
Read: an opportunity to make additional money.
We, we get always a much more modern Plasma5 and a cleaner main distribution, and Slackware, Inc. an opportunity.
Last edited by Darth Vader; 06-25-2018 at 12:05 PM.
To accommodate the Plasma5 release cycle, I believe we need an official KTown, endorsed by our BDFL, and will a faster release cycle than the 2-3 years of main distro. A much faster, as something like 6 months between stable releases.
This gives users who want KDE available out-of-the-box with only major bugs fixed what they want and others can keep updating it more frequently as Eric puts out releases.
I added the underlining and, of course, it is the opinion of the author, who, I don't believe said which version of KDE he was using.
He said he removed RPMs which means he was not using the KDE in Slackware.
Please stay to the point and abstain from using the KDE experience of users on other distros to pollute the opinions about Slackware's software packages.
The KDE4 (and also the Plasma5) in Slackware is reportedly (search my blog) much more stable than that in other distros.
Excuse me, but a 2 years old Plasma5 is just as obsolete like the Middle English, on which Shakespeare written his dramas.
I never heard you say the same about your beloved and much-praised KDE4. The development on KDE4 had already stopped when Slackware 14.2 was released, two years ago. Define obsolete please?
Quote:
I know, I know, you will raise the LTS flag. BUT, I do not know if that LTS is worth something for Plasma5. Let's take a look at the LTS variant and the 5.13.1 variant published of Eric.
Comparing them, the 5.13.1 is dramatic better.
OK so please in your next rant (sorry, post) give us an objective comparison of the dramatic improvements in Plasma 5.13.1 against the LTS 5.12.
Also explain why it is better to stick with the short-lived releases of Plasma5 (with their monthly release cycle as you explained here) instead of sticking with LTS releases of Qt5 and Plasma Desktop (with updates spread many months apart but spanning much longer than the short-lived branches)?
You are so contradicting yourself here, pal.
Quote:
OK, you will talk about "burden" as usual. Of course is not simple to maintain Plasma5, but that burden will be equal, either with Plasma5 maintained in the main tree, either in a separate repo.
Finally, a separate repo will permit to Patrick to give to it access to a close collaborator (and there I see no one other than Eric), and to share the burden to maintain this.
I am not in the least interested in "sharing a burden" with Pat. It's his distro, not mine. I am perfectly fine with whatever he decides is best for the distro.
Just my 2 cents, but I still occasionally play Loki games' Alpha Centauri, Kohan: Immortal Sovereign, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Rune, SimCity3000 and others. They all still play fine on my slackware-current (as of today) system.
Alpha Centauri came out in about 1997 or 98. Heroes and SimCity were 1999 I think.
Oh man! LOKI!! I recall being very impressed not only with the effort but that an archive was online for many years. That was breakthrough code. Rune was fun tho I haven't tried it in ages but I recently dug into an old box of CDs and saw "Heretic" and just had to fire it up. Runs great. Now where is that "Road Rash" CD?
Oh yeah in order to try to stay at least a little On Topic -----
Yo Darth - Assembly is ancient code but that doesn't make it inferior. New != Improved
OK so please in your next rant (sorry, post) give us an objective comparison of the dramatic improvements in Plasma 5.13.1 against the LTS 5.12.
Eric, I confess that I am really biased toward the Plasma 5.13.1 and started against LTS 5.12 from a simple reason: Plasma 5.13.1 works and it is at least usable, while the other one is not.
What does not work with LTS 5.12? Most importantly, it presents two bugs, both huge like Godzilla (at least after my taste), and which bugs I described already in this very thread, even with screenshots: these graphical artifacts and the KWin crashing its effect on (re)boot.
In other hand, I am really impressed by the memory consumption of the Plasma 5.13.1, visible lower than LTS counterpart. Apparently, from my biased observations, even Firefox eat a seriously lower amount of memory.
Why the heck happens that? Gods know, but I appreciate the results.
Finally, probably you know that my favorite editor is Kate. Seeing 190MB memory consumption of Kate, while it has 2744 files opened, well... that impressed me to tears.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alien Bob
Also explain why it is better to stick with the short-lived releases of Plasma5 (with their monthly release cycle as you explained here) instead of sticking with LTS releases of Qt5 and Plasma Desktop (with updates spread many months apart but spanning much longer than the short-lived branches)?
You are so contradicting yourself here, pal.
From the shocking difference between that much acclaimed 5.12 LTS and the commoner one, the Plasma 5.13.1, make me to understand several things:
First of all, that in the case of Plasma5, the LTS word is worth next to zero. If they aren't capable to fix several bugs huge like elephants within a LTS, then they do not care. So myself.
Secondly, from my own experience with Plasma5, and I followed religious every of your releases since several months (more than half a year, I believe), I learned that Plasma5 evolve very fast. Freaking fast. It is a target moving at light speed.
For example, the Plasma 5.13.1 is most likely a "beta", if they make it in 5.14 or 5.15 to read properly its own configuration files and fix the Baloo crash, with some enthusiasm you can call it RC. With even some enthusiasm maybe we will see within 5.16 the support for NVIDIA blobs too...
And there we arrive at defining "obsolete" in the Plasma5 case:
I believe that in 2-3 years it will evolves so much, that what you get from the distro release, and what you get from the recent build, these two things will differ enormous. Will be like jumping from KDE 2.2 on today KDE4.
Certainly, now I have a well working DE - the KDE4, and if Patrick adopts Plasma 5.13.1 or some later release, well... I will can live with. It is not perfect, yet acceptable.
And probably, in one year or so, maybe Plasma5 will become really acceptable, if its updates are followed.
BUT, if Patrick adopts a Plasma5 release like that 5.12 LTS, with those dragons inside, this one will be unusable for me for working with, from reasons you already know.
And nope, I have no intention to buy video-cards just to run Plasma5.
Last edited by Darth Vader; 06-25-2018 at 03:36 PM.
Or drop Plasma, keep QT (which I imagine is essential as a toolkit too many) and replace Plasma with MATE keeping Plasma as a SlackBuild...
I love Plasma but it is just a royal pain in the ass and question if it can ever match the quality of Slackware. It seems KDE has the GNOME virus, that insane running towards a cliff dragging behind the user and maintainer with their whims.
Distribution: Slackware64-current with "True Multilib" and KDE4Town.
Posts: 9,167
Original Poster
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alien Bob
He said he removed RPMs which means he was not using the KDE in Slackware.
Please stay to the point and abstain from using the KDE experience of users on other distros to pollute the opinions about Slackware's software packages.
The KDE4 (and also the Plasma5) in Slackware is reportedly (search my blog) much more stable than that in other distros.
You are not a moderator.
I started this thread and I'll add whatever I think might be relative to the conversation. There are many users, regardless of the distribution in which they use or have used kde, who are not convinced it is stable.
I won't stoop to your level and tell you, just because I don't agree with you, where you might have your head.
Last edited by cwizardone; 06-25-2018 at 08:15 PM.
Reason: Typo.
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