Migration to Plasma 6

Brainstorm
1

Hi,

I am a MocaccinoOS user, a Gentoo binary distribution and the Sabayon Linux continuaiton.
I am a power user generally speaking, working on kind of an unrecommended system configuration listed here:

Operating System: MocaccinoOS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.5.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.6.51-mocaccino (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 16 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11700K @ 3.60GHz
Memory: 61.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: ASUS

Well, not a gamer and Nvidia was acceptable so far in Plasma 5.

I’ve just moved to Plasma 6. Besides some little things didn’t work as I liked under Plasma 5, I am really pleased by it, it was smooth and nice and customizable as I have needed.

Now, meeting Plasma 6 on a daily basis, although expecting issues, I was kind of hit by lacking some features I have used a long time. Some may be intentional, some may be bugs, I don’t know, I won’t assess here the components that made my life hard, I am not that familiar with Plasma at that level.

I must say, even though I may be spoiled to complain here about these things, those are important to me and I appreciate all the effort of the developers that made generally Plasma available to us. Think of me as an user providing some feedback, even though may sound harsh sometimes, it is not intended.

Notice I have upgraded to Plasma 6, meaning did not install it from scratch.
Also, various apps were not ported to QT&KF 6, so must deal with them as they are. I did it on three computers, always one had some issue, but not the same computer every time, but rather randomly.

So, on one of my three computers my first boot ended up in a default SDDM theme, although Breeze was set and I have expected it to be upgraded too.
No problem, I’ve set Breeze back, including the image.

On one of the computers also got a black screen and had to reboot in order to access the DE again.

Then, started to assess the broken applets. On two of the computers, I’ve got the nice messages telling me some component is not supported anymore, but on one just red close buttons. Again, nothing problematic, I’ve removed them everywhere and looked for replacements.

I also use X11 instead of Wayland for the session restore feature. This is really important to me, to restore 5 dolphin instances with their setup (various split panels and paths). This is a feature in discussion for Wayland now and I put some emphasis on this because I think, regardless the fancy features of the UI, some functionalities are dead important to some users.
Those should be taken care of first, IMO.
However, this worked so far under Plasma 6 with X11.

I have had some situation in the past that cooked my plastic parts of the wires, :slight_smile:, so I’ve ended up having some widgets to show me the load, fan speeds, temperatures, etc…, even though I have a large gaming case with 7 fans and many openings now. I use VMs sometimes & containers, so I need to keep an eye on the memory and CPU laods too.
This being said, I have many applets on the desktop. Additionally to those, I have weather widgets to observe the forecasts and the head waves that were heavy in the last three years.

So, in order to be comfortable, I need some applets:

  • weather widgets: my choice were the Plasma standard Weather Report and Weather Widget (v1 or v2) . The latter is very useful to know the heat graphs and current temperature, as the other one does never show the current (bug?).
  • my basic shortcuts I use everyday with the Tiled Quicklaunch.

This one is great, but does not work on 6, so what should I do?
I’ve tried to setup the standard Quicklaunch.

Took a lot to do it just because I could not drag and drop app shortcuts from the Plasma menu anymore! So had to setup one by one by adding some launchers to the panel and drag them on the Quicklaunch, but that did not respect a clear order or went in some position I did not want to have. Also, now there are some document-like icons for adding launchers and can’t get rid of them. They are also uneven. It is not comfortable to display like that, with piles of icons with text, but will do for now.

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Here I don’t get why the apps can’t be dragged anymore. This decision is confusing me and around all that animation fuss for customizing the desktop - I imagine the effort to implement it - does not explain why should not be able to drag some icons here and there anymore.

Also, the panels context menus look like having a glass window to the right.

On the desktop, in the left-upper corner there is a little thing, like a small button without text, I can’t tell when this was created and could not remove either… Could be a panel of 3 pixels width?

Going to setup some panels, well, that got me in another trouble.

Sometimes, if I set the panel to auto-hide, yakuake opens from the middle of the screen.
Floating panels made my widgets go around, move and jump in undesired places. Not nice.
Also, it is not handy to set the panels size too. The handlers do not appear always, must change alignment in order to use those handlers, then switch back to a different alignment and set them eventually.

