Software Rants 22: Saving SteamOS

Steam Machines have landed, and the results have been everything expected but nothing desired. Unsurprisingly the uncoordinated release brings obsolete OS versions, broken controllers, and a store that doesn't even show games that actually work on the system. They still only support one GPU vendors proprietary driver, and they still have no compelling reason to adopt the platform.

So it should be no surprise that, while Steam Link and the Steam Controller will probably be wildly successful, Valve has failed to move the industry towards open APIs and cross platform by default through SDL / Vulkan. It does not help that Khronos is likewise dropping the ball catastrophically by having terrible disclosure on whenever they are actually going to publish their supposed "open" and "collaboratively developed" API that is still MIA almost two years after its announcement, but even OpenGL 4.5 would be fine if drivers existed that supported it and Valve shouldered the burden on making sure things happened at a quality standard that would move console units.

But that never really was the point - fundamentally SteamOS is a hedge, something to keep on the back shelf for whenever Microsoft goes too far for Gabe to handle that Steam stops working as they continue to follow OSX towards total lockdown of their proprietary operating system. So Valve honestly has all they wanted out of this product - they got big picture mode and in home streaming for their Steam Link, and the continued lack of availability of broadcasting on the native LInux client shows where the priorities lie.

So how do you go back in time and fix this mess? Or how do you try the even harder problem than inventing time travel by somehow overcoming the awful press this shot launch will generate and reforge the product into something that might actually see adoption, maybe even achieve the ultimate goal of usurping consoles entirely with an open standard base?

Well first, we need an open standard base. Part of the reason Valve will not see any industry fervor towards their platform is that they are taking as much a cut as Sony or Microsoft on games sales. Even if Steam is just a program running on top of X rather than the whole OS, Android soundly demonstrates how alternative app stores do not work at all when you have a default one shipped almost universally. And Steam is even worse - its not only universal, you have to go out of your way to get out of it.

If Valve wants SteamOS to succeed, they have to admit that while they can control what is on their Steam Client Store, they need to open up the client software to work as a system shell, and they need to allow third party stores to list themselves on Steam. That means if Origin or Blizzard want to throw their client or the Battle.net launcher on Steam so these companies can ship their games without Steam's cut, Valve has to enable that through some mechanism so that average people can install third party launchers and stores and play games through them.
Open sourcing the Linux Steam Client would be a start. It doesn't do anything to remove any competitive advantage, because their whole advantage is the web services Valve provides through the client - the screenshot backups, the chat, the video broadcasting, not to mention the games they sell and host themselves. To try to reuse Valve's Steam Client software against them would be to reinvent all their back-end infrastructure and somehow persuade users and developers to switch. Which is honestly impossible to perform, especially since Valve would never lose their trademarks to the Steam brand.

They could even release the source under a nonfree license such as one that bars commercial use - the point is they need community involvement and a clear path for third parties to get their storefronts on Steam so that the Linux gaming scene isn't the one stop show of whoever sells on Steam.

One core problem is the lack of common services on SteamOS - mainly, that the Big Picture client needs to perform more roles even as a TV OS than just playing games, yet Valve has not sufficiently provided for all the use cases average people expect out of a set top box.

It would be a killer system to include DVR functionality (when video in or coax in is provided by the machine), and would need to bundle Chromium with its DRM module to stream Netflix and Hulu. Amazon Prime Video would be a mess because Linux in its current state cannot support HDCP, and there is no way to ever implement a proprietary only video DRM in an open source OS like that. What a shame.

That means webapps support in SteamOS. Most of the common services people use on other consoles have ready made webapps versions already available for other set top boxes, including Youtube, Pandora, and Netflix. Integrating webapps as first class launchers in Steam fixes almost all these issues if they are also overhauling their internal browser with a Chromium implementation, while also serving device IDs for either TVs or mobile to get UIs better suited to long distance viewing.

