Bug 19295

Summary:	i686: does it really make sense to ship with plasma5 instead of plasma4?
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Elmar Stellnberger <estellnb>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	KDE maintainers <kde>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	major
Priority:	Normal	CC:	mageia, marja11, thierry.vignaud
Version:	Cauldron
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
URL:	https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368344
See Also:	https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368344
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:		CVE:
Status comment:
Attachments:	screenshot with my Celsius H270 Core 2 Quad noteboook

Description Elmar Stellnberger 2016-09-05 08:21:18 CEST

On any traditional i686 system (that are pentium IV based ones) the new plasma5 desktop just blackscreens; i.e. it does not work at all. The previous version of the KDE plasma desktop known as qt4 based on the other hand is known to have worked well on such systems up to now.
There are some newer systems like Intel Atom Books with up to 2GB of RAM where it also can make sense to run an i686 installation. However plasma5 has evolved to be very slow on such systems unless you would disable all desktop effects (that has worsened since I tracked the kde5 desktop last year via KaOS).
In the beginning kde5 came with the promise to be less resource hungry than kde4. Unfortunately by now right the opposite is true. It requires the newest graphics hardware though it is thought of as no more or less visually appealing than kde4.
f.i. I still have many Core 2 Quad systems (up to 3,3GHz) and a well equipped Q9100 notebook (gpg card reader, UMTS module, etc.) which are well supported by recent kernels but expose screen distortions under plasma5. Now that is something that would need to be fixed and truly something that I could upgrage on. Linux has been become so popular because it was known to support old hardware good. What shall I tell my customers if they could no more use such systems accordingly? use Windows 7?
All of it would be resolved by some intermediate ongoing support for KDE Plasma 4 which is known to work good on all these systems. Until the last Saturday Plasma 4 was still supported by Arch - and I have successfully used that together with the newest 4.8.0-rc4 kernel and its new UHD capabilities.
Please reconsider if it was still possible to ship Plasma 4 with Mageia 6 (otherwise I need to stick to Mageia 5 on a couple of machines for now) and whether it is appropriate to advertise Plasma 5 for the i686 arch as this may cause a lot of frustration with unsuspecting users.

Comment 1 Elmar Stellnberger 2016-09-05 08:33:02 CEST

Created attachment 8390 [details]
screenshot with my Celsius H270 Core 2 Quad noteboook

The Celsius H270 is known to have worked wonderfully good with kernel 4.8.0-rc2 and the plasma4 desktop also in UHD. Unfortunately now it seems to be no more supported by plasma5. Initially I have thought of a bug and tried it with different versions of Plasma 5 under different distros (Arch, Debian Stretch, Mageia) - but this seems to be a permanent bug that persists through all most recent versions of plasma5.

Comment 2 Thierry Vignaud 2016-09-05 17:27:37 CEST

We won't downgrade to an unsupported plasma version.
Also you're using a non Mageia kernel

CC: (none) => thierry.vignaud

Comment 3 Elmar Stellnberger 2016-09-05 18:17:22 CEST

  I have tested it with both: the standard Mageia kernel in FullHD mode and the newer kernel in UHD mode. It is deplorable that you can not ship the old plasma4 but I understand that as sufficient support will no more be offered in the future. Concerning the selection of the desktop environment I`d expect a red warning sign if somebody selected Plasma 5 for the i686 arch. That would save users from a lot of unnecessary frustration!

Comment 4 Elmar Stellnberger 2016-09-06 19:03:15 CEST

issue reported upstreams: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368344

URL: (none) => https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368344

Marja Van Waes 2016-09-06 20:59:45 CEST

See Also: (none) => https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368344
Assignee: bugsquad => kde
CC: (none) => marja11

Comment 5 Nicolas Lécureuil 2016-09-07 09:23:09 CEST

There is no plasma4 anymore so this must be fixed upstream.
We will follow the upstream bugreport.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
CC: (none) => mageia
Resolution: (none) => WONTFIX

Comment 6 Elmar Stellnberger 2016-09-07 09:28:44 CEST

  Likely also an issue for the newest version of Gnome as well as the Cinnamon desktop; though not tested extensively they may also rely on features only present with relatively new graphics cards. - or is there any common library you can think of, Nicolas, causing all these troubles? Perhaps I would have needed to file with Mesa or some other component.