So, I ended up with an ugly setup with regard to the launchers I have.

On the other hand, there are plenty of apps not migrating to Plasma 6 or QT&KF 6, so they paint odd. I think those fallback to defaults.

Also, something changed with regard to DPIs or fonts. Everything is smaller (my monitor is 2K, 2560x1440). Well, almost. Some apps are still as before, but most of them look pretty bloated, including the Applications Menu, which is a standard applet, and, btw improved as much faster than before. This is not related to the scale setting, I would not use that anyway because it makes the text too big in GTK/Gnome apps such as Firefox.

Regarding the effects, they are fragmented now. Windows minimization/restore animations sometimes go to the left, although there is one task manager at the bottom. Nvidia drivers? Worked far more better on 5. Also, KWin crashes like crazy and I lose control over the desktop with the mouse.

My thoughts are now that it was nice to have some revamp of the desktop, also the editing could become acceptable, but now it is a pain, it blows when not expected and makes thing hard to manage sometimes, even though adding some app launcher is not an operation to do so often.

My overall feeling is that Plasma decayed a bit and I am so sorry to see that.
The widgets seem to be broken in many ways since long time,for instance not all the sensors work, although are accessible to them, not to say about losing the very good and consistent ones.

I need to use it in comfort and some features must be consistent, available and work fluently. All the floating things here are nice, but must be able to do basic things like managing application launchers easily and make them accessible. The customizability is the power of Plasma. And, yes, the fun too!

I am sorry if I have upset you, but at some point some feedback can help improve things (I hope).

Thank you!

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weather widgets: my choice were the Plasma standard Weather Report and Weather Widget (v1 or v2) . The latter is very useful to know the heat graphs and current temperature, as the other one does never show the current (bug?).

If you’re talking about displaying the current temperature in the panel using the default weather applet (Weather Report), that’s a limitation of the data provider that you are using. It often seems to suggest Wetter.de which does not provide current temperature, only forecasts. Use a different provider that has current temperature support, and it should work.

I’ve tried to setup the standard Quicklaunch.

I think most people now use apps pinned to the task manager to have launchers, or at most place regular launchers on the panel. The quicklaunch widget does some weird things (and when I was playing around with it, I admit I didn’t completely get how it works), and does not seem to be widely used.

(If you drag launchers to the panel, you can move and edit them in panel edit mode; just right-click the panel and “Show Panel Configuration”; if they’re pinned to the task manager, or just dragged there, you can just drag them around or edit them directly.)

Also, the panels context menus look like having a glass window to the right.

It’s not quite clear to me what you mean. If it’s about panel transparency, you can configure that in the panel configuration, and for general Plasma transparency there’s an option in the settings for the Plasma theme.

Plasma has a lot of features, and some of them end up being used by very few people because it’s something that people usually don’t need or achieve in different ways. So sometimes it can happen that some rarely-used widget breaks and no one notices.

Similarly, development has mostly moved to Wayland, and while people still care about not breaking things for X11 users, rare combinations there get even less testing as most developers and users are on Wayland now and so things don’t get noticed, or only with a large delay.

In any case, giant complaint threads don’t really help and are not actionable. I recommend posting specific support requests for issues that you encounter, or file specific bug reports if it turns out they are connected to flaws in Plasma. That makes them actionable for developers, and will often lead to them getting fixed quickly.

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I’ll answer one by one to be able to add the images (I am limited to one per post).

The weather widgets:

  1. Weather Report widget. If the current service is not complete, why not moving to some other default service?
    How would I set another service on the widget? Where is that option?
  2. Weather Widget (v1 or v2). Look at the details of this widget:

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It provides info in the tray too, including the temperature!

I am weather sensitive since 29 years old, I need to know how hot it may be and when and the atmospheric pressure from a pro service.

