Background services removed in Plasma 6.1?
I have them visible in my most frequently used pages, but I can’t open them. They are not available in the search engine in the system settings either.
Correct, they are hidden. It’s still possible to open it with kcmshell6 kcm_kded though.
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Thanks. Why were they hidden?
It could have been marked somehow, e.g. for advanced users, think before turning off, etc.
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Because they were causing users to turn off required services that ended up shooting themselves in the foot, there’s no reason to turn them off yourself
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I see. Of course, you need to know what is turned off. I turn off what I don’t need and the system uses less memory.
Thanks for the command
Is there a way to unhide it?
I often disable many of them to save memory, specially on VM installs
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No, like I said run the command or search for it to open it again.
Run in console and pin them to taskbar 
Just created a script to launch it 
But on new installs it is an extra step…
@redstrate if one believes this change could be further considered, the way to do it is to open a bug on the bug tracker?
I know this is not a bug, but a design decision. I am asking in the regard to known about the best place to bring this to discuss with maintainers.
The Bluetooth service, in particular, is kind of “aggressive” on systems that don’t have a Bluetooth card. Aggressive in the sense that it keeps being triggered periodically. I can’t tell if applications checking for Bluetooth ends up triggering the service, e.g. KDE Connect, but disabling it saves many CPU spikes on such systems. Specially on older desktop systems.
The Keyboard Daemon one is also useful to be disabled on systems that use an alternative keyboard layout. For example, I use a Brazilian Portuguese locale, but have a US keyboard. Often, from time to time, if the service is enabled, the keyboard layout changes to ABNT2 layout (default for Brazilian Portuguese) even if there is just one layout installed. More annoying is when the switch layouts shortcut is activated out of nowhere. Having this service disabled saves many hours of getting work done.
I also disable KScreen2 service for multiple screens on X11, and have a XrandR script to autostart and fix the screen layout. After moving to this setup, I stopped having many of the bugs people usually report with multiple screens.
These are just some of the ones I disable to improve workflow and not worry about unexpected changes. I usually also disable some others such as: Accent Color, Night Color, Automounter, Remote URL, SMB watcher, Thunderbird, Touchpad and Wacom, as I have no need for those on my desktop and boot times are much improved with those enabled. The Accent Color one used to be kind of “aggressive” in its early days, but it seems to be fixed.
EDIT: on older systems, KDE is pretty much usable when most of those uneeded services, regarding these systems capabilities, are disabled.
I understand the path of making it harder to avoid less knowledgeable users to tinkering with those and reduce false positives on the bug tracker.
But maybe adding an alert box, or requiring some sort of extra confirmation step, could be a middle-ground that embraces those of us that need ease of access to this feature.
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I don’t think we’re going to change our minds about this, we shouldn’t be advertising break-my-system settings like this. Again, if you’re already using these settings nothing has really changed (only the visibility of the KCM) so I don’t know why you’re saying like we completely removed it. Feel free to open a bug on bugs.kde.org, but don’t be surprised if it gets closed.
Could the “break-my-system” ones be hidden but keep the “fix-my-system” ones available for ease of reach?
On this logic, most others KCM could be hidden, specially the font DPI settings which I often see in many posts around here, and ask the users to run them from CLI instead.
The grip is not on stable systems. But it becomes difficult to advocate for new users to adopt KDE, as I’ve been doing for many years, if getting it configured to a reliable state gets harder.
That’s where I agree with you, and in 6.x even that setting is hidden (but only in the Wayland session)
The chameleon service re-enables after a system restart. Is this a mistake?
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Imho the correct approach is to have a switch (something like “advanced settings” with a disclaimer) to unhide the dangerous settings.
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Exactly.
I talked to Nate. The services will probably not return to the settings.
It would be good if this command stayed forever
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An easier way to show this KCM is just to invoke KRunner / Plasma Search and type “background” and you’ll see Background Services.
In Plasma 6.1?
I turned off Krunner because I don’t need it and don’t use it.
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It will show up on kickoff too. Otherwise, you can run the CLI command provided on a previous command, and even create a desktop file for it.
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Kameleon?
That is pushing the bounds of “required”.
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Do I really need to explain why this response isn’t necessary, it’s hurtful to the contributor of the feature, and it’s just plain unproductive? Either way, the discussion here is complete and specifics can be discussed in other threads.
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