The second generation of Steam Machines will need to have quality control. No more $1500+ desktop computers sold on Steam. There needs to be pricing limits and minimum feature sets required to use Steam Machine branding, and a minimum of software support and build aesthetic to actually build a console. And more importantly than any of that, we need a reference Steam Machine from Valve themselves, targeting baseline specs at a break even price point to define the floor of Steam Machines, preferably at a console competitive price point of around $400. Valve definitely have the resources and scale to make it happen, even more than Dell did, who were dependent on per-unit profits to justify the commitment.

And Valve needs a timed exclusive for, lets say, "SteamOS 3.0". Half Life 3, Portal 3, whatever, something needs to be on SteamOS prereleased a month or three early to move units. Valve games are legendary. They could easily move consoles if they release a good enough title exclusively on their own OS, especially if they only announce its a timed exclusive without giving concrete time tables for releases elsewhere. Its dirty, it defeats the point somewhat, but it is also necessary to drive adoption, otherwise the chicken and egg problem of no customers no games is never corrected.

But most of that is money and effort, and it is extremely unlikely to happen now that Valve hast hey want out of their product. They put the minimum effort in to keep Microsoft from trying to push their Windows Store as a competitor to Steam, much less lock them out of the platform, and now that they have what they want SteamOS can rot until they need a hedge against the monopoly again. What they underestimate is how entrenched Windows already is, and how it can only get worse with lock in like DirectX 12. Their hedge is never going to pack the punch it had in 2012 again, and it is unlikely Microsoft will be strong-armed in this way again either, unless SteamOS proves a legitimate competitor before that time.

It would be a shame to witness the death of PC gaming at the hands of console-grade proprietary lockdown that Valve was aware of but was too apathetic to really act to stop. There are thousands of us who realize the danger, and Valve obviously tasted it, but it is naive to think it just goes away and you can proceed with using the proprietary monopoly product indefinitely now. Its a never ending battle of politics if you don't actually own your platform, and Valve has done everything they can to try controlling a platform they have no control over.

Software Rants 21: Wildstar

So I'm skipping a Plasma 5.4 rants. Only issues are that krunner is now incredibly laggy and crashes a lot due to its history feature, my displayport monitor starts slower than the others so plasmashell doesn't properly add it to the desktop set and I have to restart it after logging in most of the time, and the new audio widget doesn't have output switching. Highlights are lots of new icons, krunner history (lol), and a good audio plasmoid finally.

But on to more important things, like video games! Particularly MMOs. Particularly, Wildstar. It went free to play about two weeks ago, and I have been playing quite a bit since then (played every class a smidge, lowest is Engineer at 3 and highest is my 50 medic and 8 warrior, spellslinger, and stalker). I'm going to detail my likes and dislikes about this game, though I do like it and really hope it can succeed - amongst competition like Neverwinter and Tera, it does stand out for its setting and its housing, and the PVE is much nicer when you actually do need to use the trinity.

At that, in terms of my qualifications, I have most leveling reputations maxed, I got max level in scientist, I decked out my house quite a bit (but have not bought an expanded house because I'm cheap and hoarding plat for riding skill) and have completed most veteran adventures at this point, and have gone into a veteran dungeon to lag to death and die immediately (but the lag I'm not considering since its wholly because Wildstar cannot use any Wine performance optimization and I believe it throws a lot of rendering errors as well).

First up, the intro experience. This game lacks characters. Artemis Zin is pushed early on in both starting zones as this continuous character, but without a major introductory cutscene to introduce her shes just words you follow like every other NPC. By the end of the game when her story ends in Malgrave I think I picked up a bit on her personality but only by reading lore items and actually paying attention, something MMO players will never often do.

I'm going to make large comparisons to WoW - of course - because this game was developed by a studio founded by ex-vanilla WoW developers. In WoW, I do care about major lore characters, and there are three ways I develop an affinity - cutscenes that show them off (Varian Wrynn in the Ulduar cinematic), significantly scripted ingame actions they perform (think the duel in the wrath launch event between Garrosh and Thrall), and user generated lore hype (everyone loved the Warchief in vanilla just because of his WC3 lore and it spread to other players.

