Fwd: Experiences with KDE / Plasma in an enterprise environment

[David Edmundson]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Christian Loosli <kde at fuchsnet.ch> wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> Thomas Pfeiffer informed me about this list and asked me to post my
> feedback
> from an enterprise point of view to it, as we were discussing it on a
> different list.  Apologies that my first post thus is already filled with
> (hopefully constructive) criticism.
>

Firstly, thanks for the feedback, it really is appreciated and I would
encourage others to share their specific constructive comments too.


> Summarized:
>
> 1) Logging in is not possible with a directory service, which is the
> default
> in most enterprise environments.
>

I owe you a personal apology on that one, I remember you telling me about
that issue in person, and I promised to fix it.
I did start, but then things happened and I genuinely forgot; I've made a
bug report now, which will get fixed. I think we got a new design for the
login screen from the VDG which addresses this so it's going to go away
soon.
In the mean time, I recommend anyone to change their SDDM theme to
something else to resolve the problem


> 2) Daily tasks like undocking a notebook lead to the whole session
> crashing,
> resulting in a full data loss of all open applications
>
3) Various visual glitches and papercuts all across the applications

I like to think we're over the worst of that. Most the frequently occuring
crashers are gone. The rate of new bug reports is going down quickly, and
the number of introduced bugs is pretty slim.

I'm not going to pretend we got everything right, clearly we messed up a
lot, but I'm not sure what we can take away that we're not already doing -
other than having more manpower.
I think we should be in a reasnoble state by the time we see the first LTS
from any distro based on Plasma 5 which AFAIK hasn't happened yet.


> 4) Base concepts that are hard to understand and rarely used
>
> I certainly don't want to be going down the route that anything unique is
inherently bad.

In this case I don't think activities is a problem, the problem is that the
person couldn't change their power profile without unnecesary steps; there
maybe needs to be more decoupling there so that common tasks can be used
independently.

I'll talk through the power manager example with some people, maybe get
some ideas on cleaning that up.
If you have any more specific stories like that, that'd be great to hear -
as that's the sort of thing we can work constructively with.


5) Unreliable updates to recent versions including data loss


By data loss, are we still talking purely about the config settings?
Has that happened since during the 5.x series upgrades?

I think we definitely could migrated a lot more than we did.
Turning this into a question (for a wider audience), is 4.x to 5.x config
migration something that's worth fixing or is it effectively too late?



> 6) Response times for pressing issues are way too high, two critical bugs
> with
> either data loss or not being able to log in have been reported and known
> for
> a year without fix
>
> You clearly have two specifc ones in mind. Which ones are you referring to?


>
> So, as much as I personally like KDE and Plasma, I fully understand why
> people
> in my team switched away from it.
> And in conclusion: in it's current state, the KDE software stack and plasma
> are not usable in an enterprise environment.
>
> I really hope that this improves, and I hope that this list of experiences
> we
> made helps spotting some of the spots that could do with improvements.
>
> If you have further questions or need more details, feel free to ask. Keep
> in
> mind though that I no longer am in that environment and thus can't test
> some
> things.
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Christian
>
>
> PS:
> As I am a bit experienced with similar discussions on bug trackers, IRC and
> other mailing lists, I recommend saving some time and not coming with the
> following frequently given replies:
>

Are we really that bad :S ?

3) It's the fault of the framework we use (Qt):



> I shall get technical for a short moment here: in
> case of the screen being NULL which leads to the data loss mentioned in
> experience 2: Yes, this might be a Qt problem, but you can actually check
> and
> avoid it in your end.


In general yes, I agree with you, we are too quick to blame others, but
then not really get involved in being proactive reporting it, fixing it, or
working round it when we can.

 But given you got technical on that specific bug, I will have to give a
specific rebuttle. The check you're saying is needed *isn't* on our end.
See the trace at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360134   frame 7 is
in Qt's X backend.

David
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