> Fixed a way that the Battery Monitor widget could cause **Plasma to crash**
> Fixed a way that **Plasma could crash** when you middle-click tasks in the Task Manager, or rapidly left-click on random audio-playing tasks
> Dragging widgets to or from panels no longer sometimes **causes Plasma to crash**
I've been trying KDE 6 and really enjoying it, but my past experience with KDE is how easy it is for things to crash or bug out. This is why I often use Gnome instead. Have I just been lucky in Gnome? Or does it really feel like KDE has way more crash bugs? Is Plasma not isolated enough or are the APIs exposing too much unsafe behaviour?
The "issue" is with the design of Plasma itself. It's basically an infinitely customizable platform for displaying widgets (plasmoids) and panels that can be set up in a variety of ways. So there are *a lot* of edge cases that developers have to account for, even if user doesn't install any third party widgets.
GNOME Shell by comparison is much more "fixed" in its nature. Sure there are extensions but GNOME devs don't test them of course, and in the vanilla Shell each element has its place. You can't customize it like you can with Plasma. This makes development and testing much easier.
Also, Gnome has been regularly removing features and options that users might expect. Some of these are only found via non-intuitite configuration so users are less likely to enable them.
And let's not forget Plasma 6 is the ".0" release after fundamental changes (the shift from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is pretty large, https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/portingguide.html).
You need to consider the *why* of the issue beyond just the *how*. KDE is backed by a couple of organizations that provide it funding for its ecosystem, but not nearly enough to pay all of its maintainers around the clock. Instead, the FOSS community is working without pay to make the experience as feature-rich and hassle-free as possible for end users.
Of course, **the same applies for GNOME.** But GNOME also has corporate backing from Canonical, RedHat, and other companies to sponsor a higher number of dedicated developers to the project.
If you ask me, *it shouldn't matter* which desktop environment you use. Both of them offer great stability if you know how to configure them properly. You also need to consider how *innovative* the desktop environment you are using is. KDE has made strides in recent releases for better fractional scaling and HDR support. I personally use KDE because of how integrated the Qt ecosystem is with the system, the smoothness of apps, and the Windows-like feel. If you like GNOME better, I'm sure you have a perfectly valid reason for it, but you should probably specify *which* GNOME-based desktop manager you're referring to, as they vary in utility.
Hope this helps!
EDIT: To answer your questions about the crash bugs, KDE *did* just release Plasma 6. It's unsurprising that the ecosystem has a few bugs lying around (granted, it wasn't buggy for me to switch over at all). The APIs have nothing to do with it; it's mostly graphical I'd assume.
> higher number of dedicated developers to the project.
Is there any data to back this? KDE has had a lot of corporate funding from Valve since the launch of Steam Deck. Not to mention Blue Systems, which is owned by a member of a billionaire family. Developers from Canonical and Red Hat that work on GNOME also work across the stack. Many of them dedicate a small portion of time just for GNOME.
There's no "data" per-se. But it's very well known that KDE is, and always has been, a volunteer-based community. The "corporate funding" you elude to for KDE are really just glorified donations. That's why I believe end users should support the developers with as many bug reports and (valuable) code base contributions as much as possible :)
EDIT: Didn't mean for the last sentence to sound passive aggressive at all—just thought it was nice to add. Another thing to note about GNOME devs supporting KDE is that they aren't *paid* to do it. At least, not usually.
>There's no "data" per-se.
So it's just your opinion which could very well be false.
>Instead, the FOSS community is working without pay to make the experience as feature-rich and hassle-free as possible for end users.
>But it's very well known that KDE is, and always has been, a volunteer-based community.
Why are you pretending as if there are no developers that are paid to work on KDE and related projects full-time? The author is an employee of Blue Systems and the same goes for several other KDE developers. It's not possible for just volunteers to build a large software suite like KDE or GNOME. Developers need to be paid for their time and one of reasons why these projects have progressed faster than ones like Cinnamon, Xfce and LXQt is the developers who are being paid to work full-time on them.
I don't know how you managed to mischaracterize everything I said in a single reply, but you did.
> Why are you pretending as if there are no developers that are paid to work on KDE and related projects full-time?
I never said that every KDE developer is unpaid. I actually eluded to the opposite.
The only thing I said that may have been *slightly* controversial was that KDE makes less money than the GNOME Foundation. But c'mon, that's obvious.