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The Tiled Quicklaunch. I use something that I need and how I need, my ergonomy requires that.
First, I’ve used the drawers (remember them?).
Such feature worth keeping - a launcher to expand on hover that hosts icons.
I have loved the look of the Latte Dock - this is also gone. Now, there is the Crystal Dock. All are interesting, but I’d like to have a stack of items to launch.
Anyway, I have tamed the Quicklaunch, yet it’s ugly.
After restarting, those document-like items went away. May be a bug related to the moment when it is empty. Should polish it a bit to avoid that and add two features:

  • expand on hover instead of click only
  • add an option to have icons horizontally
    That’s it, it would be perfect and simple.
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Drawing launchers.
There are no drawing launchers on the taskbar panel anymore.
Just because confused users…?
Anyway, can’t drag launchers from the menu at all.
Is this a bug?
If this is a decision, I find this truly disturbing!
Let’s have a game to practice this instead! (Like Solitaire story to educate people use the mouse).
This is a basic feature in any desktop!

I admit, this operation was not as expected, it was a pain to drag and drop the launchers, even now it’s kind of sluggish to move them around when on panels. This should be fixed for usability and avoid people confusion.

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The “glass window”:

image

The thing is possibly due to KWin.

KWin crashes a lot. It is sometimes broken right after the login.
I restart it with:

kwin_x11 --replace '>' /dev/null '2>&1'

There are so many breaks a day!
It manifests by black windows, desktop stalling, losing mouse interaction with the desktop (it moves on the screen only), missing right click and many other annoyances.

For me, using X11 is mandatory for the session restore.
Also Nvidia drivers with Wayland fixes are not yes stable in Gentoo (560 version).
So I must stick for a while with X11.

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Bonus. I have got some leaks that eat up the memory (64 GB) fast.
This happens since I moved to Plasma 6. It happened in the past too when 5 was unstable.

In the end, fragmenting the post in bug or support requests is practical indeed.
Yet, putting all together is an experience that should be assessed as an impact to the user.
One or two little things may keep it usable, but accumulated all these become a concern for the user. Just think how some would be affected.
I know you do that, but still, there may be many reasons to support some “marginal” flows or technologies until the mainstream is stable enough and has enough features.
Plasma is about customizability. Otherwise, would go to other DEs. I know some using simpl,e DEs and are happy with them. IMO, not for Plasma users. Those are more peeky and need complex features.

I hope I won’t have breakages in my workflow too often with 6 until things get more stable.

:hearts:

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Weather Report widget. If the current service is not complete, why not moving to some other default service?

There are multiple providers, but not every provider has every location. The place where I live is covered by two providers and one of them has current temperature, but I have to search under a different spelling. Wetter.com lacks this feature, but does have forecasts for many locations.

(And FWIW, it was downgraded to fallback only for Plasma 6.2 and will only be offered if no other weather provider is available, see applets/weather: Only show wetter.com results as a fallback (!597) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Add-ons · GitLab)

If a specific provider makes data for your location available, and under a license that KDE is legally allowed to use, and that is not supported in the Weather applet please report it on bugs.kde.org.

How would I set another service on the widget? Where is that option?

When you select your location in the widget’s configuration. It shows you every registered provider for that location. (The link above has a screenshot)

Weather Widget

That’s not a KDE provided widget, is it? I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say. You can install this from the KDE store (or from whereever the author made the source available), as long as they released it for Plasma 6.

First, I’ve used the drawers (remember them?).

No I don’t, sorry. Was this a Plasma feature or a third-party widget?

I have loved the look of the Latte Dock - this is also gone.

Latte-dock’s single developer is no longer working on it. An effort to port it is slowly ongoing, but it is very complex software and there are not a lot of people working on it. It’ll be back if more people want to work on it.

Should polish it a bit to avoid that and add two features

Does seem like reasonable suggestions. Please report them here: Bug List

(Be aware though that this is a little-used widget, so it’s not going to be high on developer’s lists for new features, unless someone steps up and takes an interest in working on it.)

There are no drawing launchers on the taskbar panel anymore.
Just because confused users…?

I don’t know what you mean by drawing launchers (and a web search isn’t helping either).

Why do you think that it was removed because of “confused users”?

Anyway, can’t drag launchers from the menu at all.
Is this a bug?

Yes, and it seems to be a highly specific one - I’ve been doing Plasma 6 online support and bug triaging for months now, and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with an issue dragging launchers from the menu, It definitely works for me.

The “glass window”:

This is clearly a bug (and another one I haven’t seen before).

Please report it on bugs.kde.org. It does seem like kwin would be a good place to report it, but it might be a problem elsewhere.

