All posts by davidwinterton

KDE Plasma 5

Before any review;
A huge thank you to all the people who have put so much thought and effort into the birth of Plasma 5

As a Chakra user, ( the KDE Distro ) I upgraded to Plasma 5 over 3 months ago, the upgrade was a major one, needing to be done by command line, rather than by our package manager.
As I use Chakra as my day to day Distro, my system was rather harder to upgrade than most. Many thanks to Julian whose advice put me back on track after I had ‘bricked’ it. ( Using the command line to successfully improve things is a rather new and novel experience to this user!! )

So first impressions;
WOW !!!!!!!!,
It loads SO quickly and is like grading up from 720 to full HD,

Then, as with everything new, a few problems occured.
By design multiple independent windows ( the spinning cube ) has gone, I only ever used two sides, annoying but not enough to put me off,
Not by design were the stability problems, crashes were normal, the whole system slowly grinding to a halt all to common, regular KDE apps like Qupzilla, would not load and then when an upgrade got it working again Rekonq stopped loading.
It must have driven the developers mad.
But as the weeks have passed the problems are being beaten,

But the WOW is still there, in the coming months it will be replacing KDE4 in mainstream Distros, and it will be mature enough to rely on, only if you must have the spinning cube decline the chance to upgrade.

Over flowing root

Document-1-page001Just the shortest article for the site:
Just as windows gives it’s users hours of fun running defrag, linux can fill it’s root partition with older versions of programmes if left unattended, mine got to 8.5gb (I use Chakra, which is Arch based so the commands used are Arch) and entirely filled the partition.(/var/cache being the culpit) Unlike windows however this is not really a problem till it gets to excess as it means you can reinstate any up graded programme if ‘progress’ is not to your liking. The answer is simple, if everything is running to your liking then the command ‘pacman -Scc’ (without the ‘ ‘) will wipe the lot. this is not recommended.
‘pacman -Sc’ will wipe all the older copies, but best of all the programme ‘paccache’ will give you total control over it all.
I am sure those of you far more learned than me will know the commands for Debain and other O/Ses.

Now I think this is fairly interesting but what makes it fun is with Linux you can open the root folder, go to /var/cache, open a terminal issue the commands and see your computer change before your eyes and followed by a general upgrade ‘pacman -Syu’ repopulating  the file.