Basically, you cannot make a character great on written text in a 3d world. They need to take action. In the OmniCore weekly at the end of the game you escort a mechari called Axis Pheydra who finally gives you some character with an NPC that has voiceovers besides a bit of Artemis. Basically each race has a quest leader - Mondo Zax for the Chua, for example - that recurrs in the world, but since all they do is act as questgivers and have very limited interaction in the world they aren't really too interesting.

Software Rants 20: Plasma 5.3 Problems

Blogger problems: why can't you set the default font to be something other than MS shovelware? I keep manually putting these blog posts on Helvetica.

I figure with each new release in the KDE 5 series I'll just make blog posts about whats broken. Gives me some clarrvoyance on where I can direct any contributions I want to make.

This release was quite the landmark for me, though - I finally switched my desktop and notebook over to Plasma 5. So first thing is first, something must have improved from last time for me to make the switch, and it definitely happened. So lets address my complaints last time and see what has gotten better, and add some more remarks now that it has been my daily driver for several weeks.

1. Performance. With the release of KDE applications 15.04 a lot of software has gotten a KF5 release, so much more of my desktop is now using the same shared libraries again. We still have that render thread problem - Qt 5.6 is not fixing it, so it will be at least next year before they reenable it. Which is insane. Besides that, opening almost anything is quite noticably sluggish on Plasma 5 on both my computers - it seems there is no disk caching going on, and since almost every window is now using the GPU, it might be compiling shaders every time, which is probably the real culprit. At the same time I've put Cyanogenmod 12 on my S4, and if I find my two year old phone is more responsive than my eight thread i7 computers with ten times or more CPU and GPU performance than the thing, both with SSDs that can pull 400 MB/s data rates, something is still amiss. It could also just be the QML compiler, but that seems less likely since both Android and KDE5 are using interpreters, so sluggishness on one should not be so pronounced. And usually my own QML apps are pretty spiffy in startup time.
2. Multiple monitors. Works alright now! I can setup my desktop properly, and it preserves across boots... usually. I'm pretty sure sometimes my DRM driver is reporting my displays by different names at random, which breaks everything and gives me an ugly clone 4x3 fallback mirror on all my screens, which then means I need to redo the configuration. But that is not KDEs fault - it sometimes happened under KDE4. The difference is that in the old one I could reorient the monitors for that one boot and not save the layout, whereas now the layout is autosaved. Honestly, the advantages of autosaving I think outweigh the inconvenience of sometimes having back to back boot cycles where I have to reconfigure my displays.
3. The KCM hasn't improved much, but that is pretty much my fault. I've found trying to work on either the KCM projects or KDE Telepathy to be incredibly frustrating experiences. The system settings KCMs are in the Plasma repo rather than systemsettings itself, so you have to rebuild the whole desktop to try modifying one KCM... on the flip side, KTP is super annoying in how you have to manually build binaries from a half dozen repos to test changes, because the project is - imo - pointlessly overarchitected into several git projects rather than just being one or two. But thats another blog post!
4. Plasmashell still randomly crashes, but at least it restarts properly now. Opening programs still does randomly kill the shell, which is an oddity...
5. Kmix is still awful, but I think someone was working on giving it a QML interface for the next release, which is what is needed.
6. Kickoff works fine now. Only complaints are how you cannot resize it, system settings is no longer under "computer", and that you cannot drag desktop files from kickoff and drop them in icon tasks like you could in kde4. Its a lot prettier now though!
7. Digital clock is still worse. I just have to live with having my time and date in the wrong format with no easy way to fix it.
8. Why the hell does systemsettings do this? Hell, a lot of KDE software is now doing that. I know what it is - default window dimensions. What I want to know is why Qt got stupid and stopped sizing containments like this around the elements therein. Here is how it should look. And under KDE4 it usually would. But a lot of different settings pages are now ingoring the actual dimensions of subelements and presenting themselves as stupidly small boxes. File dialogs do it. Kwin effects does it. It seems like a major Qt5 regression where any resizable elements containing lists of widgets just stop caring how much space the widgets take up, and just don't even try to size themselves reasonably for the elements contained therein. Using it more, there were a lot of improvements in individual systemsettings modules, but the UI is still barf.
9. Breeze-GTK at least is in the works from reddit posts I've read. Some super amazing guy is working on it, so hopefully it will be done one day. GTK still looks like butt.
10. Muon hasn't changed pretty much at all.
11. Bluedevil was fixed! And there is now a native Bluetooth widget like the networkmonitor one. Extremely positive changes here, everything is better!
12. IconTasks now always delays tooltips. I don't mind... since I always do that... I just wonder if anyone else now misses instant tooltips.