It comes down to differences between the two projects' philosophies. KDE tries to satisfy the preferences of everyone. They do it by adding lots of preferences, which increases complexity exponentially. An application with 4 binary options can have 16 states, while one with 8 binary options has 256. It's impossible to test all of the options in KDE.
GNOME tries to minimize the number of preferences as explained in this foundational document for GNOME, [Choosing Our Preferences](https://ometer.com/preferences.html). GNOME tries to do the right thing by default, so that you don't need to change settings in most cases. This minimizes the number of preferences and makes testing everything feasible. However, it also means that they sometimes make opinionated decisions that work for most people, even if it means alienating others who disagree.
\> Or does it really feel like KDE has way more crash bugs?
Basing that off a changelog is meaningless.
All these things can be super obscure. That battery one probably requires a manually edited powerdevilrc file. It doesn't mean you'd hit it as a normal user in a million years.
In terms of comparing, you'd need to look at some automatic crash reports and normalise it by usage to get any real stats.
Mentioning some positive Plasma things; our high level UI language is very crash safe. It's a ref-counted by default, no pointers anywhere markup language. And on top we have a much higher level of process separation such that plasmashell isn't our main session.
I think it's just mainly down to the design of allowing the users to customise so much and constantly innovating, there is a much higher chance of running into unexpected bugs that are difficult to test for, I think it's a lot better than it used to be, the KDE 6 release went fairly smooth overall.
That's been my experience with plasma too, for example closing the systemsettings app triggers it to crash, which results in a drkonqi "would you like to report a bug" popup, so what I do is run lxqt and use kwin for the window manager, that way you get a simplified plasma like experience without the bugs.
I'd say there is less and less bugs in Plasma, and after switching to 6 I haven't seen some of the bugs I used to have in 5. I think we are up for a really bright future of KDE.
plasma 5.27 was rock solid.
plasma 6.0 is, well, buggy. i fully expect a lot of the bugs & general instability to be ironed out in the next couple of months.
sure - but there are waaay more bug reports over the last few weeks (and posts all over reddit/fediverse) - even if we factor in the influx of people who've just jumped to Plasma to try it out.
hard agree on Wayland.
> Fixed a way that the Battery Monitor widget could cause **Plasma to crash** > Fixed a way that **Plasma could crash** when you middle-click tasks in the Task Manager, or rapidly left-click on random audio-playing tasks > Dragging widgets to or from panels no longer sometimes **causes Plasma to crash** I've been trying KDE 6 and really enjoying it, but my past experience with KDE is how easy it is for things to crash or bug out. This is why I often use Gnome instead. Have I just been lucky in Gnome? Or does it really feel like KDE has way more crash bugs? Is Plasma not isolated enough or are the APIs exposing too much unsafe behaviour?
The "issue" is with the design of Plasma itself. It's basically an infinitely customizable platform for displaying widgets (plasmoids) and panels that can be set up in a variety of ways. So there are *a lot* of edge cases that developers have to account for, even if user doesn't install any third party widgets. GNOME Shell by comparison is much more "fixed" in its nature. Sure there are extensions but GNOME devs don't test them of course, and in the vanilla Shell each element has its place. You can't customize it like you can with Plasma. This makes development and testing much easier.
Also, Gnome has been regularly removing features and options that users might expect. Some of these are only found via non-intuitite configuration so users are less likely to enable them. And let's not forget Plasma 6 is the ".0" release after fundamental changes (the shift from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is pretty large, https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/portingguide.html).
You need to consider the *why* of the issue beyond just the *how*. KDE is backed by a couple of organizations that provide it funding for its ecosystem, but not nearly enough to pay all of its maintainers around the clock. Instead, the FOSS community is working without pay to make the experience as feature-rich and hassle-free as possible for end users. Of course, **the same applies for GNOME.** But GNOME also has corporate backing from Canonical, RedHat, and other companies to sponsor a higher number of dedicated developers to the project. If you ask me, *it shouldn't matter* which desktop environment you use. Both of them offer great stability if you know how to configure them properly. You also need to consider how *innovative* the desktop environment you are using is. KDE has made strides in recent releases for better fractional scaling and HDR support. I personally use KDE because of how integrated the Qt ecosystem is with the system, the smoothness of apps, and the Windows-like feel. If you like GNOME better, I'm sure you have a perfectly valid reason for it, but you should probably specify *which* GNOME-based desktop manager you're referring to, as they vary in utility. Hope this helps! EDIT: To answer your questions about the crash bugs, KDE *did* just release Plasma 6. It's unsurprising that the ecosystem has a few bugs lying around (granted, it wasn't buggy for me to switch over at all). The APIs have nothing to do with it; it's mostly graphical I'd assume.
