I hear ya Stephen. A lot of change but usability and performance has gone down considerably for me as well. I've also had to cold boot my machine due to lock ups from time to time and I never used to do that with Linux. When KDE 4.x first came out I was not a fan, if you go way back in the archives of this group you'll find a rant email from me about those changes. Well wasn't when it first came out as I ran a KDE 3.x distro till the wheels fell off and KDE 4.x had been out for 2 or 3 years before I first tried it. What they were trying to accomplish with the plasma desktop made sense mostly, so I was patient and figured out ways around the bugs and alternate ways of doing things while the plasma desktop matured.
Thus far it seems like they took a hard turn right into windows land trying to integrate everything and give you a one size fits all solution. Removing the ability to customize and remove elements however and that's not going to work. Most people who run Linux don't have super high end machines, if they do they are usually more server not desktop and they might not run a desktop manager at all on the machine. I damn sure wouldn't use KDE 5.x on a server. KDE 3.x I used to leave running on servers as the footprint was so mild and it came in handy at times to have a desktop manager. The footprint on KDE 5 is enormous and too much to leave up on even a high end server. Gnome isn't much better. The Evolution folks have done about the same thing and made evolution even more difficult to kill than Akondi but at least once you kill it, evolution doesn't rise up from the grave every five minutes like Akondi does. It also doesn't have near the footprint Akondi does. I'm using Gnome right how to type this email in Chrome.
The taskbar manager is very much inferior to KDE's. However it's stable and considerably faster than KDE. Fewer lock ups. Never thought I'd be talking about Linux machines locking up due to the desktop manager, but both KDE and Gnome force me to cold boot the machine from time to time. I thought I left that behind years ago when I got rid of my last windows machine, and for years I NEVER cold booted a machine except to install a new distro on it.
I've got some other ancient machines even older than these I'll be trying Lubuntu, Trinity and a few other desktop managers on. I loved KDE and for 20 some odd years that's what I've been running. Hate switching but the performance is becoming such a huge problem I have too. If I could afford a machine with 16 gigs of ram I'd want to use that ram for stuff I actually want to use and run rather than wasting gigs on apps I never use or rarely use. I thought the whole idea of Plasma was to reduce the foot print not make it this massive overwhelming machine killing gigantic monster app you cannot configure or edit to suit your needs. If I wanted that I could leave Windows on the machine.
On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 9:26 AM Stephen Dowdy <sdowdy@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 7/16/19 7:31 AM, Draciron Smith wrote:
> Dolphin defaults to a size larger than my screen and often locks in place so I cannot move it to resize it. I just don't even bother with Dolphin any more. The loss of extensions pretty well crippled it anyway.
<ALT>+<LeftMouseButton> == move window
so you can get access to window controls
<ALT>+<RightMouseButton> == Resize Edge/Corner near your mouse
I don't recall for sure, but i think Dolphin defaults to "last size used" when re-opened.
You could try using KWin Window-Specific settings to force dolphin size.
Click the window app-icon in upper left, select "More Actions->Special Window Settings",
then under "Size & Position" click the enable gadget for "Size", set "Apply Initially"
and specify a size. theoretically, if things work right, everytime you open a NEW dolphin,
it should come up as that size. If not, you could try using "Force".
FWIW,
I haven't tried bleeding edge of KDE, using whatever is in Debian Stretch at this point, but i am pretty disgusted by
the state of almost all software these days. I have more issues with the current software set with a 32GB desktop than
i had with 6GB 10 years ago. Stuff like the Task Manager failing to group 60 Firefox windows together, Plasmashell being
completely non-responsive after switching windows, plasmashell locking up forever due to single-threaded handling of
systray stuff like NetworkManager (requiring a complete kquitapp5 (which often doesn't work), pkill plasmashell; plasmashell &).
Can't blame it on KDE, maybe, but also, Xorg constantly blanks out my screen momentarily (dual-monitor, sometimes only one
monitor blanks out). This gets worse as the number of windows/X-activity grows. Also happening on my single-monitor docked
laptop setup at home.
I really hate to say it, but i'm at my wits end, and i don't think Gnome will necessarily be much better, but may be more
stable.
--stephen