Now that it is my daily driver, and now that all my deal breakers are resolved, I can bitch and moan about all the new problems i've run into! This is the list I'll use in my "why plasma 5.4 sucks and free software developers should be doing a better job giving me amazing desktops for nothing the brats" post on an internet blog where I complain about things too much.

1. Responsiveness. I mentioned this above, but its still an outstanding issue. I have a desktop with 16GB of ram, an 840 Pro, and I get tangible application load delays and sluggish animations that never happened on kde4. I do believe it is related to QML, seeing as its everywhere now which means shaders are containtly being compiled and my GPU is being hit quite often. It might be related to how I'm using my 290 on radeonSI as my only GPU now, since my onboard Intel DVI port could not see my 144hz monitor as 144hz. I do want to consider writing the modeline myself and trying prime offloading again, though.
2. plasmashell still has issues. Any real time widget will constantly load the CPU, like its drawing updates at infinite FPS or something - this includes the network, disk IO, and CPU monitors. Kind of annoying to not have that info anymore. Sometimes, applications launched from plasmashell stop having working file dialogs - the application will lockup as if there is a superceding window, but no window will appear, and I imagine it is due to some hidden window somewhere else in the plasmashell sea is impersonating the dialog. Either way, when this happens, I must xkill the program and restart plasmashell - theres no other way to get working file dialogs back. Only happens with KF5 programs too. And the shell does still crash occasionally.
3. First boot problems. On my desktop the time from login -> working desktop is often at least a minute. It takes around 15 - 20 seconds for krandr to modset the screens away from the SDDM mirrored monitor configuration, and then another minute or so of plasmashell and kwin jerking it in the corner for some reason. Logs are not informative on what is actually going on here, and I'm already in the habit of starting my desktop when I get up to go brush my teeth, and I sleep it throughout the day if I'm going anywhere, so I don't really feel the sting of this problem - but it is a problem all the same. On my notebook, desktop widgets flicker like mad for a while after first logging in. Restarting the shell fixes the flickering, but its pretty wild while its going on. Only impacts desktop widgets, not the panel, so when I open kmail / firefox I don't have to look at it anymore, and it does go away after a minute or two. Still a regression.
4. Autostart is ignoring /usr/share/autostart. Just outright. Adding scripts is broken, so I had to make desktop files for all my shell scripts.
5. KDED is trying to open ksysguard as ksysguard.desktop, but ksysguard got a KF5 port and was renamed org.kde.ksysguard.desktop. I have to symlink the new one as ksysguard.desktop in my applications directory and then have my custom shortcut of meta-g to open it point to that desktop file for it to work, or I get a "malformed ksysguard.desktop" error hitting the shortcut. This happens nowhere else.
6. KDE Telepathy is a mess. Its now on KF5, has a new desktop widget, and looks gorgeous... but everything has regressed so bad. It now has a proper KCM to manage accounts, its now using kpeople, and soon it should be using telepathy as its accounts backend. Kontact should also be adopting kpeople and that backend too at some point, and when it works it should be the online accounts management we should have had years ago. But for now, its a half baked mess - no error messages when accounts fail to connect, and the various implementations of login providers spinlock themselves when external servers are nonresponsive to login attempts. That means if I try to signin to a hangouts account but the telepathy part or KTP is broken, it will max out a CPU core and sit there waiting for a working pipe that will never be setup until the connection times out. You can only add about a half dozen different accounts now, down from several dozen in the 4.x series, and we end up with Gadu-gadu and IBM Sametime rather than the real esoteric accounts like AIM... or SIP... or Bonjour... half my IM accounts are no longer supported even though Telepathy still works with them just fine. Even when an account is avaialble, going online is a pain in the ass - you must not only enable chat in the internet accounts KCM, you have to go into the contact list and force online to actually try connecting if it ever failed even once. The Call UI is completely gone, I can't even dig up an experimental git repo of a ktp5 callui. The Google Talk teleapathy tube must be screwed up or something, because I cannot have two hangouts accounts active at once anymore, and the client will randomly lose connection on the only one I can keep online to then spinlock and error out until I relog the session. Ifi it was not such a pain in the ass to get a working development environment for KTP, I'd be trying to fix this mess in an instant... but every time I go to do it I have to pull down so much other stuff in git form, and then build it all and try installing all this crud to just run the connection manager that I always give up after an hour or so. Some projects like mozilla-central really need to learn how to seperate their git repos, but I see no reason why a desktop IM client needs different git projects for its file transfer dialog, accounts manager, filetransfer-handler, desktop applets, text interface, call interface, and a kded module. None of this stuff works for the most part without all the rest, if anything it should be ktp with plugins for sendfile, call, etc.
7. Its great that desktop widgets now snap to a grid rather than being this randomly sized blob of rectangle, but the alignment is wonky when mixing old widgets like the notes one where it consumes much more space than the actual displayed notepad. Whenever my screen resets it also dumps all the widgets in a corner that I have to replace them all in their positions on my screen.

