KDE 4 vs Plasma 5 - The Farce Awakens

Well, that might be a little harsh.  But the move to Plasma 5 is still a pain.  As I've written previously, I'm running a Gigabyte BRIX with a Celeron N3150 1.6GHz 64 bit CPU (about 2GHz in burst mode) and 8GB of installed RAM.
It is working pretty hard for a low end processor, but it wasn't really all that long ago (1984) that I was using an $8,000 Epson QX-10 with a Z80 8-bit processor at about 4MHz and about a quarter of a Meg of RAM for all my heavy business work.  So I'm pretty happy with what the $300 BRIX can achieve.

Ok, so back to 2018.  I've used most of the main Linux distributions since we first converted all our business computers to Red Hat in 1998. Before the end of the year I had installed Mandrake on one computer and that was the beginning of my experience with KDE.  I've used almost everything else available in Desktop Environments, but I always end up back at KDE.

I settled on Linux Mint as my favourite distro quite a few years ago after it was suggested by a friend.   Over the last five years it has really improved and although I often mess with other distros, I keep a copy of the latest Mint KDE in my main root folder.  The second root folder is used for either testing new releases of Mint, or dabbling in other distros, while enabling me to immediately reboot into something stable and familiar if anything goes wrong.

And that is what happened when I installed Mint 18 point something last year.  Mint KDE had moved to Plasma 5 and so many things didn't work any more.  Now I had tried NEON in the early days of Plasma 5, and given up on it.  So my main distro is Mint 17.3 with Plasma 4.13.2, and my spare distro is Kubuntu 17.10 with all the latest bits of Plasma 5 and QT.

Here's the How the desktops look:

Mint 17.3 with KDE 4 (above) 

Kubuntu 17.10 with the latest Plasma 5 and all the beta bits (above)

So how do they compare?  KDE 4 is mature, slick and almost bullet proof.  Even on the Celeron, it is snappy with no lag, and no compositing problems.  Everything just works.  A bit like KDE 3 was when KDE 4 first came out.  And back then we all complained about how slow and clunky KDE 4 was.

That's what Plasma 5 feels like compared to KDE 4.  Slow and clunky.  Plasma 5 takes forever to boot, although the latest is a little faster to shut down.  It is also a little laggy when switching work spaces, even with the timing set to zero.
I also tried it with Wayland instead of X11/Kwin.  That was a mistake.  Almost nothing works properly, but luckily CTRL+ALT+Backspace got me logged out and I could log back into a standard Plasma session.

That will all change though.  Work seems to have more or less stopped on KDE 4.x, and pretty well everything is being focused of trying to sort out Plasma 5.  Each time I upgrade it, there seems to be a few less bugs.

One of the worst is the apparent memory leak in 'heap'.  If I run either the Screensaver Wallpaper option on the desktop, or if I set a Media Frame Applet on the desktop, I can run KSysGuard and watch as the plasma-desktop process just grows and grows every time an image changes.  Left alone it will soon eat all of my 8GiB of RAM and start using my 16GiB of Swap space.

The plasma-desktop process also eats RAM when doing something as simple as clicking the Application launcher on the Panel, then clicking the desktop to close it.  Doing that over and over, but never clicking on a menu item, it can leave up to 100Kib or more in plasma-desktop each time.  It soon takes the used RAM from say, 1.8GB to 2.4GB.  Little things like that need to be fixed before Plasma 5 will be ready for everyday use.  But as long as you set up the Plasma Restart icon in the Panel

(see an earlier post about 'kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart plasmashell')

 it only takes a moment to free up RAM.  And the problem happens much more slowly now, especially if you remember NEVER to leave Desktop Wallpaper running or install the Media Widget.

Luckily I have a script on the panel that reboots Plasma without affecting other running apps, and without having to log out and back in.

This update is being written as a follow up, because I did a major upgrade of Plasma 5, Frameworks and also Qt today and There are a few slight improvements.  I still boot into Kubuntu 17.10 with Plasma 5 frequently, but the moment I finish messing around there, I sigh with relief when I'm back in Mint 17.3 and KDE 4.

Sadly, that can't last.  Eventually KDE 4 will be phased out like KDE 3 was.  I just hope Plasma 5 is matured enough by then to take over the heavy lifting.

The one good thing is that both are still very easy to customise.  As you can see in the screen shots, I can still have my translucent title bars and panels, and I have Cairo-Dock on KDE 4 and Latte-Dock on Plasma 5.