At SDDM when selecting and starting KDE Plasma a small dialog box popup titled Dr Konqi: KDE Connect has closed unexpectedly displays. It seems to display often too and the instances crash into the system-tray. Example, attempting to play a music video with VLC. KDE Connect warning of crash pops up and the bug report never succeeds in completing (wheel spins and spins). A crashed instance is then left in system-tray.
Just wondering if this is typical behavior? Is there something I can look into more deeply on how to possibly resolve this?
AlmaLinux’s KDE Connect may be way too old - there’s a fair number of crash reports on bugzilla, for issues that have been fixed years ago, but AlmaLinux and its colleagues insist on using a version that’s been unsupported by KDE for almost two years now.
@cwo Good to hear your message and insight. I was able to ask IRC Alma Linux channel about this (after message here). I was told it is not an Alma Linux thing. It is a EPEL thing. I was given two links and the second being important information for filing a bug report. So Alma Linux 9.7 falls into the epel9 version.
Which component of KDE is KDE Connect named?
I do not know what filing a report will actually bring but it is worth a try? If you have any further thoughts please do share.
Edit: I see now that it leads to Red Hat Bugzilla and I have no account and believe I must pay to file a bug. I’ll look a bit more into it. I have not filed a bug report with Red Hat nor Fedora before.
You can find some unfortunate information in the first link that you posted:
EPEL 9 KDE Plasma Desktop is going to stay at the releases that they currently are at. We will backport major security fixes. Bugs and bugfixes will be best effort. But we will not do any across the board updates.
This is due to the older libraries in RHEL 9. We’ve hit the limit that the newer KDE versions can run on the older libraries.
AlmaLinux and its colleagues are based on RHEL 9 - that’s there main reason to exist, maintaining compatibility with RHEL as much as possible. RHEL will often not update software, including important development libraries, to newer versions within one release. This is because the new versions may have changed behavior and incompatibilites. As I understand it, EPEL is generally a bit more liberal with updates, but there is a limit - EPEL can’t replace base packages, and the versions available are too old to support the new versions of KDE apps.
Your options are:
Upgrade AlmaLinux to a newer version – 10.1 should have much more recent KDE software
Switch to a distribution that updates its software more frequently, if you don’t need RHEL compatibility
Compile your own KDE Connect and the libraries and programs it requires. This may be a bit challenging, as KDE Connect is a service that needs to integrate with many other things
Uninstall KDE Connect - this way you of course can’t use it, but at least it can’t crash.
This is a helpful and clear explanation of the situation. I obviously should have read the first webpage of the two more thoroughly.
I was looking for an OS that would have long term support for a non technical family member. For use on a machine that does not have the avx2 cpu flag (it’s Ivy Bridge) so cannot use Alma Linux 10.1. It looks like Mint 22.xx may be the best solution but I do not really want to use Mint.
