A positive step forward.
Regarding Plasma ISO build ID # 2274 in VBox. Booting to Live is still very slow, like 5 min 23 sec. It is possible and indeed probable that if I had done the trick (let it boot for say 30-45 sec. and then switch to a VT and back) that it would boot sooner. But this needs to be fixed or we’ll have reports of “ISO doesn’t work” or “ISO boots to black screen” because not many users will wait 5 minutes or longer for an ISO to boot. Alternatively if we publicize that you have to use a trick to get it to boot that would lead to bad publicity. Anyway this is a well known issue.
I’m given to understand that this ISO has a fix for “Xorg crashing”. But I was not experiencing Xorg crashes with earlier ISO’s so can not verify.
A minor complaint is the screen locking is enabled on Live mode. This is not good design in my opinion. Enabling screen locker for an installed system does make sense (if you assume users are to stupid to enable it for themselves) but makes no sense on a Live ISO does it?
Next I attempt to install with no tricks or workarounds. Since I am testing I do start Calamares from Konsole thus:
$ pkexed /usr/bin/calamares -d
to enable recover of output of the above command in the event of an issue. Since erase disk wants to make my 15 GB VM disk have a 6.4 GB swap I will use manual partitioning so I can make a smaller swap partition. I make a 300MB fat16 /boot/efi, a 13GB /, and 1.7GB swap.
Install was successful and took about 2 min. And that is with no tricks or workarounds applied. So that means about 3 or 4 different problems in Calamares configuration have been fixed in the last 10 days. Thanks to @Colin, and all others involved with that effort.
After install boot remains either slow or you have to use the switch to VM VT and back trick. So that needs fixing. But this ISO represents substantial progress.
That’s all I have on this so far. If you test this remember there is a thread about OM-Welcome so post any issues you find with that in that thread. Other issues can be posted in this thread.