Does KDE require snap in either ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04

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With the last Ubuntu 22.04 update, KDE started intermittently freezing.
Symptoms: On boot it takes 1 to 3 minutes for the menu bar to appear at the bottom. On every launch of Krusader or Kate, there would be a 1 to 3 minute lag with the new window frozen until it becomes active.

There started being some unexplained KDE errors that required hard shutdowns.

I completely removed KDE. And then reinstalled it. The problems remained. So, remove Ubuntu 22.04 and installed 24.04, along with a minimal KDE desktop. I still have the same problems.

There were no problems until the last update in Ubuntu 22.04 (KDE 5.24.7). The problems are identical in 24.04 (KDE 5.27.12).

I tried install KDE Neon, but that was a disaster. I could not get beyond the boot selection screen and the boot options were truncated to a few words so I could not see if I was making the correct selection for debug mode boot.

Besides the hardware, the only thing in common between the 22.04 and 24.04 installations is that the first thing I do is disable and remove snap.

Does anyone know if the last updates to Ubuntu 22.04 introduced to KDE some kind of dependency on snap?

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Hi! The best place to ask about any requirements changing for the overall Ubuntu distribution or Kubuntu-specific packaging would be the Ubuntu Community Discourse: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/

If you have an up and running system with those issues, folks might be able to assist by helping look at system logs, terminal output when running programs, and things like that :slight_smile:

For what it’s worth, a couple of general notes:

  • If you’re wanting to use the KDE Plasma desktop on an Ubuntu distribution base, the best way to do that is by installing the Kubuntu flavor: https://kubuntu.org/ That way, you’re getting an system that’s setup for use with KDE Plasma by the folks who maintain those Ubuntu packages

  • Long-term support distributions typically use older versions of software for longer periods of time, so it’s possible that some inconsistency has occurred in the Ubuntu base by trying to combine some newer underlying components with older KDE software

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@johnandmegh thanks for the suggestion regarding KDE flavors, up and running systems, Kubuntu specific packaging, and Ubuntu distribution bases.

I don’t know if I installed a Kubuntu flavor. Rather, I installed Ubuntu 24.04, disabled and removed snap, then used synaptic to install the KDE minimal desktop that was in the standard Ubuntu 24.04 repo (same with 22.04). Up until now the result was a stable KDE environment.

I am not sure where the line between Ubuntu and KDE lies when it comes to the LTS distribution updates, which I use for stability and update compatibility with other programs.

The KDE problem has now appeared on my other computers running 22.04 (all without snap). At the same time a plasma message appeared on all the 22.04 computers stating that an Ubuntu 24.04 update is available and that 22.04 will no longer be supported.

The real question may be: Did Ubuntu and/or KDE insert a snap dependency for KDE in their recent system updates?

The fact is people choose container systems other than snap for their systems such as flatpack, appimage. And if so, usually remove snap.

I would have expected a warning on the Ubuntu or KDE docs stating something like:

“Starting with the xxx update on xxx date in Ubuntu 2x.04, KDE will require snap to function.”

But I have not been able to find any.

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So you added Kubuntu’s Plasma to your Ubuntu desktop.

Mixing Gnome and Plasma on the same Ubuntu, if not any distro, is something that is long been known at least anecdotally to potentially cause at least some annoyances, but not usually overly major problems. But everyone’s experience here seem to be different.

Snap won’t have an effect on this, it has no connection to your non-snap software or desktop setup. There is no “hard” dependency on Snap in Kubuntu per se, and definitely none in Plasma itself.

That seldom ever fixes things, and depending on what you removed, you most likely did not completely remove it at all (there are hundreds of packages involved).

Of course, knowing the actual errors you had might help.

As you have had problems on both Ubuntu and KDE neon (which is Ubuntu 24.04) , My initial thought is a combo of your particular hardware and Ubuntu-specific driver/kernel issues. Trying a non-Ubuntu distro can help verify, or at least running straight-up Kubuntu, instead of mish-mashing two full desktops.

