Just for some perspective, this is from Eric's blog a couple of days ago:

Maybe this is another thing that's holding up 15.0. It's hard to know what heavyweight DE it could use if not Plasma. GNOME is out of the question [which may or may not also omit Cinnamon and Budgie].

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I believe Eric is saying that Plasma 5 is going to be delayed for a indefinite period, not that it won't be included ever. In fact, if I remember correctly, I saw a post by Pat saying he was going to include Plasma 5 in Slackware eventually. It's just a matter of time now.

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Dang, well maybe at least this means Slackware 15 will be ready in the nearish future. But surely we're not going to keep KDE 4 around, right? We at least need Qt5 in Slackware.

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Now, the question is: on which scale of time? From a geological point of view, the US of A was born yesterday, you know...

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Would be good if you can link to it, I can't find anything. There's another blog from July 2018 where Eric goes into more detail, saying that it could still go either way, and that if PV decided not to include it, Eric would keep providing KDE builds. Looking back through PV's post history, he has never confirmed inclusion of KDE5 that I can see, only speculated.

Also, this is an interesting post from Darth Vader, a big fan of KDE5:



Both qt4 and qt5 can be installed side by side, as far as I'm aware. I don't know too much detail about Pat's reasons for being hesitant to include Plasma, but I know personally a couple of old school *nixers who think 5 is dreadful and inferior to 4 by a large margin.

EDIT: Ah, now I see you know about qt4 + qt5, montag.

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You can mod or pimp your Slackware any way you like but <<you>>> and you alone are re-sponsible for your re-sults.
So you can do LXDE or LXqt or Cinnamon whatever you want to your Slackware.

But KDE4 and KDE5 dont get along with each other unless they are on different partitions.

I liked some of the theming of KDE4 such as "Keramik" which is gone in KDE5, but the performance of KDE5 for me is much better
so I live with a more plain page (by choice).

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One thing I forgot to mention in post #476 is the KDE applications now load noticeably faster from within Xfce, using KDE-5.
This box has a relatively new CPU so I was quite surprised to be able to "see" the difference between loading KDE-4 apps vs KDE-5 apps. Again, this was in Xfce.

qt4 and qt5 are fully co-installable. After checking, I've remembered that I run them both side by side with no issue. KDE4 and KDE5 are another matter.

Also check out this comment from montagdude:

So there would technically be nothing wrong with having KDE4 and also installing qt5.

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I am pretty sure that I had qt4 and qt5 both at the same time at one point because something required qt5
while I was still running qt5.

I dabbled with KDE5 for awhile on a different boot partition until it developed to the point that
KDE5 was running so much faster than KDE4 that there was no longer any point in having a KDE4 machine.

I think I do have some machine in the lab somewhere that still has kde4 and keramik theming but it is
a machine that is mostly used by others not me and runs Chinese windows 7 and a chinese login setup of Slackware
that I had toyed with a one point.

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Your Dell graphics card is this one?

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-spec...oem-1-gb.b5452

If yes, it is an Oland with architecture GCN 1.0 and it is overclocked from factory.

The good news are that you are blessed with two drivers for it on Slackware Linux, because it is supported (by default) by "radeon" and also it will work fine with "amdgpu" if you use the following options on the kernel command line:
You may want also to complete the options to
Would be interesting to see if its issues with Plasma 5 are just because of the elder "radeon" driver and the graphics card would behave probably better with the much more modern "amdgpu" driver.

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My apologies, it wasn't an LQ post, he mentioned it in one of the entries in the ChangeLog.txt for -current, dated Fri Oct 12 19:24:43 UTC 2018:

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Yeah, I meant we should drop KDE 4 because it is old and unmaintained, not because it is incompatible with Qt5. But, if we're not getting Plasma 5 in Slackware, I hope Pat will consider adding something else Qt5 based but less massive, like LXQt or Lumina.

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To play devil's advocate here, with respect to graphics issues:

The intel graphics drivers, which are very widely used since the graphics are included onboard with ever so many Intel chips, have a lot of tearing issues when left to their own devices (no pun intended) and rely heavily upon having a well-configured compositor keeping vsync in place. There is the "TearFree" xorg config option, but it is widely known as a band-aid solution and to cause performance issues.

Kwin, especially in Plasma5, is one of the few WMs out there that really gets compositing and full vsync to work properly with Intel graphics on Xorg. XFWM4 does have compositing and a vsync option, but it doesn't function properly, at least not on my machine, with Intel graphics.

I actually have one of those annoying Intel/Nvidia hybrid systems with "Optimus" technology, which works notoriously poorly on Linux. KDE5 with the Intel and nouveau drivers works very beautifully on Plasma5 with kwin. I tried the closed-source Nvidia drivers (410.78) and it severely broke almost everything graphics-wise, including Plasma5, which didn't look right at all, but also many other things. Playing 3D games (in my case, Dragon Quest VIII for PS2 through PCSX2 in 1080p mode worked beautifully and looked breathtakingly smooth and gorgeous), but just about everything else was very wonky. This may be because the Nvidia card on Optimus machines isn't meant to be used all on its own, which is what the proprietary drivers with 'offloading' enabled does do on Linux/xorg - there seems to be no easy ability to actually dynamically swap between the drivers/video cards, except maybe with Bumblebee (which I believe may now be unmaintained?) - but that is a rabbit-hole I really don't feel like going down.

On my PC though, which has a dedicated Nvidia graphics card (an older one; can't be bothered to look it up right now), Plasma5 works perfectly with the closed-source nvidia drivers (again, 410.78).

So yeah, Plasma5 may not play super nice with some proprietary nvidia setups, but as I've said, in my experience Xfce (and other WMs) don't play super nice with Intel, without using a solution like Compton (which doesn't come with Slackware). So you can't please everybody, I guess. Personally I'd be much more interested in hearing about user experiences using FOSS drivers that actually come with Slackware as opposed to using closed-source add-ons, which are inherently unsupportable to a certain extent.

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I wonder if maybe Mr. Volkerding looks forward and have some particular hopes for Plasma 5.20.x, just like Darth Vader?

At Plasma 5 pace of one minor stable release per month, and considering that now we are around 5.15, I guess that in the next half of year we will see also that 5.20, after all...

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I'm all for Lumina. I've been playing with multiple DE/WM's and currently run AlienBob's Lumina 1.4.0.p1 package. It is a great balance between a WM and DE. Its memory load is only slightly lighter than XFCE, but it loads the KDE4 apps without issue. It has a few quirks I needed to fix with key code layouts, like hiting "end" taking me to the main menu. Ken Moore says he is open to helping make Lumina the most portable DE available for both TrueOS and any Linux distribution which asks for assistance. Image presentation is probably not as good as XFCE right now. Just my two cents worth, I'm sure PV will make up his own mind about proper direction. Cheers.

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