14 DAY TRIAL // In a blog post published earlier today, October 15, KDE contributor and developer Björn Ruberg talks about the stability, usability, and reliability of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment for end users.
According to Mr. Ruberg, who encountered a great number of issues while using the latest KDE Plasma 5.3 desktop environment on the Fedora 22 GNU/Linux operating system on four laptops for a few weeks, the quality of the current KDE desktop is questionable.
Most of the issues he encountered were related to multi-screen configurations, such as attaching and detaching external displays from the laptop, the broken functionality of moving the Plasma panels between screens, distorted screen problems with on-board Intel graphics cards, etc.
"These are just the bugs I was able to clearly identify and reproduce. I had many more problems. SDDM was some kind of a nightmare when it became the default for KDE," said Björn Ruberg. "I had heavy problems with it in a multi screen setup and I could not login into a second session. I had to fall back to kdm several times."
Recent versions of KDE Plasma 5 seem to work much better
In addition to the multi-screen setup problems listed above, Mr. Ruberg, who is known for creating the KDE Plasma’s on-screen keyboard, as well as for solving various bugs in the KMail email client, reports that he encountered issues with several KDE applications that have not yet been ported to KDE Frameworks 5, such as those who still rely on KDE Wallet 4 instead of KDE Wallet 5.
Later in the blog post, the developer is puzzled by the fact that-the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment is promoted as stable among GNU/Linux users and that he didn't spot any review that reports the bugs he encountered. But then he answered his question saying that you can cope with the KDE desktop if you use it on a single screen.
In the end, he notes that the KDE Plasma 5.3 is a terrible experience, which many of us already knew, including the KDE developers, that's why they published the KDE Plasma 5.4 and the KDE Applications 15.08 updates a couple of months ago.
We've always said that if you want stability, you must have the latest stable version of a software, so if you're using KDE Plasma 5, upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.4.2 (the latest version available at the moment of writing this article) immediately. Also, upgrade the KDE Applications software suite to version 15.08.2, which was released just a couple of days ago.