Agreed.

I can't comment on the quality of Plasma, because, I've never tried it; I don't even use KDE at all for that matter; and have not since KDE3. My suggestion would be to put KDE4 in pasture and Plasma into extra. I am happy, however, with whatever Pat chooses to do, as well. To be honest the choice of KDE version or even if it stays at all would effect me little.

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I do not know if Plasma5 is ready or not for inclusion in Slackware, and I am not in measure to make a decision about, but at least the 5.13.1 is finally usable.

5.12.x is not usable like to consider it stable. And the screenshot thing I think is very dangerous for privacy.

The intention of inclusion of 5.12.x, which presents certain misfeatures, made me to raise an eyebrow.

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To be honest, I would just like to get the new KDE applications even if the desktop is not included, though I don't think it's very likely that Pat would go that route.

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There is no need for you to raise eyebrows.

When that LTS will popup in -current, you know already what to do; and how I guess that you have no strong feelings for KDE4, the best solution for you is to make a shiny blacklist, then to stay in 5.13.1 or whatever superior release will make Eric in future.

Being a beta-tester, or even a pre-beta-tester (as in Plasma5 case) has some advantages, as you know already what to expect, and from where.

---------------------------------------------------
Also for me, the long list of removals following will be a very very useful reading - I work a shiny LXC container meantime preparing for that moment; and to be honest, maybe I will stay in 5.13 or whatever comes superior from Eric's forge.

I care no less if Baloo is alive or dead, I am habituated already to edit manually the config files, I do not use NVIDIA blobs and even that funny screenshot thing disappeared. Like I said, 5.13.1 is usable.

Do you have a crystal ball or something?

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I remember there being some hit or miss issues with some IGP on the early r600 reversed engineered driver. Of course the issue is lack of docs/testers. I doubt getting docs ever got resolved since it's long obsolete as far as AMD is concerned. But it's possible that plasma 5 will work on some of these chips since desktop effects have always been fairly light requirements given a compliant driver. So it's certain revision of chips missing support in this particular series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_70...rated_graphics

I've bought Radeon since 2004 for open source support, and will never look back at nvidia. Bugs are in both drivers, and your out cold after a short while with nvidia's support. I've fixed bugs in mesa and won't hesitate to do so again, but picking a good card with mesa support is not hard anymore.

So if someone has a broken card, report the bug upstream to mesa at the very least.

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Just to add my experience from different perspective.

Half of my Slackware desktops are running in Virtualbox VMs on top of either win7 or Slackware virtualization host (note - I tried all possible HW/SW config tuning). My experience in Vbox VMs with Plasma5 was really terrible (slow, shaky, freezing graphics - just personal experience). However this was some time ago. So after reading this thread (and Darths testing) I will give to 5.13.1 another try (since I really would like to have Plasma5
Of course I understand that the issues might be Virtualbox related too.

Unfortunately I am one of those AMD APU users with built in Radeon graphics and sometimes it's not my decision to have such HW. Some times yes but I was not aware of the mentioned AMD/Radeon support issues till now...

Anyway, Ditto - I am perfectly fine with whatever decision Pat and the dev team will make. Thanks for all their support!

Additionally, thanks to Darth and Eric for having this conversation! I don't have time to do extensive testing myself and every piece of info is valuable for me.

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Very nice! I used to play SimCity 2000. Loki's Quake 3 1.16n build is broken though.

There were a few free games that I tried out that required ktown for me. I had Qt5 Slackbuild installed prior to that. One was Unturned, the other WAKFU (its like Final Fantasy Tactics).

I run KDE5 at work on Fedora and on my Porteus thumbdrive. No complaints. I vote yes.

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This the money quote right here! Its a pity that 5.13.1 isn't LTS. They fixed Kate's performance & removed Darth Vader's opposition to the inclusion of Plasma 5 with a masterstroke!

So what is going on here about Kate & the artifacts appearing in LTS & disappearing in the newest release? Is it still being ported? Bug fixes aren't being incorporated in the LTS editions? Is anyone going to submit bug reports stating that 5.9 LTS has these problems but 5.13.1 works to KDE? They don't bite: https://bugs.kde.org/

I have been using kde5 routinely for several months or longer.

I do hate the theming and transparency in KDE5 and the inability to
modify them.

However it is fast and efficient and I can get my work done.

I will stay with kde5 even if it is not part of a slackware release.

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There is another issue in LTS. The Kwin claims that its effects crashed and disable them after a reboot.

The truth is that the difference between LTS and 5.13.1 is impressive in favor of later.

Maybe for the people with powerful computers is not too visible, but 5.13.1 feels signifiantely faster, consumes signifiantely lower memory and since I upgraded to it, no issues manifested so far.

I can understand why DV says "LTS? So what? Let's go 5.13.1"

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I wonder what LTS actually means for KDE, if there is a real effort to have a stable base, or if it's just a label and the whole projects focus on the next version...

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Desktop Themes can be modified. Hover over the theme, in the lower left of the theme is an edit button. Not sure about transparency, transparency with what? There are some transparency adjustments.