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Before I start swapping equipment out, I am wondering if someone can help me identify the actual problem by pulling some error codes and interpreting them?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
I have not had any problems with snap removed in 22.04 on multiple machines until this last upate. I have not updated the other machines because they are running long programs (months). So I don’t know if the other machines, all with snap removed, will have the same problem. The icon I associate with the update that started the problem was:

ubuntu_2404_update_messae
ubuntu_2404_update_messae398×176 21.2 KB

The machine is not too new and not too old: Asus x670E mb, Nvidia 4090 graphics card, and 570 drivers. I should say I ran many months of numerical work on the 22.04 machine and graphics card with KDE with no problems. It is strange that the identical problem exists on the same machine for two different ubuntu and KDE versions. The problems started when 22.04 was updated and the notice in the image appeared.

I have only seen one mention of the upgrade notice in the form of a question, but no answers. This is odd because support for 22.04 goes on for another couple years.

Also, KDE Neon would flat out not run. I had to completely reinstall Ubuntu 22.04 to get out of that mess. The few posts on the subject indicated that Neon required snap for various reasons.

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Clay’s advice above is the best approach here - but just to add, Ubuntu flavors, and the packages maintained by those flavor teams, have different support windows than the main Ubuntu Desktop distribution:

image
image1807×918 126 KB

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Ubuntu proper does have the 5-year lifespan, or longer.

The Ubuntu ‘flavors’ only have three years of support, but this is a gray area.

The three years is only on the desktop side, So for Kubuntu, that means Plasma won’t see any sort of security support, but the actual Ubuntu OS under the desktop GUI still does.
To be honest, 22.04 hasn’t seen any Plasma related updates of any sort since late 2022 anyway, as far as I can tell, and any updates you have in 22.04 will be completely unrelated to KDE.

If you are OK running the old plasma version, there is no real need to upgrade, considering the use case you seem to have.

But you will need to dig in a little to see what is actually happening. Your reported symptoms don’t necessarily indicate a problem with KDE. A memory leak in something, not enough ram, maybe causing you to hit swap file usage. Look at a system monitor in Konsole to see what may be going on, what might be hogging the CPU or memory. Open that slowly loading app from the terminal and see if it is complaining about something. The fact that you see the same symptoms in 24.04 (assuming a clean install) make me want to look at resource usage as well as any third party repos added for softwasre or drivers – PPAs, for example.

You can disable that release-upgrade prompt in the Software Sources tool found in Discover’s settings area, to at least get rid of the nag.

Those few posts are dead wrong. Neon does have snap installed, but in no way requires it. It is available, same as flatpak, but nothing requires it at all - they even replaced the Firefox snap with Mozilla’s deb repo.

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@claydoh you have the removal of snap exact. Purge snap apps and then snap itself. Install the apt scripts to prevent snap from being reinstalled with updates. Install the mozilla ppa and then install firefox, and then KDE minimal desktop.
Thank you for how to remove the notice.
But this does not explain the sudden emergence of a problem in 22.04 and then the identical problem in 24.04.

I am not sure where (what logs etc.) to look for errors. I would sure appreciate any help in this.

I get the impression from you and @johnandmeg that I should move to plasma 6, which I assume is Neon. This is somewhat daunting given my previous experience with it.

QUESTION 1: Will an installation of the plasma 6 flavors (without snap) automatically be updated with the standard 24.04 updates?

QUESTION 2: If so, might you have a suggestion for the KDE version (flavor) to install a version of plasma 6 that is closest to KDE minimal desktop? And hopefully a guide for 24.04 that shows how to do it?

UPDATE: With the last upate, the 1 to 3 minute delay with the launcth of Kate has disappeared. However the 1-3 min delay with the appearance of the menu bar and the launch of Krusader remains.

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ANOTHER UPDATE: After booting and waiting for the menu bar to appear, the first click the Krusader icon launches it instantly. However, after closing that instance, any subsequent attempts to launch Krusader incur the 1-3 minute delay. This behavior repeats with each boot.

