KDE Plasma Login Manager Won’t Support Systemd-Free Linux or BSD Systems

[Zare]

LibreQuest there is a screenshot of my Plasma desktop in the screenshot thread, from FreeBSD 14.x. I have FreeBSD 15 now, and it wasn't an upgrade, it was fresh pkgbase install. I just restored my home dir, and packages, and I have the same desktop.

 

[Beastie7]

Wayland SHALL resolve at least below before becoming default

Since KDE Frameworks and KDE Gear aren't explicitly dependent on Wayland; the Foundation should get behind the SonicDE fork (and XLibre) and contribute bug fixes through the FreeBSD Desktop Team. Wayland is a dead end. It's deficient and loosely defined protocol standard will end up in GNU/Linux-style fragmentation again. Who the hell wants to switch between a thousand different implementations of a display compositor (which share no conformity in code quality and/or performance), just to try a different desktop experience. It's simply stupid. Not to mentioned their progressive dependency on systemd.

For the KDE detractors - not only is KDE pretty malleable nowadays (for those who care about tweaking); it's pretty lightweight for the amount of eye candy you get (at least compared to Liquid Glass/macOS or Fluent/Windows11 and it's system-wide consistency), and it's developed atop a modern, stable development framework. The community seems to be more FreeBSD friendly also. Although I think the Plasma UX is still bloated/ugly - it's a sane move on the Projects end for all things mentioned.

 

[Zare]

Here's the catch - I am not a traditional KDE user. I had used KDE on some Linux distros I ran in early 00s, however WindowMaker is my thing.

Also I would like people to realize I always had power to force FreeBSD at the dayjob, from my first job. I had freedom to install anything on my computer, provided it can participate in the corporate stuff. If I had technical issues slowing down my workflow, if I had mess around with every detail on some "minimal desktop setup", if I couldn't just click around the office stuff, that freedom would be gone.

I wanted FreeBSD there for its networking functionality, for its robustness and stability, I did not want it to have control of every little aspect how a file gets opened from the web.

Huge part of my Windowmaker desktop was gnome-session and later mate-session. These things provide the Freedesktop. They provide file associations, remembered locations, all the stuff that is important if you want to lay off the DE details and just concentrate on whatever you're doing right now. Unified look was done through GTK2-Gnustep theme, and this desktop was a dream right until GTK3 started killing GTK2 off, and HD+ res took the norm. Many dockapps wouldn't build any more, they weren't maintained, it didn't look that right on too high resolution, and GTK3 is really really ugly and totally different paradigm than GTK2.

MATE or no MATE GTK2 was thrown out of the window and the unified looks couldn't be achieved any more.

So I moved to KDE. Just to be functional. I learned how to set it up and appreciate it. I'm using it as main DE for years now, while Windowmaker is always set up as fallback option.

As I said, not actually from KDE background, this was a process, sometimes painful.
In the end my opinion of KDE is far far far better than what it was when I started using it.
For me the biggest bonus is - the stuff available in theme store I can combine to get a really nice looking GUI. The amount of clicking needed to lighten up the resource usage by removing some tasks and services is 50 times less effort that what I would need to set up the KDE automatisms on some "light WM".

In the start, I disliked Dolphin and avoided it. Now I see what it can do and how you can customize it to look and behave to great extent, and now I use it.

To conclude I believe a lot of people shunning KDE have never given it a chance, maybe they can't, maybe they won't. I don't care.

Btw the only time something has fked up my KDE setup was tryout of some praised WM, that messed up my QT and GTK application theming. So some amateurish scripting project is praised but a longlasting successful million-user-base thing isn't. Ok.

 

[Tomolok]

Never liked KDE,especially because it is full of small bugs coming from no where.One of the most painful thing is KWallet.
I prefer Xfce and MATE.

 

[MrBSD]

To conclude I believe a lot of people shunning KDE have never given it a chance, maybe they can't, maybe they won't. I don't care.

I have been using it since version 2.0 which was, in my opinion, the last good KDE desktop. Since version 3.0, everything has gone to shit. I love KDE for same reasons you mentioned, but it always, i mean, ALWAYS starts falling apart when you start customizing it and actually using it. Sometimes it just breaks on its own after few updates. For several years i was thinking it was my wrong choice of distros and how they packaged it and configured it. But i was wrong. 10 years ago i started using Arch linux and i was pretty confident that i will be able to make KDE work without any issues because Arch repositories had kde-plasma-meta package which is bare bone bloat free KDE base. It doesnt even come with file manager or terminal. I didnt even had sddm which was default DM for KDE back then. I was starting KDE through .xinitrc and startx to keep everything clean and minimal. My whole Arch KDE install had ~400 packages.It was lightning fast and minimal and it still broke few months later after several updates (kde related updates). I wake my system up from sleep, and i see icons on desktop without wallpaper and taskbar. I reboot my system, type startx, and i get greeted with "KDE has crashed" message with error report button. I remove kde-plasma-meta package and install full blown KDE with all bells and whistles and it starts working again. Then, few updates down the line, i start to see no icons in start menu. Wrong theming,graphical glitches...etc...etc.

