About updating to latest newest version - my thoughts

[BRM]

> On Tuesday, May 12, 2015 4:04 PM, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
  

> On Tue, 12 May 2015, O. Sinclair wrote:
> > Dear all,> >> > from my point of view Plasma/KDE5 is not mature enough for production> > use. That is how I see it and feel free to disagree.> >> > I have one computer and I use to make a living. There is a degree to how> > much I can surrender a working stable environment to "new and shiny".> >> > This is not meant as an offense to the developers who have spent> > countless hours on the "5" environment.> > I agree with all of the above.
If you must stay stable, then stick with LTS.Ubuntu "stable" is Debian "Testing" so you really can't assume the non-LTS releases by Ubuntu are stable.They just tend to be pretty stable; but there are still big changes that can happen - like the grub2 change for 13.10 that broke boot-up on a lot of systems.

 That said, I've found KDE5/Plasma5 to be very stable and usable at this point. I miss a couple things - Konsole Profiles widget, Quick Access Widget - but I can generally live without them if I had to.It's actually fixed some things for me. I don't care for the extra memory usage, but the machines I have it on are capable. I expect that memory usage to drop as more Qt4 apps move to Qt5 and from KDE4 to KDE Frameworks 5.

> > What I dont get/understand is how many just seem to jump on to this> > upgrade and did not expect serious breakages? Then go on to use XCFE or> > Lubuntu instead of, to me, simply staying where you are?> Because KDE is not the only software that's upgraded between the two releases.> If Plasma5 isn't ready, then it shouldn't have been the default in 15.04, and > there should be a way to downgrade to the prior software (build on the ubuntu > 15.04 base)> > Use 14.04 or 14.10. If you want a newer kernel go mainline kernel ppa (as I > > type this I am on kernel 4.1.rc2), for graphics there are several ppa for > > Libreoffice again the same.> > so instead of running a supported distro release, I should frankenstein a system > that nobody will support by installing a bunch of upgraded packages myself? If > I'm going to do that, why bother running Kubuntu at all?> > > If you choose to go Plasma5 then EXPECT breakages and lack of functions.> > It is still in development (sorry devs but that is the truth) and you> > are likely to hit snags for at least 2 releases of Kubuntu.> > I didn't choose to go Plasma5, I chose to upgrade to the next stable release of > Kubuntu. And if you are telling me that I should not expect Kubuntu to be stable > for the next two releases, then you are telling me that I should switch away > from KDE.
While I agree, I'll point out that KDE5/Plasma5/Qt5 is a very different beast than KDE4/Qt4 was.KDE5/Plasma5 is more component oriented so things can change at different rates.There was also a lot of apps that moved from Qt4 to Qt5 without necessarily moving to Plasma5.So overall things are a lot more compatible and stable.
I'm not to fond of the fact that KDE5/KDE4 can't be both loaded together so you can't switch between them.

> When KDE 4.0 was released and distros switched to it, the KDE folks claimed that > 4.0 was only supposed to be for developers, normal users shouldn't be useing it > and it was a mistake on the part of the distros to switch that early.> Well, either the same mistake is happening again, or it wasn't a mistake on the > part of the distros, it's a mistake on the part of the KDE maintainers to be > pushing this.
The big difference here is that with KDE4 they devs said at the 4.0 release that it was not ready for prime-time use, they were releasing it so developers could start building against it.And then the distros started switching.
With KDE5/Plasma5, I feel almost as if the distros waited longer than they should have, which is probably due to not being able to have KDE4 and Plasma5 installed at the same time.
 
> I am very willing to try new software, and I would have been very willing to > give Plasma5 a try. But given the problems that I'm running into, I would have > switched away from it rather quickly. As it is, I've had to switch away from KDE > on one laptop, and I'm debating doing to same on my work systems.> Please provide some way to switch back to Plasma4 quickly and don't make Plasma5 > the default until it's ready.
I don't know why KDE make it so hard to have KDE4/Plasma4 and Plasma5 installed side-by-side so users could switch between them.But that's probably the bug you want to push on. Whether anything will be done, I don't know. May be Kubuntu devs can help out there.
$0.02

Ben

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