KDE on Arch at uConsole - results of one month usage

racoon
Thu, 26 Dec 2024 17:27:42 +0000
uConsole

I am using KDE Plasma on uConsole for the last 1 month and decided to share my experiences with community.

In a nutshell

So far, the experience of using KDE Plasma (desktop edition) on uConsole is really positive. It is faster than I thought and provides a very satisfying productivity.

The setup

I am using Plasma on top of Arch Linux assembled with the scripts provided by @PotatoMania. I use Wayland and never even tried X.org on my uConsole. I have disabled search indexing (no point or me).

Advantages

I rely on KDE Plasma/Ach for daily driving my personal laptop for years. So I was really curious if that would work for uConsole. My bet was that it will be struggling - hardware-wise it is not even close to my powerful Lenovo laptops.

It turns out, I was wrong - KDE Plasma is really usable on uConsole. My typical setup is below.

So, the advantage is that I can use highly functional desktop environment on my uConsole with all the benefits and conveniences it provides.

When I was just installing Plasma on my uConsole, I had a hypothesis that it will be hardly usable due to relatively small screen (at least comparing to 4K screen on laptop). it turned out I was completely wrong - the screen size and resolution allow for quite comfortable usage. Even with 1,25 scaling.

All native KDE apps that I use work in fast and responsive way on uConsole. Some lags are observed when I use Ferdium or other Electron-based apps.

It is probably worth mentioning that in my personal experience, Plasma Desktop runs faster on Arch than on Postmarket. I did not compare with other distros, though.

In a nutshell - I am a happy uConsole user )

Drawacks

There are some dawbacks and glitches which make my experience o using Plasma on uConsole slightly less happy. It does not make me love uConsole and Plasma combination any less, but worth mentioning:

Night mode does not work. If I enable it - the screen just goes black

Screen corners + expose effect just brings the black screen. Stops after mouse click. Somewhat annoying as I rely on electric corners+window overview on the desktop

App menus on the window title bar (yes, I use this setup) are somewhat miss-positioned. Completely usable, though.

Instead of conclusion

I am a happy uConsole+Arch+Plasma user this far. There are some minor glitches, but they do not hamper productivity in any significant ways.

So, huge thanks to both uCconsole and KDE teams and all the contributors as well as wonderful people on this forum who help complete strangers to solve their issues and hack.

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