This post is already too long. I can sit here all day and tell every little thing i tried with completely different hardware, different linux distributions, different virtual environments and i even had it installed on other peoples computers via OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. Outcome was always the same. It will eventually crash or become so broken and unusable that you have to switch to something else. As i said before, i love KDE. I love how it looks. I love all the customization it offers and all the little things under the hood that people dont see right away. But it has become too big and too complex and its very difficult to love and use.

 

[astyle]

Never liked KDE,especially because it is full of small bugs coming from no where.One of the most painful thing is KWallet.
I prefer Xfce and MATE.

yeah, KWallet is painful, but you don't have to install it. Sometimes pre-compiled packages pull in stupid deps that are not absolutely essential. With a bit of research, it's possible to figure out how to disable KWallet. And disabling KWallet does no harm to the system.

And all the complaints that MrBSD has about KDE - those were my exact sentiments about Linux. An unrelated update would pull in other updates, and that runaway train would crash the system so bad that the only real choice was a clean reinstall with the up-to-date stuff. At least with FreeBSD, if you follow the manual/Handbook, if stuff works, it works well, and is freaking stable. It may not be the most feature-complete thing, you may need to add some obscure utility just to get a feature you want, but what you get is stable enough to make commercial offerings envious.

And I have to ask myself: Do I prefer to spend time ricing a basic DE so that it has the convenient interactions that I'm used to? Or is it easier for me to do a bit of research on how to disable a specific feature I don't like? Ricing a DE and creating customized behaviors for it, just to get basics (like properly close/open/minimize window, copy-paste, alt-tabbing through apps) working properly without hours of programming and research from me, that's just not the kind of thing I'm really willing to spend my time on. If I can get a pre-packaged theme that properly changes the looks/behavior without creating weird artifacts, great.

And, there's some noise about efforts being underway to create a login daemon for FreeBSD, with an API that the new Plasma Login Manager can use. It does take knowing where to look if you want concrete info

 

[T-Aoki]

I think one of the unignorable pain would be akonadi defaulting to MYSQL.
It was pulled in when I've installed some apps that depend on (part of) KDE plasma, and worked silently well until default MYSQL switched to 80.

I think the default should be SQLITE3 for computers used exclusively by single person, but it seem to be dropped, MYSQL and PGSQL as remainders.

PGSQL option has issues, too (worked without complaining, unlike MYSQL, though), as akonadi wants to create DB at abnormal place (user's home directory instead of centralized place), making major upgrading of PGSQL (conversion of DBs) confusing.

But no need to be too worried. What akonadi keeps is mostly scratch cached data. Discarding old DB of akonadi on every PGSQL major upgrades does no harm at least for my limited use-cases. Maybe culprit would be stop using everything really want akonadi as backends like I do.

 

[MrBSD]

yeah, KWallet is painful, but you don't have to install it. Sometimes pre-compiled packages pull in stupid deps that are not absolutely essential. With a bit of research, it's possible to figure out how to disable KWallet. And disabling KWallet does no harm to the system.

That is no longer possible. They made a very "smart" decision to make KDE Plasma wireless network manager dependent on KWallet. KWallet was always the first thing i remove from KDE Plasma. I did that recently on KDE 6.6, and after reboot, you can no longer connect to WPA3 protected wireless network. To make matters worse, even if you connect to your wifi network via WPASupplicant, KDE is not aware of that and sees you as being offline. Its just retarded.

And all the complaints that MrBSD has about KDE - those were my exact sentiments about Linux. An unrelated update would pull in other updates, and that runaway train would crash the system so bad that the only real choice was a clean reinstall with the up-to-date stuff. At least with FreeBSD, if you follow the manual/Handbook, if stuff works, it works well, and is freaking stable. It may not be the most feature-complete thing, you may need to add some obscure utility just to get a feature you want, but what you get is stable enough to make commercial offerings envious.

FreeBSD has its flaws. For example, i can not use FreeBSD on my system with AMD RDNA4 graphics card. Drm-612-kmod package is still broken and requires tinkering with patches and AMD firmware. I just dont have time for all that. Its been a year since this graphic card is released and we still dont have a working driver.

 

[Tomolok]

That is no longer possible. They made a very "smart" decision to make KDE Plasma wireless network manager dependent on KWallet. KWallet was always the first thing i remove from KDE Plasma. I did that recently on KDE 6.6, and after reboot, you can no longer connect to WPA3 protected wireless network. To make matters worse, even if you connect to your wifi network via WPASupplicant, KDE is not aware of that and sees you as being offline. Its just retarded.