KWin crashes a lot.

Sad to hear this; KWin on 6 has been more stable on me than on 5 so far. But knowing that it crashes is not helpful, to investigate crashes we need backtraces, and they should be reported on bugs.kde.org, not here.

See here for more information on crash reports: Guidelines and HOWTOs/Debugging/How to create useful crash reports - KDE Community Wiki

For me, using X11 is mandatory for the session restore.

This is a very fair point, I miss session restore dearly (even though it didn’t work often enough under X11 either…).

I have got some leaks that eat up the memory (64 GB) fast.

Again not something I have experienced or seen reports on.

One thing after going through your list, it seems that you are using a very large number of third-party addons, and apparently with a rather old configuration. I would recommend trying with a fresh Plasma configuration to see if the same issues happen there as well. Of course, in an ideal world everything would work no matter what, but the number of possible Plasma configurations is likely higher than the number of atoms in the universe, so they cannot all be tested under all circumstances.

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(And FWIW, it was downgraded to fallback only for Plasma 6.2 and will only be offered if no other weather provider is available, see applets/weather: Only show wetter com results as a fallback (!597) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Add-ons · GitLab
If a specific provider makes data for your location available, and under a license that KDE is legally allowed to use, and that is not supported in the Weather applet please report it on bugs kde org.

Great! How would I know the license allows or not a service usage in KDE?
Additionally, I live near a city, wetter com has forecast for my village, but never shows up in the widget. I’ll wait for the new implementation and see how it goes!

Does seem like reasonable suggestions. Please report them here: Bug List

I will.

Why do you think that it was removed because of “confused users”?

From the bug 483469, comment 2 (can’t post links here)

Yes, and it seems to be a highly specific one - I’ve been doing Plasma 6 online support and bug triaging for months now, and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with an issue dragging launchers from the menu, It definitely works for me.

For me they don’t move at all, regardless how I approach this.
Is there some specific new way to do it?

About the crashes, I try to find some info on this before I can file a bug.
Maybe wait for 6.2 to come in Gentoo.
Right now, I have tried to add a widget, but the entire desktop stalled.
I can change the tasks, but nothing on the desktop is accessible to me, including the menu.

Third party of widgets or not, this memory leak was not a problem in the last two years.

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tldr

However, certainly try creating a new user to test out whether your config was clean…

Plasma 6 is best started up vanilla and rebuilt.

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Great! How would I know the license allows or not a service usage in KDE?

The provider will usually have Terms of Service documents available. I can’t tell you the exact legal requirements, but for example the Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin had to be removed from Plasma 6 for legal reasons IIRC.

Additionally, I live near a city, wetter com has forecast for my village, but never shows up in the widget.

It should show up if you click on the widget (and have it set as your location in the widget settings). It will not show up as text in the panel, because that is for current temperature, not forecast temperature.

From the bug 483469, comment 2 (can’t post links here)

That is for the context menu. The difference between “Pin to Task Manager” and “Add to panel” is very unclear; it makes sense that people would choose the second when the first is almost always what people want (for example to not get duplicate entries if the application is open, or so that you can reorder them with drag&drop without needing to go into edit mode). The bug explicitly lists that you can still drag&drop things from the menu to the panel to create a launcher icon if you really need one separate from the task manager.

For me they don’t move at all, regardless how I approach this.
Is there some specific new way to do it?

No, not really - you just open the launcher (it can be the default launcher kickoff, or the popup-menu based kicker, or the full-screen Application Dashboard). Click and drag the item you want, and drop it on the panel.

(If you use Application Dashboard, you’ll need to alt-tab out of the full-screen dashboard, which is admittedly not optimal, but it still works).

If you use a third-party launcher, it will need to implement Drag&Drop. There’s little the Plasma team can do here.

Third party of widgets or not, this memory leak was not a problem in the last two years.

The third party widgets had to be switched to Qt6, so are effectively new versions. These may have introduced new bugs, and the Plasma team can’t fix them (unless it’s something they broke), that’s on the third-party authors of the applets.

You can try running plasmashell in a terminal (use --replace to replace a running instance) to see the error and debug output. Most of these are harmless, but it can give you some information about what exactly is breaking and help you fix things or pinpoint where to report issues.

