Copy paste problem - works every other time

Support Kde Plasma
#1

Has someone experienced some copy/paste problem after last upgrade?

Using Manjaro KDE with Wayland.

Mostly using Vivaldi and VSCode and it drives me crazy.
Copy/paste works every other time 90% of the time.
Cut behaves the same as copy - broken.

Steps:

  • copy stringA (it does not matter if I use Ctrl+C or right click Copy)
  • pastes : stringA
  • copy stringB
  • pastes : stringA <----- BUG - it should be stringB
  • copy again stringB
  • pastes : stringB

UPDATE: Clicking/pressing Copy multiple times like a madman does not solve the problem anymore.
It must be and odd number of clicks or key-presses.

copy 1 ## fails
copy 2 ## ok
copy 3 ## fails again - like it populates clipboard with an invalid value

Is this somehow linked to Electron or Wine (Ubuntu users have problems with Wine copy/paste) or something?

Note: copy/paste works OK in Kate.

OS/DE/kernel versions 
 ██████████████████  ████████     
 ██████████████████  ████████     OS: Manjaro 20.2 Nibia
 ██████████████████  ████████     Kernel: x86_64 Linux 5.9.3-1-MANJARO
 ██████████████████  ████████     Uptime: 6m
 ████████             ████████     Packages: 1521
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Shell: fish 3.1.2
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Resolution: 2560x2160
 ████████  ████████  ████████     DE: KDE 5.75.0 / Plasma 5.20.2
 ████████  ████████  ████████     WM: KWin
 ████████  ████████  ████████     GTK Theme: Breath [GTK2/3]
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Icon Theme: breath2
 ████████  ████████  ████████
[Stable Update] 2020-11-18 - Kernels, Plasma5, Frameworks, Thunderbird, Firefox, Mesa
LibreOffice Calc paste inserts text twice
#2

I’ve experienced the same lately. Although I’m usinga Wayland session, so just thought it was another wayland quirk.

#3

I am using Wayland also.
A colleague uses Gnome and has the same problem but only inside Wine apps.

This drives me crazy.
In which apps are you experiencing this?
Have you tried native DE apps? (e.g. Kate in my KDE setup)

Tried wine-git from AUR but same problem again (hopped it was wine related bug that affected global clipboard).

#4

Mainly experienced from GTK apps (like firefox) and some times with Kate.

#5

Another me too. Manjaro Gnome, and yes, Wayland.
Mostly I notice this when using Cherrytree. Often restarting Cherrytree seems to fix the glitch, but not always. Noticed in in other apps too but less frequently.

edit to add: I also use Clipit cliboard manager.

#6

Been having this issue since last pamac update - so for 4 days now.
Every time I CTPL+c something, I have to do it at least 2 times.
I think it is everywhere… terminal, vscode, firefox, slack.
I use default whatever the clipboard is, default terminal.

Wayland, KDE plasma:
plasma-desktop 5.20.2-1
plasma-framework 5.75.0-1
plasma-wayland-session 5.20.2-1
kwayland 5.75.0-1
wayland 1.18.0-2

journalctl has these kinds of lines appearing intermittently:
xdg-desktop-portal-kde[72040]: xdp-kde-background: GetAppState called: no parameters
but they do not appear when “copy” fails. Just every 30s this line is logged (probably not related?).

Utterly ANNOYING.

Just noticed that in firefox copy link location selected via mouse right click failed also on 1st try. On 2nd try it worked.
That indicates that this is a system wide bug.
Somehow any “copy” command might get lost. System behaves as if “copy” was done, but nothing appears in clipboard. Maybe some kinda race condition

I think next installation is back to Windows10 for me. WSL2 makes it into a mostly working OS again.

On Arch with i3wm I never had crap like this, but many small things didn’t work coz I couldn’t spend 1 year to figure some obscure configurations.
On Manjaro everything just worked (even full disk encryption out-of-the-box!) - except any update is a potential nightmare; this time broken copy-paste.

Oh man… Should there be a bug report done to some place?

#7

Worst thing about this is CTRL+x, aka “cut”.
Line/text disappears as if “cut” happened ok, but then “paste” doesn’t contain what was cut. Paste contains the previous thing on clipboard. “cut” content is completely lost.

1 Like
#8

I’ve seen this ‘every other’ copy working behavior but what I mostly experience is different.
Basically copy stops working in a particular app. Mostly cherrytree, but just happened in tilix too.

Workaround is restarting the problem app.

It’s definitely the copy part of copy-paste that is the issue, content just never reaches clipboard.

#9

FFS… any updates anyone?

By now I’ve become accustomed to repeatedly smashing CTRL+c , but not having fun with it.
I’m considering taking a backup of my data and doing a full reinstall - can’t stop working though, so not sure when I’d find time for such an amazing endeavor.
Feels like back in Win95 days; have to be prepared to format harddisk at any time :smile:

#10

Another thing.
Clicking/pressing Copy multiple times like a madman does not solve the problem anymore.
It must be and odd number of clicks or key-presses.

copy 1 ## fails
copy 2 ## ok
copy 3 ## fails again - like it populates clipboard with an invalid value

P.S. Latest update from 2020-11-18 does not solve anything.

#11

I have experienced something like that also.
Hammering on copy results in empty paste.

But I get that intermittently. I cannot reproduce it now for example. Tried 3, 5, 7. Tried with different speeds also. Could not get it to happen.
Maybe 1 in 40 cases I get an empty buffer after copy hammering.

#12

I’m having the same problem in Archlinux, KDE + Wayland

#13

Trying live ISO 20.1.2 (Mikah) and copy works like it should (X11 + KDE).
At this point I think I will be making a fresh install probably (last 2 rolling updates did not solve this).

It is probably one bad package or config but I can’t figure out which.
If it is a config problem then a clean account should help - empty home with default configs. Will try this too before reinstall.

  • UPDATE: new account with default .config - same problem

UPDATE: I installed again from stratch. X11 works now OK (before I was forced to use wayland session - KDE + X11 did not work on my machine at all - could not get past the login screen)

This copy/paste problem is probably something specific to KDE + Wayland combination.

UPDATE: A friend has the same problem on Ubuntu 19 & 20 (Gnome+X11).

#14

can somebody having copy paste issues with KDE (in some applications) have a look at my problems with LibreOffice Calc?

Is this the same / a related issue? The descriptions here sound a bit different than what I experience but I’m not too sure.