Was really frightened as it just sat there on that default program Clipboard of Plasma.
According to the reviews in Discover it has come out as a security and privacy nightmare. This thing puts EVERYTHING copy pasted, to the bottom right corner with a clipboard icon on Plasma desktop!
How is it possible that we can’t even simply uninstall this Clipboard? So now we’re at it: HOW to actually remove it at all?
A clipboard is a basic part of the operating system - if you uninstall it, a lot of things will break.
If I understand correctly, your problem isn’t that you can copy your password and have it in the clipboard - every operating system does that. Your problem is that if you click on the “clipboard icon” in the notification area (system tray), then the clipboard widget pops up and your password is shown.
The solution for that is simple - don’t show the clipboard icon in the system tray:
You can also choose “Always Hidden” which will move the icon from the visible system tray part to the overflow widget - the one you get when you press the up arrow, with the “Status and Notifications” heading: this will still let you access the clipboard manager menu if you want to, but it will be harder to accidentally click it or hover it.
Well thanks, but that is not very intuitive and appears possibly very cumbersome to alot of people who would just like to uninstall the thing.
Why on earth can’t it be made to be uninstalled like everything else, nevermind being decided to be part of the system. This still boggles me. The history entries also cannot be put to zero for precautions either.
If removing this little thing breaks a lot of the system, is it not a design flaw? There is no such problem in say, GNOME and others. Or maybe i just understand Plasma wrong from the get go how it operates.
As I mentioned, a clipboard is a built-in part of the system. You can’t uninstall the clipboard in Windows or Mac, then why should you be able to do that in Plasma? If you could - that would be a serious problem because suddently CTRL+C and CTRL+V would stop working. Users being able to uninstall the clipboard will create a lot more support issues then these kind of issues here for the very few people that really do not want to ever CTRL+C.
I would also claim that this setup is very intuitive - pressing an arrow at the end of a list of things to configure the things in the list should make sense, and it is more or less how it is done on Windows and on Mac (The Windows UI is also almost identical).
Same issue - 0 entries means “no clipboard” and that would be a big problem. You can set it to “1” though, which makes it behave like old operating systems (such as Mac or Windows) that cannot remember more than 1 thing. I personally find the default of “7” to be very limiting so I’ve set it to the maximum size.
I’m pretty sure GNOME also has a clipboard and if you select something and press CTRL+C then you can paste it. GNOME is actually much worse in that than Plasma - it doesn’t have a UI to configure the clipboard at all, and if you want the (very useful) feature of having more than 1 clipboard entry remembered, then you have to install an extension.
Again - it seems like you are railing against a feature that Plasma has that makes it better: having a clipboard manager that lets you see what you copied instead of that being invisible and a mystery (and it also lets you edit the clipboard content before pasting it) and you decided that its a bad feature - well, like everything in Plasma - you can turn it off if you don’t like it.
The Plasma slogan of “Simple by default powerful when needed” is slightly misleading - it is pretty powerful by default, more than a lot of other desktops’ defaults.
Ohh no no no: i mean Clipboard THE APPLICATION! Not removing the function of control c and control v! Now THAT would indeed be bad 
In GNOME and others i can use copy and paste, and the content does not appear anywhere in the taskbar, or an app in a taskbar for all to see if i leave the machine for a while.
That said, there is no need to go to menu’s in GNOME and other desktops to tweak the hell out of settings to make a clipboard contents not show.
The default is that the app Clipboard is right there with an icon; i reckon most users don’t much tweak the default settings and many won’t even understand the existence of that clipboard there, and copy pasting is still very common.
What you are asking for is the exact same thing.
So you think because there is no gui something malicious can no longer access it?
It is obviously in a file or memory somewhere.
Removing the gui tool does nothing in that regard.
Why would this matter in regards to security?
Let me ask you this, can you, as you can on plasma, click one icon and copy the 7:th last thing you ctrl+c:d?
I see this as an amazing feature Gnome does not have.