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Some people could not afford the time to do it.

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It took me 2 minutes to move my ~/home contents to a backup folder, 4 minutes to install Plasma6 upgrade, and then maybe half an hour to copy back the most relevant configurations.

Nobody would refer to themself as a ‘Power User’ and then complain that one hour is not an affordable period for a serious upgrade.

I suggested this after seeing - for many months now - in the forums how many people are having serious issues and spending much more time than this trying to fix bugs in their system.

Notably:

  1. Leave behind all plasma5 themes and widgets.
  2. Delete the cache (rm -rf ~/.cache)

Also, as a general precaution read this guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Configuration_related

I had some further issues - as I had created launchers for my settings modules, so they all required editing for kcmshell6:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Application;
Comment[en_GB]=Launch kcmshell6 settings module
Comment=Launch kcmshell6 settings module
Exec=kcmshell6 kcm_colors
Icon=preferences-desktop-color
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application

Basically the more vanilla your setup, the smoother it should run.

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I am glad to hear how efficient you are!
I know enough about Plasma in order to generate a configuration to build a live ISO. I have an idea about installing on a clean account.
But “vanilla” to me means starting from partitioning, installing the bootloader, a distro and all the needed software beyond the desktop of choice, Plasma. Then I can restore configs (I have scripts for that). This is not something I’d go without true reasons.

I am able to write scripts to be launched from the DE service menus and customize it for my needs. I had to move and rewrite their launchers too.
Did not have to fix that kcmshell6 launcher as you did.

The user home part is not necessarily a clean install because there are their counterparts to take care at system level too.

As a developer myself I have always provided an automated way to migrate those. I see moving to Plasma 6 was a much smoother transition than to 5, yet I deal with things I shouldn’t, like so many crashes and leaks.

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OK, I’m back just to let some feed-back of how it goes.

I’ve had a disk that got 3 bads and I have scanned and marked those. It is large one, I have decided to replace it and got the new one. I have started to move things to the new one using Dolphin.
In the process, I’ve selected many files, about 2 TB, then started copying. I have 64 GB RAM, but OOM-ed pretty fast. I think it’s a bug. If I select about 1TB at once, it’s no problem, the memory is not filled-up, I mean, did not notice to grow (I use a standard widget for that all the time).

OOM is a nasty thing. I wish there was a mechanism similar to other operating systems to ask you to close something before crashes the entire system.

Besides this, no other memory issues.

What I have noticed is that the system seems lighter than with Plasma 5.

I have kept on the desktop the Tiled Quicklaunch even broken, but no breaking occurred.

About Dolphin, at drag and drop on a folder I see a fast folder flipping and it collapses or expands too soon. I end up with this because I wait a little too much due to the uncertainty of the fact it will drop in that folder because it is not that obviously selected (to me, at least). That’s because a more visible highlight occurs right after the items are dropped, but bot while hovering over.

Another issue with Dolphin is that it crashes - or closes unexpectedly, and that is not caught. It simply closes when moving directories or files. If there is some add-on issue, I can’t tell either. There is no stack or something.

KWin crashes keep happening, I’ve learned how to restart it, also happening at startup or shutdown. I try to find the crash info to add some reports.

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2TB is a bit too much, I’d go with rsync for that… run back-in-time maybe.

For drag and drop, I’d start slowly - start with .config for example.

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Not sure what you mean by starting with .config.

1TB worked for me. I have already moved about 15TB like that.
It may be a bug of how much of the files tree can store, but should actually handle or complain.

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I mean I wouldn’t use Dolphin for anything more than moving a few folders or files.

To back up or copy large amounts of data I’d use rsync instead… I recently moved my snapshots backup folder…

doas rsync -avhz --progress /mnt/W2/snapshots* /mnt/T3/
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Well, Dolphin is more capable than that and it’s also described as a file manager. Let’s give it a little credit! It’s truly handy due to services it has and you can implement more (by using shell files).
Its flaws would be the one described and the character/code page naming that may make files not accessible. Gnome Files always worked in this regard, so it seems to be a toolkit limitation.
Rsync is great form any things, but we use a DE so all those operations should work with its visual tools.

BTW, the number of files that worked were around 60000/TB.