I’ll carry on, then. 
3 Likes
Thank you!
Comprehensive overview of all the work that’s been done.
Quite remarkable to see my first bug report in the “fixed” list. 
4 Likes
I’m doing this Plasma 6-testing on my “new” laptop, one of the few laptops I bought new, instead of refurbishing someone’s discarded one. So, I lived under the illusion that I’m running quite a proper machine.
Well, consider me well disillusioned since this morning 
.
I had reported Spectacle being unstable[1], adding all information I could give them.
The reaction was: “your PC specs don’t look very high”, and “Given that you only have 3.7 GiB of RAM, there’s also a possibility that you didn’t have enough RAM to start a recording even if there wasn’t a bug. Spectacle usually needs 200-600 MiB of RAM while recording, depending on your system specs and what encoder is being used. Were you running anything RAM heavy like a web browser?”
ONLY 3.7 GiB, they say. My first computer had 16Kb, and I drowned in that much memory back then 
.
Still, my report was considered to be a duplicate of another report, that does seem to point to a bug[2].
Will now ponder if Spectacle is a reason to buy a new laptop.
[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477924
[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475894
Well, funny story, I had it now too. Spectacle freezing when the recording should start
[AVFormatContext @ 0x7fff4cde9540] Unable to choose an output format for ''; use a standard extension for the filename or specify the format manually.
Did a plasmashell --replace and it work worked again. 32 GB RAM and 2/3 of it available.
So there’s that. 
My laptop feels slightly vindicated now, and thanks you from the bottom of its CPU.
I can semi-reproduce the issue now. Seems if you hit the bug Spectacle doubles it RAM usage while being frozen. Depending on your memory/swap/tempfs situation that probably pushes the system into out-of-memory with 4 GB RAM.
You clearly know what you are doing 
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May well be useful information for the bug report that mine was a duplicate of.
I think we have two different issues. First the people with runaway memory usage. You may experience it or you’re just unlucky with 4 GB RAM, hard to tell.
What I can reproduce now is the AVFormatContext error you also experienced, which deserves its own bug report.
From my fstab:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
Apart from that, there appears to be no swap on my setup. 
free -h gives:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3,7Gi 3,5Gi 200Mi 740Mi 1,0Gi 247Mi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
swapon --show gives no output.
In /etc/fstab there is no entry for a swap-partition or file.
I did a clean install from an EndeavourOS live-usb and had expected a swap in some shape or form.
As far as I remember I have not knowingly chosen not to have a swap.
Perhaps Spectacle will behave better when I do have swap.
I’ll see how to get me some swap.
Edit: followed this how-to.
swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 4G 0B -2
free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3,7Gi 1,5Gi 1,2Gi 153Mi 1,5Gi 2,2Gi
Swap: 4,0Gi 10Mi 4,0Gi
Will try out spectacle some more.
you need to choose if not it defaults to no swap … may not the best default… choosen but the partition part is very tricky anyway.
Success of some sort.
With swap I managed to make 2 screen recordings of about 1 minute length.
First recording went without any trouble.
Second ended up dragging down my system, but I could nonetheless finish the recording.
Starting from cli these first 2 times gave NO warnings or error messages (which did appear in earlier runs, before “swap”).
Starting spectacle for a third time did give the error messages, and resulted in the crash and error that @Schlaefer also is seeing:
[AVFormatContext @ 0x7fef806344c0] Unable to choose an output format for ''; use a standard extension for the filename or specify the format manually.
Spectacle hangs and does not record anything.
All in all swap makes spectacle behave better on my system.
But there is also this bug “AVFormatContext” bug.
I don’t think it’s useful for me to do more spectacle-testing at this point.
I’ll start looking for other bugs.
Ah, thank you!, that does indeed clear up the situation: I am very much a “default” kind of person.
My thinking is that if a default is offered, the people who are offering it will have thought long and hard about that default and are convinced it’s the best option to choose.
I may be showing my entitled self here…but to me, given the state of computing the no swap default is the std desired state. Most current computers have 16 GB as a minimum these days. I’m starting the new one with 32 this time, but for gaming, not for Linux per se. Doing an average desktop duty, no swap required.
The person doing something atypical that needs swap is the atypical user and probably more advanced anyway and will know they need it and choose appropriately.
That’s aside from the std convention that Linux is often ran on older leaner computers.
I’m probably going to file it later next week.
You generally always want to use swap esp. on an average desktop. But there are other threads who have discussed that topic in the past, the plasma-beta thread is probably not the right place.
The Plasma 6 sddm login screen is only partially translated at my end. I reported that as a bug, under: “systemsettings" --> "kcm_sddm”.
The people over at KDE changed it to: “plasmashell" --> "Theme - Breeze”, and added “milestone 1.0”.
My main challenge at reporting bugs is to label the report with the right product and component; but they don’t complain about my mistakes; they simply edit the information.
But I don’t know if I can or should add things like “milestone 1.0”? Surely that’s information the people who do all the hard work to get the bugs squashed must and will add themselves?
It’s off topic in this thread indeed, but allow me to end this little detour with a link to an article that made me add the swap to my Plasma 6 setup to test Spectacle a bit more:
My next steps to test Plasma 6:
- add a printer
- try out some goofy things with desktop effects
- have a look at the new features and changes that come with Plasma 6 [1], to see what else I should try to stress out as much as possible.
2 Likes
(take this with many grains of salt, because it’s only an opinion, I sure don’t know )
I would think that we can just do the best we can, and let them move them appropriately. I sure wouldn’t have filed it against themes. Giving it a bit of thought, perhaps the login screen is hard-coded as a graphic image versus using some internal language pack?
And as for milestones, that’s their goal for supported release (1.0), but that’s something only they know, as to when/priority.
From what I see/hear, they (developers) will appreciate our efforts in testing and reporting what we find.
That’s good to know - I’ll keep digging.
I filed the Spectacle AVFormatContext issue if someone wants to chime in: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478045