And I reckon you are among the 0,001% of the users that does NOT want access to it.
If you are scared of security breaches of your ctrl+c I have 2 recommendations.
The saying “the biggest security risk is the user” is not a meme, it is a very accurate truth.
Look, i think we just see this differently. The main point is, that copy pasted stuff shows too conveniently right there on the picture of a clipboard.
I still don’t understand why the actual function of copy pasting would be gone if this Clipboard named APP is removed? This Clipboard thing should made at least invisible for example with a click of a right mouse button on top of that icon on the taskbar.
It is also illogical to put a clear Remove button there with a trashcan in means for user to uninstall this Clipboard - but alas it is impossible clicking that button.
No, you don’t understand as in your comment:
We already explained it, you can not remove it and SHOULD not try to remove it.
Without even checking, I feel pretty confident other applications also uses it as a dependency.
It is, well, not 1 click but 5 to be precise, 6 if you count “apply”.
But I fail to see how a tiny icon can irritate you so much that removing it from your sight is not enough.
Removing the application from the system tray does not change anything other than hiding the functionalities for you.
Sure it COULD be moved from that taskbar or made show 0 history entries. If the copy paste history requires digging from the depths of a filesystem, much better!
I still don’t understand how the function of pressing control + c could not work without this app called Clipboard.
Try uninstalling all your web browsers and click a link you have in a document. It OBVIOUSLY will not work, because you have no browser.
Now switch pressing a link, to you pressing ctrl+c without an application handling what is supposed to happen when you press ctrl+c.
Not sure I can explain it any simpler than that.
Doesn’t disabling it in the Systray settings turn it off?
This doesn’t affect the normal ctrl-c/v actions, and I believe it turns off this plasmashell component.
Of course random folks posting reviews on the internet must all be actual security experts
Klipper has been part of KDE since as along as I can remember, which goes back over two decades to the 1x days, and definitely from KDE 2x. If it were truly a security nightmare, it would not be around as a defualt component.
This topic does come up every now and then over the years, and is understandable, for sure.
Ok so when you press Ctrl-c and ctrl-v what happens is that the thing you have marked gets basically saved to another file in some temporal way. Thats just what happens and in every single Operating System (more or less) for phones, tablets, computers. The clipboard exposes that in a graphical manner.
Every time you copy something, for you to be able to paste it in to another application, like say you copy “Hello KDE friends” from this post, and then open up some word processor like Libreoffice and paste it in there - your operating system has to handle that. Firefox doesn’t understand what Libreoffice is, and vice versa - its your operating system to takes care of that for you.
The number of things it saves - that is set by you in the clipboard settings. You can in Plasma set the exact variables in it.
This is my clipboard settings (which are the bog standard ones)
But the act of saving things, like your password, or “Hello KDE friends” is done in the exact same manner and is more or less universal in all operating systems.
I hope that made it make sense and perhaps ease your worries
EDIT: And finally I think you’ve done ABSOLUTELY right in asking here. I mean you read someone who did a review on an application and what they said, while incorrect, is also worrying. So you went to the source and asked which is goddamn aces. Wish more folks did that! Good on you
It’s not recommended to remove or disable Klipper. Because, X11 at least suffers from an old problem by design, If you try to copy anything from any app then the source app is closed, you will lose the content of what you copied.
This is why most desktops provides another tool to fix those kinds of problems, and KDE offers Klipper as a solution.
I’m not sure, I think mine doesn’t show any password.
In the clipboard I can only see stuff I manually copied with Ctrl+C or equivalent.
Do passwords really go trough the clipboard?
This looks like a Neon packaging error. KDE no longer has a standalone “clipboard” app (“klipper”), and it’s impossible to uninstall the systray applet separately.
If you copy and paste them, then, well…
Not a packaging error; this is the way it’s intended to be, and AFAIK it was this way in Plasma 5 too.
Not for me. I tried with the screenlocker and firefox (gmail). For me this works as expected.
