Daniel Abrecht via Dng - 21.12.23, 10:32:35 CET:
> It doesn't seam very stable, though. The shell sometimes crashes. When
> I'm lucky, I still have a terminal open, and can restart plasma-shell.

If not you can usually press Alt-Space to open KRunner and restart
plasmashell from there.

Interesting to note that you and Adrian seem to have stability issues with
Plasmashell. I usually run it all day without a single crash. I do not use
WLAN often, but I do use it at times. Different ones as well. And I enable
and disable Bluetooth every now and then or change audio devices. Or
disconnect from external monitor and connect again. Things like that. I
usually use standby during day time and hibernate over night. Often enough
I use the same Plasma session for several days. I do not have uptimes from
several months with one KDE session nowadays like I had in the past but
that is mostly because I install and boot into new kernels more
frequently. And well… I still do have long uptimes on less used devices
like the music laptop. These do not run daily, but including when it is in
hibernation I have a Plasma session there for weeks and months without a
single crash. Frankly I do not remember Plasma crashing on music laptop
ever.

What may affect the stability of a Plasma session is the applets you have.
Unfortunately these all run within the Plasma process. If an applet is
just QML, a crash should not bring down Plasma - in theory at least! -,
but if it also uses C++… anything can happen.

I'd not say the stability of KDE is perfect. On my main machine I rarely
restart a Plasma session. Usually not due to a crash, but due to some mix
up of state in an applet.

I'd like more micro kernel like separation in the desktop environment, but
I do not have that with the Linux kernel to begin with. I fondly remember
when I used a QNX Neutrino desktop on an AMD Athlon XP machine. This
operating system did not even know how to crash. I do not remember a
single complete crash of operating system or GUI with it. It is the only
operating system ever where I could run a music player and could do
whatever I like without even a single trace of a glitch in playback. No
matter the workload, audio did play without a glitch. Linux still cannot
do this. And while you can consider AmigaOS as soft real time OS, it did
not have memory protection to begin with and a misbehaving program
could even poke into the sample buffer. Unfortunately QNX is not free
software.

Overall with Plasma I am really quite happy. I do have strange crashes of
Dolphin file manager when accessing external LUKS encrypted USB disks on
one machine. I guess this one may be related to Devuan in its Ceres suite
in a sense. As Firefox with xdg-desktop-portal-kde is also affected from
those crashes, it may be related to a lower part of the stack like eudev
integration. But I did not yet figure it out unfortunately.

Mind you this is all on boxes with Devuan Ceres.

I do have some people using Plasma on Devuan Daedalus. I did not yet
receive a single crash report. Not even one. Including from my mate. She
uses her ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 AMD Linux laptop quite often and it simply
just works.

But anyway, the way you use and configure your machine may affect
whether you trigger a buggy code path or not. With the myriads of
configuration options there may be combinations thereof that are less well
tested than mostly a standard setup. Those setups I did for others are
quite close to standard configuration while the setup on my main machine
deviates a lot more from that. Which may be in addition to using Devuan
Ceres a reason for a bit more instability there. But Plasma almost never
crashes even on that machine.

--
Martin