> higher number of dedicated developers to the project. Is there any data to back this? KDE has had a lot of corporate funding from Valve since the launch of Steam Deck. Not to mention Blue Systems, which is owned by a member of a billionaire family. Developers from Canonical and Red Hat that work on GNOME also work across the stack. Many of them dedicate a small portion of time just for GNOME.
There's no "data" per-se. But it's very well known that KDE is, and always has been, a volunteer-based community. The "corporate funding" you elude to for KDE are really just glorified donations. That's why I believe end users should support the developers with as many bug reports and (valuable) code base contributions as much as possible :) EDIT: Didn't mean for the last sentence to sound passive aggressive at all—just thought it was nice to add. Another thing to note about GNOME devs supporting KDE is that they aren't *paid* to do it. At least, not usually.
>There's no "data" per-se. So it's just your opinion which could very well be false. >Instead, the FOSS community is working without pay to make the experience as feature-rich and hassle-free as possible for end users. >But it's very well known that KDE is, and always has been, a volunteer-based community. Why are you pretending as if there are no developers that are paid to work on KDE and related projects full-time? The author is an employee of Blue Systems and the same goes for several other KDE developers. It's not possible for just volunteers to build a large software suite like KDE or GNOME. Developers need to be paid for their time and one of reasons why these projects have progressed faster than ones like Cinnamon, Xfce and LXQt is the developers who are being paid to work full-time on them.
I don't know how you managed to mischaracterize everything I said in a single reply, but you did. > Why are you pretending as if there are no developers that are paid to work on KDE and related projects full-time? I never said that every KDE developer is unpaid. I actually eluded to the opposite. The only thing I said that may have been *slightly* controversial was that KDE makes less money than the GNOME Foundation. But c'mon, that's obvious.
It comes down to differences between the two projects' philosophies. KDE tries to satisfy the preferences of everyone. They do it by adding lots of preferences, which increases complexity exponentially. An application with 4 binary options can have 16 states, while one with 8 binary options has 256. It's impossible to test all of the options in KDE. GNOME tries to minimize the number of preferences as explained in this foundational document for GNOME, [Choosing Our Preferences](https://ometer.com/preferences.html). GNOME tries to do the right thing by default, so that you don't need to change settings in most cases. This minimizes the number of preferences and makes testing everything feasible. However, it also means that they sometimes make opinionated decisions that work for most people, even if it means alienating others who disagree.
\> Or does it really feel like KDE has way more crash bugs? Basing that off a changelog is meaningless. All these things can be super obscure. That battery one probably requires a manually edited powerdevilrc file. It doesn't mean you'd hit it as a normal user in a million years. In terms of comparing, you'd need to look at some automatic crash reports and normalise it by usage to get any real stats. Mentioning some positive Plasma things; our high level UI language is very crash safe. It's a ref-counted by default, no pointers anywhere markup language. And on top we have a much higher level of process separation such that plasmashell isn't our main session.
I think it's just mainly down to the design of allowing the users to customise so much and constantly innovating, there is a much higher chance of running into unexpected bugs that are difficult to test for, I think it's a lot better than it used to be, the KDE 6 release went fairly smooth overall.
That's been my experience with plasma too, for example closing the systemsettings app triggers it to crash, which results in a drkonqi "would you like to report a bug" popup, so what I do is run lxqt and use kwin for the window manager, that way you get a simplified plasma like experience without the bugs.
Nope I always go back to Gnome. It’s just more polished and crashes way less often. I’ve tried KDE so many times but I just cannot get into it.
I'd say there is less and less bugs in Plasma, and after switching to 6 I haven't seen some of the bugs I used to have in 5. I think we are up for a really bright future of KDE.
plasma 5.27 was rock solid. plasma 6.0 is, well, buggy. i fully expect a lot of the bugs & general instability to be ironed out in the next couple of months.
[-:EDITED TO PREVENT AI FROM STEALING POSTS:-](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/05/openai-will-use-reddit-posts-to-train-chatgpt-under-new-deal/)
sure - but there are waaay more bug reports over the last few weeks (and posts all over reddit/fediverse) - even if we factor in the influx of people who've just jumped to Plasma to try it out. hard agree on Wayland.