To answer your question, Yes, it does screw up the Xfce settings even if you don't start up plasma-5.
I ignored the little voice in my head telling me not to do it and just, with in the last several minutes, installed plasma-5. I did NOT start it, but after it was installed, went straight back into Xfce. As previously mentioned, plasma-5 overrides the Xfce theme colors and the keyboard volume controls no longer work, and, as I said, I haven't even started plasma-5.
I'm done.
The next step is to remove plasma-5 and this time I won't even bother to re-install kde-4. Enough of this nonsense!

4 members found this post helpful.

Keep calm and breathe, my friend!

Slackware is sound and well, even with no KDE or Qt software at all. It is still Slackware.

BTW, as more I use Plasma5, more I love XFCE thought. Could explain that?

2 members found this post helpful.

Just went to use my VPN for the first time since installing kde-5 yesterday and discovered all the passwords for the various servers I use have all been deleted and Xfce is asking to establish a keyring, which I haven't used in the past (like yesterday morning).

2 members found this post helpful.

I prefer MATÉ. This being said I have installed openSUSE 15 Leap with plasma 5.12 to test EFI3M.

The desktop and yast2 look sleek and neat to my old eyes.

Attached Thumbnails

   

3 members found this post helpful.

I have one openSUSE 'Tumbleweed' installed here, their plasma theme is very elegant

My understanding is that those shouldn't be used, and you're supposed to just use what's shipped with X by default now?

Me too, I prefer MATE. MATE + Compiz-reloaded + Numix is so far the best Linux desktop for me.

In anticipation of Plasma5 in current I tried the KDE spinoffs of several major distributions . I also tried Neon and ktown. So far Tumbleweed showed less buggy and somewhat usable. But the KIO network issues are a showstopper for me.

So I keep a current VM without XFCE KDE4 and the KDE related stuff in /l. It will be easier to create Palsma5-free tagfiles when 15 comes out.


Cheers

2 members found this post helpful.

I understand then that you know the KDE related stuff from l/

You are kind to tell me the names of the KDE related stuff from l/ ?

I work in a script named "plasma5cleaner", for fully removal of Plasma 5 and everything related only to Plasma 5, from the future Slackware 15, as shown there: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...8/#post5876011

2 members found this post helpful.

I asked a similar question a while ago for KDE4: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ly-4175616051/

As you can read, I ended up making only the KDE series itself plus akonadi optional during installation.

The list of packages that will not be installed in Slint 14.2.1 if you don't want KDE is here.

But you could as well keep Plasma5 and not show the corresponding applications in menus of other DEs., see the scripts hide_kde_apps and show_kde_apps.

I won't decide what to do with Plasma5 until the list of packages has stabilized enough but almost certainly will keep all libraries installed in any case, as there is no benefit removing them: that would just save a few MB on a mass storage device, keeping them won't hurt at all, and I wouldn't take the risk that some software not related to KDE miss a dependency, including third party ones

Long story short, I'd suggest that you remove only plasma5 proper if you don't want it but no "related" package in other series. This is assuming that packages in Slackware will still be sorted in series, on which I have no clue.

3 members found this post helpful.

Well, for now in current, in theory there is nothing strictly KDE related in /l. In practice akonadi is the only package that is used only by KDE, but it was supposed to be a PIM database used by other projects too. For now I remove these packages from /l:
There are also some libs used only by Calligra, but they can be used by Libreoffice too, so I keep them. Grantlee could be removed eventually. And phonon is another mess that Qt/PyQt could eventually use, so it stays for now. Eigen2/3 is also rarely used (opencv). Polkit-qt can be removed, but this will eventually break lxqt.

It is not that simple w/o dependency info. I use this script to find the dependencies and detect missing libs.

In 14.2 and in current for now skipping /kde makes your system practically KDE-free. I am afraid it wont be the case with Plasma5. So I keep a clean install where I could eventually add some packages if needed instead of trying to find what Plasma5 dependencies can be safely removed.


Cheers

6 members found this post helpful.

Despite my strong statements to the contrary before, I have to admit, perhaps in a moment of weakness, I may have been wrong.

I've been using Plasma5 (5.12.6) as my daily driver for about a week now. Overall it has been a great experience. But when issues do arise, they are serious and raise concern. And half the time it's hard to tell whether something is going awry due to something specific to the distribution, or if the software itself is at fault.

