Thanks guys. I thought the Wayland libraries might be needed but I didn't launch them. Possibly a zombie from a single try at Wayland. I did discover leaving them out of installation altogether has negative affects on KDE-Plasma even though I didn't and don't plan to even try Wayland again anytime soon.

That said killing kwin_wayland had no effect. It isn't a huge deal since effectively it's cosmetic only... just annoying BUT I really dislike anything happening I didn't initiate and the black background was a complete bolt from the blue.

I have five distros (3 slackware, and 2 others) installed on one hard disk of 250 go, no problem ;)

This week's list of new features, changes and bug fixes for kde5,

https://pointieststick.com/2020/07/3...-task-manager/

Anyone having issues where kwin and Xorg randomly go to 100% utilization, and there's basically nothing that can be done except hit the reset/power button? I installed a "current" snapshot as of about a week ago..

How do I upgrade to the "latest" kde version? Can it be done relatively easily with slackpkg / gslapt?

That’s likely Baloo, file indexer, it takes a toll for its first pass.

The “easiest” way IMO is to use slackpkgplus (slackpkg+) and enable the ktown repo. Read the changelog, it’s well written and thorough.

Never mind.. My bad - I assumed that since I installed current, I was automagically running KDE5. Turns out I'm still on KDE4.

Edit: is the switch to 5 irreversible? In terms of user config settings, etc? Or can I switch back and forth to try 5?

The config locations are mostly different between KDE4 and Plasma5. Still, I would not try switching back and forth.

I don't know if anyone has gathered any statistics yet regarding how many Users who deployed KTown wanted to switch back to v4 but I would most certainly be in the "Hell No!" crowd. KDE/Plasma5 a la KTown just rocks!~

BTW and FTR, I'm not one of those "New == Improved" guys.

Just curious as to what "....just rocks!" about kde5?
Other than the updates and/or improvements to various kde based applications, I just don't see the benefit.
For the last few weeks I've been running kde4 and much prefer it to kde5 or xfce-4.14. The only kde application I would use, if there were a need, is k3b, and CD/DVDs have pretty much gone the way of the floppy disk.
If I had to pick one desktop environment and stick with it, it would be Xfce-4.12.
The Xfce developers promised 4.16 within a year and we are now 1 week from the one year anniversary of the 4.14 release.
Slackware64-15 is still, probably, 2-1/2 months or more away.

KDE 4 is dead, so that's kind of a non-starter.

Well, kde4 is desperately out of date, i.e., no longer supported by its develoers, but it works just fine. If there were any security problems with kde4 I'm sure we would have heard about them by now.

As to kde5, from a technical/mechanical point of view, I'm interested in hearing what makes it so much better than kde4. From a simply aesthetic point of view, kde5 makes windows 10 look good. :)

I've installed kde5 and used it for a day or two, on average about once a month or every other month since it was first released and, sorry, I just don't see any reason to use it, other than, as I said before, the updates and improvements to the kde specific applications.

So, as I said, sell it to me. What is so new and improved?
:)

On that basis we might as well demand that Fluxbox be removed as well.

Yeah it's a great desktop. I'm back to KDE after some years on tiling window managers (KDE 4 before that). KDE 5 is very clean, configurable, and really pretty snappy.

Hello cwizardone :) As for what just rocks after the cataclysmic change from 3 to 4, 5 finally seems like a proper polish rather than a sea change. I like how System Settings is organized and has an actually useful, fuzzy logic search function. Coming from a DOS-Shell background I am way too locked in to using a File Manager to stop now and I LOVE Dolphin which has been substantially re-organized and polished. I really don't like Nautilus or Thunar at all. IBM wanted to convert everyone to "Object Oriented" on OS/2 and I didn't like that. I actually paid for a real File Manager and when emx runtimes made it possible to install Enlightenment to replace the Presentation Manager I was overjoyed and it was my introduction to Linux.

I got by with Xfce for about 1 1/2 years during the initial fiasco of the transition from KDE 3x to 4x but that would have been all but impossible were it not especially friendly with KDE. As soon as it looked like v4 was sufficiently repaired I went right back. Another year later and I barely missed v3. I don't miss Xfce at all. Now I am quite happy to be on KDE/Plasma5. Eric has done a great job as has the KDE devs. I've tested Plasma on several other distros and though the differences are slight, KTown is better. I despise the distros that disallow "kdesu" and a few other root oriented procedures. Ktown does indeed "Just Rock!"... at least for me.

If there were a new version of Fluxbox, I'm sure it would be going into Slackware 15.