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No. The only way to have Plasma 6 on Ubuntu 24.04 is to use KDE neon. For Ubuntu proper, you would need the current non-LTS Kubuntu 25.04.
Remember, Kubuntu is Ubuntu’s KDE ‘spin.’

First, define minimal.
Kubuntu has a Minimal option in its installer. Basic Plasma and Firefox. No office suite, games, etc. Pretty much the same as installing the meta-package
kde-plasma-desktop that I assume you are using to install KDE in your Ubuntu install (Kubuntu Plasma packaging, actually.)

Yes, you would still need to remove and replace the FF snap. It would get you to where you are now, minus having Gnome installed, with all the things it can run at startup and in the background, so an even more minimal install than what you are using now.

Are kate, krusader, and your ‘menu bar’ (please specify what this is, to make sure we are all discussing the same thing) the only things that are slow? Again, for applications, try opening them using a terminal and look for warnings and errors.

Open a system monitor and look for spikes in ram and cpu usage when opening these slow items.

What are your hardware specs?
Do you have any PPAs in use, or other third-party repos added (other than Firefox)?

Boot a live USB of KDE neon or Kubuntu 25.04 (or Fedora, Manjaro, etc) to test things out in Plasma 6, at least partially, and to see how that looks and feels.

There is something unique about your installation and setup, so having solid information that hopefully gives clues as to what is happening is needed. Else, we are just playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I do think this problem leans towards being distro-specific, which does limit the number of eyes with experience, possibly even more so throwing Gnome services into the mix. So more info is needed.

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I can and will test a non LTS version of Ubuntu. However a non-LTS version is not something I can work with.

NEW DISCOVERY
I installed LibreOffice and until I rebooted the Krusader 1-3 freeze seemed to disappear. It came back upon reboot. The 1-3 menu bar appearance delay at reboot is still there.

Also - In making the image below I tried to move the Krusader focus to another network drive, there was a long delay before it switched. This is repeatable.

On a hunch I tried the Open Files dialog in Kate - The same window freeze occurs every time.

So the KDE problems appeared in 22.04 after an update at about the same time as non-support notice. The same KDE problems occur in 24.04 with an almost identical install.

I am going to guess that the same 1-3 minute delay in the KDE menu bar appearing is due to the same problem.

But I do not know where to go from here.

Here are the system specs, the problems are shown in the image below.

Here are the system specs:
Operating System: Ubuntu 24.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.12
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.115.0
Qt Version: 5.15.13
Kernel Version: 6.11.0-24-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 32 × AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Processor
Memory: 125.4 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: ASUS

image
image590×877 111 KB

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For what it’s worth, when I used Ubuntu 24.04 with an NVIDIA card, the X11 session had many such issues with programs starting (and this was in the default GNOME setup), while with libnvidia-egl-wayland1 installed, the Wayland session generally worked well.

It looks like there are several uncommon combinations of components going on here, between Plasma on top of GNOME-based Ubuntu Desktop and several PPAs in use. As Clay mentioned, if you’re looking for a good KDE Plasma experience on an Ubuntu base, using the Kubuntu installer is the best way to go.

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I believe I found the source of the problem.
With that last update that appeared to cause the problem, it did, but not in a manner I might have expected.

What appears to have happened was that the update started this computer system and the other 22.04 systems connected to a KM switch I use to switch keyboard and mouse between computers, to continuously spam the following in the dmesg error log:

usb usb6-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
usb usb6-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
usb usb6-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
...

Mind you, the keyboard and mouse never showed any problems, lag, or anything with or without the KM switch. At this point I cannot rule out the possibility that this was an existing problem, and that update simply included a faster routine for spamming the dmesg.

There seems to be something in the file directory access libraries used by KDE that is affected by the dmesg spamming sufficiently to cause the freezes.

Removal of the KM switch stopped the spamming of that dmesg. The 1-3 minute freezes of the KDE menu bar freezing, the Krusader launch, and the Kate Open File dialog also disappeared.

@claydoh and @johnandmeg, thanks for the help, and the process of elimination. I hope this helps someone that runs into the same problem.

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