The long and painful road to useful Plasma 5 desktop

UPDATE 22.1.2018

Some parts of this angry rant still hold true, but Plasma desktop sure improved greatly since this post was originally written. I now run latest KDE software on Manjaro for several months and it sure got good enough for my day-to-day use. New post incoming… maybe when I get around to it.

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First of all, I would like to state that I’m a fan of KDE. Some of their programs and utilities are unmatched by any other. For example file browser Dolphin, text editor Kate, the great PIM suite Kontact, … the list goes on. Also the level of customization is borderline fetishist. KDE desktop lets you do absolutely anything you ever thought possible and more… or it seems so at first. Then, in the moment of awe, the first crash comes. Then you start noticing weirg glitches and somehow missing features.

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Running Ubuntu natively on Nvidia Shield Tablet

Thanks to Nvidia’s Linux4Tegra and work of Bogdacutu and Steel01, as of today I’m running desktop Ubuntu on my Shield Tablet. And it works surprisingly well. Except some tablet-specific hardware like the modem, accelerometers and such, of course.

All it takes is to install MultiROM, patch the kernel and install the appropriate Linux4Tegra installation archive next to existing Android system and there you go:

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Linux Device Tree – a slight disappointment

After reading about the much discussed Device Tree for quite a long time as a holy savior of the ARM world I had the chance to get my fingers on it in a real world application. The issue was to upgrade Linux system from 3.0 kernel to 3.13 on a custom Vybrid VF610 board. The original 3.0-based system from Timesys was not working properly in some aspects and needed a bit of an overhaul.

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