KDE Plasma.. I've seen the light

My old Thinkpad is basically useless for those gestures, but I’m getting something new later this year. Maybe a Slimbook or something.

Plus X11 can’t beat Wayland for scaling on screen with different resolutions!

Give 5.26 a shot.

Plasma also eats too much memory (and leaks a lot )

I run Plasma on a PC with 2 GiB RAM and still had more than half empty.

I had some strange issues, laptop getting hot and using a lot ventilation when logged into plasma, but not when logged in my i3 wm session.

Disable file indexing.

touchpad gestures don’t even work on Gnome Wayland…

Three finger swipe gestures for workspace switching, some sort of overview etc. work fine here.

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But is your laptop nine years old like mine?

No, only 1 year old.

I am on an old device right now and not only gestures don’t work, but also all multi-tap related features are disabled!
image
Also, FYI, this is with Firefox w/ a single tab open:

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           1.9Gi       1.0Gi       132Mi       208Mi       757Mi       515Mi
Swap:          999Mi       6.0Mi       993Mi

They should become available if you select “Tap to click”.

I always liked KDE Plasma, but there were some stuff that didn’t fit my workflow, but after reading this topic and watched a lot of YT videos, I’ve started to test it again and I’ll give it again.

Right now, I’ve installed EOS + KDE Plasma on Virtualbox and it looks pretty cool, there’s some changes that I like more from Plasma that make me think that my workflow would be much better on it than is currently on Cinnamon.

The good:

  • Low memory usage
  • Grouped icon tasks with ease window selection
  • Activities + Desktops grid
  • Panel configuration
  • Dolphin has compact view
  • KDE Connect (didn’t try it but it seems the easiest way to connect and manage an android phone)

The bad:

  • There are a lot of steps to take in order to configure at my taste, too many configuration options and is not easy to find or select what you’re looking for
  • Panel can be broken easily. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to add a new panel with default settings
  • Need to logout and re login to apply theme changes

The ugly:

  • On first run, everything took long time, I guess it was because baloo was indexing files, I’ve disabled it and system runs pretty faster

I guess the difficult part would be the initial configuration and after that I will enjoy using it.

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I never really had any problems with Baloo but I still use to disable it because I don’t need or use it.

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Actually rendering in plasma really sucked, at least in the past. Especially with hybrid graphics cards, while gnome was running smoothly, plasma presented glitches and I had to move back and forth using it’s different renderer or rendering modules or modes. That’s been my beef with plasma for a long time but seems they fixed it in the past two years. Gnome was always smoother experience for me, and probably also why they have implemented Wayland and make it work before plasma.

That being said, I am very curious about the new features, especially if they managed to improve multi monitor screen scaling as someone mentioned above.

Also plasma is really community driven to my understanding, so each release is nice to see it getting better and better.

I honestly don’t understand why people are always bashing baloo so much. After a few hours / days after the initial indexing, it calms down again and then you never notice anything. I don’t need it either, but it makes no difference to me whether it runs or not. And I have a very old machine (but also only with 8GB RAM).

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I really don’t know much about KDE Plasma, but I’ve read a lot of baloo related performance issues, so I guessed it was the one that made my VM installation very slow. Sure I’ll check it on bare metal when I’m ready.

I saw the plasma. That’s all the light show i needed. I was hooked. :rofl:
EOS Kde Plasma it is!

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Awesome image…