FreeBSD has its flaws. For example, i can not use FreeBSD on my system with AMD RDNA4 graphics card. Drm-612-kmod package is still broken and requires tinkering with patches and AMD firmware. I just dont have time for all that. Its been a year since this graphic card is released and we still dont have a working driver.

Yeah,the graphical card support on FreeBSD is pretty much a pain,especially on relatively new hardware like my Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G8 IRL.After intensive work,I could only establish a basic desktop environment with scfb driver.

 

[Tomolok]

I have been using it since version 2.0 which was, in my opinion, the last good KDE desktop. Since version 3.0, everything has gone to shit. I love KDE for same reasons you mentioned, but it always, i mean, ALWAYS starts falling apart when you start customizing it and actually using it. Sometimes it just breaks on its own after few updates. For several years i was thinking it was my wrong choice of distros and how they packaged it and configured it. But i was wrong. 10 years ago i started using Arch linux and i was pretty confident that i will be able to make KDE work without any issues because Arch repositories had kde-plasma-meta package which is bare bone bloat free KDE base. It doesnt even come with file manager or terminal. I didnt even had sddm which was default DM for KDE back then. I was starting KDE through .xinitrc and startx to keep everything clean and minimal. My whole Arch KDE install had ~400 packages.It was lightning fast and minimal and it still broke few months later after several updates (kde related updates). I wake my system up from sleep, and i see icons on desktop without wallpaper and taskbar. I reboot my system, type startx, and i get greeted with "KDE has crashed" message with error report button. I remove kde-plasma-meta package and install full blown KDE with all bells and whistles and it starts working again. Then, few updates down the line, i start to see no icons in start menu. Wrong theming,graphical glitches...etc...etc.

This post is already too long. I can sit here all day and tell every little thing i tried with completely different hardware, different linux distributions, different virtual environments and i even had it installed on other peoples computers via OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. Outcome was always the same. It will eventually crash or become so broken and unusable that you have to switch to something else. As i said before, i love KDE. I love how it looks. I love all the customization it offers and all the little things under the hood that people dont see right away. But it has become too big and too complex and its very difficult to love and use.

There appears to be a fork of KDE 3 named Trinity Desktop Environment that removes a lot of complexity you have on modern KDE,but I haven't try it.

 

[astyle]

I think one of the unignorable pain would be akonadi defaulting to MYSQL.
It was pulled in when I've installed some apps that depend on (part of) KDE plasma, and worked silently well until default MYSQL switched to 80.

I think the default should be SQLITE3 for computers used exclusively by single person, but it seem to be dropped, MYSQL and PGSQL as remainders.

PGSQL option has issues, too (worked without complaining, unlike MYSQL, though), as akonadi wants to create DB at abnormal place (user's home directory instead of centralized place), making major upgrading of PGSQL (conversion of DBs) confusing.

But no need to be too worried. What akonadi keeps is mostly scratch cached data. Discarding old DB of akonadi on every PGSQL major upgrades does no harm at least for my limited use-cases. Maybe culprit would be stop using everything really want akonadi as backends like I do.

I compile my ports from scratch, it takes a couple days to get to a functional system with KDE.

I make sqlite3 the db that Akonadi depends on, and turn off PGSQL everywhere. make config makes that very easy.

KWallet is also something that I just don't compile, and if a port offers kwallet as a compilation option, I just uncheck that checkbox at compile time. That never caused me problems.

 

[MrBSD]

Yeah,the graphical card support on FreeBSD is pretty much a pain,especially on relatively new hardware like my Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G8 IRL.After intensive work,I could only establish a basic desktop environment with scfb driver.

Its not just graphic cards. Its wireless cards and some wireless standards like WPA3. They simply dont work. Not to mention something advanced like MLO on wifi7 devices. There is no perfect system. For example, OpenBSD has excellent support for AMD RDNA4 because they made better decisions in the past. However, wireless support on OpenBSD is years behind compared to FreeBSD.

There appears to be a fork of KDE 3 named Trinity Desktop Environment that removes a lot of complexity you have on modern KDE,but I haven't try it.

I tried it. Its garbage in current state. Im a twm and Cinnamon user myself and i have no interest experimenting with other desktops. I just need to wait for a few months until RDNA4 support is properly implemented so i can finally switch back to FreeBSD.

 

[T-Aoki]

and turn off PGSQL

I turn off MYSQL whenever possible after bitten at "to 80" transitions.
And akonadi seems to work with PGSQL, as ~/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/* were automatically re-created when I've deleted the directory on upgrading PGSQL.