So enough Negative Nancy, whats good about this release?

1. QML everywhere is still great. CPU usage on most things is lower, animations are pretty, Breeze is gorgeous, and the new system tray is fantastic. These all are pretty much carryovers from 5.2, though.
2. We are finally getting plasmoids, even if many are still broken. Plasmoids are probably one of the greatest features of KDE, it would be nice if they were given more class in the ecosystem to make it easier to develop and package them. I intend to try making a bitcoin plasmoid just for funsies today, for example.
3. All the fixes I mentioned above, but I'll restate the big ones just for posterity - bluetooth works! Multiple monitors work! Modesetting works! Power management works! That cool feature where the system won't sleep with an external display attached when you lidclose works and is great! 

So despite the criticism its still the best desktop environment out there. And its now better than kde4, else I wouldn't have switched over already. Heres hoping the future is only brighter for KDE. We had the difficult UI transition from 3->4, and now the internals transition from 4->5, so hopefully the model in place today - GPU accelerated QML, with glorious Breeze styling, with huge configurability and the abiility to effectively immitate any other workflow - can last a long time.

I'll add to this list over time as I bump into more issues. They are definitely out there!

Software Rants 19: Plasma 5.2 Problems

So the KDE collection 5.2 just came out recently, including Kwin 5.2, a kcm to configure displays, Plasma 5.2, etc.

