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Mageia 6 and Kde 4

PostPosted: Oct 7th, '17, 02:56
by zexcel
I have upgraded my system from 5 to 6, but I get used to the old interface and didn't quite like Plasma 5.
So can I switch back to KDE 4, and can I use packet from Mageia 5 or what else should I do?

Re: Mageia 6 and Kde 4

PostPosted: Oct 7th, '17, 10:12
by doktor5000
No, you can't switch back to KDE4 the way you seem to want this to work.
You probably would need to try out a different desktop environment, maybe XFCE or LXQT or something like that.

Re: Mageia 6 and Kde 4

PostPosted: Oct 12th, '17, 18:47
by Gelsenbury
I appreciate that running KDE 4 under Mageia 6 is not a solution. But I understand the frustration with Plasma 5. I've gone back to Mageia 5.1 for now (for various reasons, not all of which have to do with Plasma 5), and I hope that some issues will be ironed out by the time I upgrade to version 6 again. I no longer have a Mageia 6 installation to verify, but from memory some of the issues were these:

[*]Configurability was limited. Installing themes didn't work as intended (see thread viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11819&hilit=theme and associated bug report), and the repositories had a colourful mix of KDE 4 and Plasma 5 themes, icons, etc., which became difficult to navigate.

[*]Older themes didn't seem to have been ported to Plasma 5 yet. Sorry, I really don't like Breeze. It's nobody's fault, time will bring back choice. It's just frustrating when something was good and now isn't available any more.

[*]Some packages still *need* KDE 4, but KDE 4 can't be configured in a straightforward way any more. KMyMoney is the example that I remember. On a fresh install of Mageia 6, it looked different from other applications and formatted the date in a different way from that set in the Plasma 5 locale settings. For an application where dates are crucial, that's a big deal.

[*]I'm not an expert on GTK, but something similar seems to be going on with GTK 2 and GTK 3. Open, for example, Kontact, Firefox, LibreOffice, and KMyMoney, and there may be up to 4 different environments and icon sets. Quite a messy desktop experience compared with KDE 4. And configuring the GTK look and feel isn't easy either.

[*]Bubblemon is gone!

[*]On login, I had 1-2 seconds of black screen before my desktop appeared. Not a serious problem, but not a great first impression either.

I can't contribute to bug reports about these because I don't have a Mageia 6 installation to check any more. But the general impression is that things still need some time to mature.