Plasma/5.5 Errata

Known issues in the Plasma 5.5 release.

Intel GPUs

We have recieved many reports on problems with running Plasma on hardware with graphic cards provided by Intel. We are sorry for the inconvenience and are sorry that we are not able to provide a product which is on par on all systems. Our aim is it to have our software run well on all hardware, but we cannot prevent errors in the underlying stack. Our software was hit by surprise by the issues which are from our view regressions in the underlying driver stack as previous versions worked fine. We would have liked to provide workarounds for these issues which can only be fixed by Intel. Unfortunately we were not able to find a satisfying solution. Given that we present here a list of known workaround which can be tried by affected users.

We encourage our users who experience problems to come to forum.kde.org so that we can help with our knowledge and to help us gather more information to provide better workarounds.

Random application crashes

This issue is caused by an driver bug. A reported workaround is to change AccelMethod to UXA in the xorg configuration and restarting the system. Please refer to documentation provided by your distribution on how to change this.

Heavy rendering artefacts

Users told us that enabling DRI3 in xorg configuration can circumvent this problem. An alternative can be to use the new OpenGL ES backend in KWin which also seems to circumvent the problem or disable compositing completely.

Beta

Plasma Media Center is in tech preview and misses features compared to Plasma Media Center 1

Missing features

No holidays or calendar events displayed in the Plasma calendar - Needs porting to PIM's KF5 libraries
KWin does not provide window tabs
Tooltips on window decoration buttons
KUrlRequester freezes UI when its dialog is opened for the second time Bug 351516

Configuration changes

Environment variables and shutdown scripts are now sourced from ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env and ~/.config/plasma-workspace/shutdown, respectively. Existing scripts from Plasma 4 should be moved there.