And after two days and endless problems I have to give up and go back to KDE4, again. So here is why:

1. Performance. The moment by moment fluidity of Plasma is great now, but a lot of other aspects have hugely degraded in the transition, and a large part of it is probably the fact QtQuick still will not generate a render thread on Mesa drivers. You know, what a significant portion of the Linux desktop uses. Opening any program via panels locks the desktop up for a few milliseconds, because of that. It is so distracting and so adolescent a problem it makes the whole experience feel like a joke. You get sort of the same issue on KDE4 opening KDE5 apps (Arch has gotten rid of KDE4 konsole and kate, so you open the Frameworks 5 versions now) where it has to load all the shared libraries in addition to the program itself. But that is a good thing - it shows off how much of a benefit shared libraries are, because under Plasma 5 they open snappy and quick.
2. Multiple Monitors. The real nail in my coffin for running Plasma 5.2 is that it plain DOES NOT WORK with three screens on my system. I have an r9 290, on top of Mesa 10.4, with four displays running off of it - a 1440x900 75hz ancient Dell monitor on the left on DVI, a 144hz 24" 1080p "gaming" monitor in the middle on dual link DVI, an IPS 1080p 21" panel on the right for coding and reading running over a DP to HDMI cable, and a 35' HDMI line through the wall to the living room TV to play movies or screencast with. And if I try to even start kwin with all these monitor attachments, arranged or not, it simply crashes, every time. I can get it to work with two monitors, but not three or four. It seems to take offense with the HDMI and DP screens. Regardless, I cannot use a desktop where all my monitors do not work.
3. An addendum to the monitors - the new display configuration KCM is complete garbage. It has a single option under "advanced" in the refresh rate, which is just a waste of screen space and makes it seem half assed. It has no presentation of if or if not it is preserving its settings, and oh my surprise, it does not save a huge plethora of settings or at least remember them in the GUI, in that if you explicitly set refresh rates, resolutions, orientations, or positioning it will just randomly reset these fields to defaults whenever you apply changes. The UI Interactivity of drag and drop snapping monitors is great, that is great progress and is the best part. But everything else is lackluster and horrible and needs fixed, and I hope to find the time to try it myself.
4. Plasma Shell crashes all the time. This is on Qt5.4, on kernel 3.18, on Mesa 10.4. Newest everything, so any bugfixes are here. Dragging panels, resizing widgets, opening programs, and just clicking the application launcher too fast crashes it. In my experience QtQuick2 is super solid and hard to crash, so I have no idea what unholy sorcery the shell is trying to do to it to make it so unstable, but it is not acceptable in what is now shipping in a mainline Kubuntu release.
5. Kmix is complete garbage and needs a huge overhaul. The volume bar is neat and works when you hit the keys, gives a nice feedback sound and such. That works. Nothing else does. The UI is actually broken on Plasma 5 - on KDE4 with the Breeze theme the slider bars at least render correctly, albeit Veromix demonstrates a hugely superior interface for that. The control panel is also nice, and Veromix has nothing like it. But having this ugly ass Qwidgets slider amidst gorgeous clipboard and network management tray icons is a huge blemish to the experience. Again, if I had the time and skill to go into KMix's sources and rewrite it a nice QML interface with nice animations and drag and drop sinks and quick attach effects, I would.
6. The kickoff plasmoid rewrite broke it somewhere, where you just lose the side buttons completely. I think adding favorites causes it. I could consistently reproduce it just by searching a few programs, adding some favorites, opening and closing it a few times, etc. For the stock launcher to literally remove the ability to find the programs list for most users at random is a huge oversight.
7. The digital clock plasmoid has taken a huge step backward. I like the idea of basing all the system wide measurements and metrics off locales, but doing so means I'm stuck with the abhorrent month / day / year date everywhere, which I do not want. But I have no choice! I can't tell which other country uses ISO dates if any, and I have no way to configure my own locale settings anymore. I guess this is more a KCM issue. However, the digital clock still has completely broken NTP support on however it plans to sync time, so while I would love to not have to muck around with ntpd conf files by just setting it to the NA NTP server in the GUI, that doesn't happen. At least it isn't making inactive root password dialogs behind the window anymore. Actually, there is one down side - they removed the ability to set the font on the clock, and you can't put it in 24 hour mode anymore. I don't want AM / PM wasting space on my panels width, I know military time, let me set it to use it. It should be an option right under show seconds.
8. System settings got a bit better, but the UI is still hugely painful. It should have adopted the syntax of how kmails settings module works, with tab groups on the left, tabs in the group on top, so that you weren't having these huge UI clashes where you were going three depth levels into a menu structure to find some setting. Also it solves the problem of how display configuration and window management are on completely opposite ends of the listing.
9. Where the hell is Breeze GTK? GTK apps now look like burrito diarrhea with oxygen-gtk.
10. Muon feels like a childrens toy. I'm not sure how the UI was designed, but it seems to be all custom QML without using controls at all, which make all the buttons and frames stand out as wrong. It also could use a bit of mobileization of its UI, since its a software store it really should be a Tonka toy in how you use it. And little things like being able to zoom in on broken images for apps makes it feel unprofessional. It is so much better than everything else we have that I have to gun for it, and it still beats out the Ubuntu App store, but it could do so much more.
11. Bluedevil 5 always starts with bluetooth off. This is incredibly annoying when using a bluetooth mouse. There is no obvious setting anywhere to make it... turn on.. when you turn it on? And I have no idea who thought it would be a good idea to start your bluetooth program and NOT TURN ON BLUETOOTH.
12. IconTasks got rid of its delayed tooltip option. This is another thing I want back desperately, because now it is impossible to use the context menus of system tray items because they have tooltips immediately popping up. This is an issue with kmix and bluedevil.