In any event, I don't mind bugs if they're either minor, or can be troubleshooted or squashed. But there have been some major bugs I've noticed. Eg, when baloo_file_extractor suddenly hits 100% CPU usage and my laptop starts to overheat, that's serious stuff. *I* know how to run killall on a runaway background process but why should a new user or even an experienced sysadmin have to do this on a stable system? I've seen other reports of this happening on other distros too. So how would we even begin to address a bug like that? It makes me nervous.

Also, things like the power manager fail to work and give no error or any indication of anything wrong. For instance, suspend on laptop lid closure does not work. Again, *I* know this is probably because it is expecting systemd to be there when it is not. But once again, how do we fix a bug like this? At what length are we willing to go to say "oh well. That's just what you get when you use Slackware."

Anyway. Those are the two examples that spring to mind. There are others I've experienced.

The turning point for me was seeing AlienBob's live XFCE iso. My god, is it a thing of beauty. It just feels like... Slackware. Like where Slackware is meant to be. Kind of a zen thing, really.

Also reading Pat's post yesterday, that also hit a few points home. One of the whole reasons GNOME was cut was because it was a maintenance nightmare. There were so many little packages that needed to be compiled in just the right order. In contrast, KDE shipped nice monolithic packages that compiled cleanly: kdelibs, kdebase, kdeutils, etc. You could also pull individual components from CVS, so you got the beat of both worlds. Now as Pat said, Plasma5 has become worse than GNOME2 in that regard.

I could also see something like Lumina working quite well, as AlienBob alluded to this morning. I listened to a podcast featuring an interview of the TrueOS folks, talking about how on the BSD side of things, they had to come up with a Unix-neutral DE as neither KDE or GNOME will work on their platforms anymore without sacrificing features or doing a lot of coaxing. As Slackware has always self identified as being somewhat BSD-like, perhaps this is the appropriate direction for Slackware going forward.

Let me conclude this rant by saying, I personally will still continue to use ktown and plasma5 myself and I'm super glad to hear that IF KDE gets put on the chopping block, AlienBob will continue his ktown maintenance efforts.

Edit: although I have been only running plasma5 on Slackware on *bare metal* for about a week, I was running it in a VM for several months before that.

2 members found this post helpful.

Yes, that one I have seen as well. I've been running Plasma since it was first introduced. Baloo has been problematic before Plasma. I found that the indexes can get corrupted. Deleting them solves the problem for awhile. I ended up turning off file content indexing, it helps for a while but that pesky baloo_file_extractor; which I guess is what is used for file content indexing; keep popping up from time to time. References for this baloo_file_extractor seem to be none existent, at least I could not find it. The baloo_file program you can find information on. I eventually gave up and turned of off.

File search seems nice at first; but in looking at the available options in Dolphin when it is turned on, just don't see the benefit. Kfind I find much for beneficial as a file searcher. I have it pinned on the Icons-only Task Manager.

No problems with power manager on my laptop (Acer Aspire).

Yep me too. Every once in a while Kate will freeze up for short amount of time (seems longer of course); that said I have not noticed this in awhile. (jinxes self).

It was mentioned by Eric that both Lumina and LXQt (Xfce too) are included in Plasma 5 Live. Just tried them out, I favor LXQt at first glance, but I will stick with Ktown as long as Eric provides it. Just not ready to learn new tricks. <grin>

If you have problems with Baloo then turn off File Search. System Settings->Search->Uncheck Enable File Search

I don't want to disable baloo or have that be the advice we give users. I want the KDE team to fix their bugs!

Reminds me of a paper Havoc Pennington put out in or around 2002. When something is broken, people will put in a request saying, can you add an option to un-break this? No! Just fix it!

I personally don't need indexing, but I want file search to work. In my experience if you disable indexing, the whole search functionality breaks rather than plasma falling back on using UNIX 'find' style searching.

3 members found this post helpful.

I checked /proc/acpi stuff and it turns out the kernel is not registering the lid being closed. The "buttons" module is relying on nouveau, so strangely, it is possible I might need the proprietary Nvidia drivers to be installed to get it to work as it does under Ubuntu and Arch. I guess a kernel patch could also be what made it work on other platforms, but I doubt Arch would be patching it as heavily as Ubuntu.

So that's probably the issue as opposed to kde. I *would* look into this further, but my laptop lid mechanism is physically somewhat broken now, and registers false openings and closings all the time when it is working. So when I'd go to put the laptop in my briefcase, it would wake up, which was actually quite aggravating.

So for me I'm going to consider this a "feature" right now.