I'm still switching as soon as I can actually use my monitors on Kwin5. Now I have to dig through a thousand IRC channels, mailing lists, and bug trackers to try to find out if anyone else has reported it, and what I have to do to get upstream aware of the issue.

I guess I should mention the good while I'm here:

• Breeze. Such a gorgeous theme in both light and dark. Everything about Breeze is glorious and makes me so happy KDE looks fantastic again. If anything it takes the sensibilities that Material Design approaches but does not go batshit crazy like Google did. My only complaint is that stain of a white pixel wide bar on Breeze Dark when the panel is oriented vertically. That really needs to be removed. The icons are great, hell even the Oxygen fonts are nice.
• QtQuick2. When the shell is not freezing up due to not having a render thread, it is butter smooth, uses about a quarter less resources in total than KDE4, and looks great with the new notifications center. The icons on panels scale very fluidly now where they didn't in KDE4. The only thing missing is a Plasmoid grid - having the ability to arbitrarilly position plasmoids is great, but you should also be able to orient them into a block grid that snaps them in place so you need less finesse to make your desktop look nice. The grid does not need to be overly large - I could imagine a standard sized notes plasmoid taking up a 4x4 or 8x8 region.
• Frameworks are a huge improvement over the monolithic kdelibs. Fundamentally KDE5 for everyone but the Plasma Designers was cleaning up technical debt, and I think it will pay off hugely in the coming years. The technologies underlying this cycle are top notch and hopefully these roadblocks don't last very long. I was not around for the KDE4 release debacle, but it seems to be less bad this time.

I'm still really worried about Kubuntu 15.04. I really want to stick everyone I know ever on it - Muon is good, Systemd is necessary, Plasma 5 should be great, but all these issues make me feel that the time is still not here. It might be Qt 5.5 or 5.6 and Plasma 5.3 or 5.4 before this stuff is resolved and I can actually start using it, and it will be just in time for Wayland to break everything again. I almost wish that Kubuntu and everyone were pushing for a configuration with Weston as the system compositor and Kwin as a local one until Kwin can take over Westons job rather than continuing to use X11 and thus running into another wall of bugs when everyone starts beating up Kwin-wayland.

PS: A lot of these are turning out to be Arch-only problems, at least from my experience. Kubuntu 15.04 on a clients desktop on radeonSI is running pretty much flawlessly, with no menu breakage, bluetooth turns on by default, kmix inherits the theming from the system properly. Only difference is the GTK apps aren't getting Oxygen styled, they are getting the GTK fallback theme.

I really do think all these kinks are just another release cycle away from resolution, though, so hopefully four months from now 5.3 can pull me in fully.