KDE Plasma 5.26.x Stability Inquiry

I never had issues with 5.25 or 5.26. I run both AMD and Intel systems, All are single monitors, resolutions HD and 4K. All run Breeze with minimal widgets (Digital clock and an extra panel as a launcher dock). Hopefully keeping it simple helps, I’ve sure read some tough threads here about these issues; thankfully they haven’t hit me yet.

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Not really, since there are people who’ve reported problems on fresh, uncustomized installs as well.

But of course, in order to find the cause of a problem, you actually have to look for it, and the KDE developers are not known for spending a lot of time on doing exactly that. :frowning_face:

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Phew, that’s interesting.

For all the time I use KDE (around 1 year) with a customized Breeze theme (some color correction and round-corner icons installed) I have had only these issues:

  • No startup sound (firstly fixed by adding specific .desktop file to the autostart to play it, but then it was fixed by one of the latest updates);
  • Plasma was totally frozen for 3-5 seconds at random moment (it simply happened at any time, so I couldn’t get why; I cannot remember exactly where, but I found topic with a guy who cleared translations in the ~/.config/plasma-localerc and it helped also to me. I use English, Russian and Ukranian and keeping only one of them in translations do no freeze anymore).

So, I feel very lucky now, but with

If I simply ignore Plasma packages to update for now, will it prevent any issues for me in the future or make it even worse?

:eyes:

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 $ neofetch
██████████████████  ████████   fh@tiger 
██████████████████  ████████   -------- 
██████████████████  ████████   OS: Manjaro Linux x86_64 
██████████████████  ████████   Host: 30CY006WGE ThinkStation P330 
████████            ████████   Kernel: 6.0.8-1-MANJARO 
████████  ████████  ████████   Uptime: 9 hours, 26 mins 
████████  ████████  ████████   Packages: 1207 (pacman) 
████████  ████████  ████████   Shell: bash 5.1.16 
████████  ████████  ████████   Resolution: 5120x1440 
████████  ████████  ████████   DE: Plasma 5.26.3 
████████  ████████  ████████   WM: kwin 
████████  ████████  ████████   Theme: [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3] 
████████  ████████  ████████   Icons: breeze-dark [Plasma], breeze-dark [GTK2/3] 
████████  ████████  ████████   Terminal: konsole 
                               CPU: Intel i9-9900K (16) @ 3.600GHz 
                               GPU: Intel CoffeeLake-S GT2 [UHD Graphics 630] 
                               GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Pro WX 7100 
                               Memory: 24834MiB / 64143MiB
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[demo@manjaro ~]$ neofetch
██████████████████  ████████   demo@manjaro 
██████████████████  ████████   ------------ 
██████████████████  ████████   OS: Manjaro Linux x86_64 
██████████████████  ████████   Host: HP Spectre x360 Convertible 15-df1xxx 
████████            ████████   Kernel: 6.0.8-1-MANJARO 
████████  ████████  ████████   Uptime: 4 hours, 49 mins 
████████  ████████  ████████   Packages: 1617 (pacman), 6 (flatpak) 
████████  ████████  ████████   Shell: bash 5.1.16 
████████  ████████  ████████   Resolution: 3840x2160 
████████  ████████  ████████   DE: Plasma 5.26.3 
████████  ████████  ████████   WM: KWin 
████████  ████████  ████████   WM Theme: McMojave-light 
████████  ████████  ████████   Theme: McMojaveLight [Plasma], Flat-Remix-GTK-Blue-Light [GTK2/3] 
████████  ████████  ████████   Icons: BigSur [Plasma], BigSur [GTK2/3] 
                               Terminal: konsole 
                               Terminal Font: Hack 11 
                               CPU: Intel i7-10510U (8) @ 4.900GHz 
                               GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX250 
                               GPU: Intel CometLake-U GT2 [UHD Graphics] 
                               Memory: 3652MiB / 15631MiB

I don’t think there’s any point in ignoring the plasma package group when you’re already on 5.26.2, because 5.26.3 is just around the corner. The advice to ignore those packages was for those on 5.24.6 who didn’t want to upgrade to 5.25.5.

There is however — at least for now still — the option of switching to Plasma 5.24.7, which is the current LTS version. Assuming that the reader of this post is already on Plasma 5.26.x now, here’s how to do it… :arrow_down:


First, make a complete backup of your system — don’t skip this step!

Next, get the file plasma-5.24.7-LTS.zip from the link below :arrow_down: — you only need that one file.


Open up a terminal window and elevate your privileges to root… :arrow_down:

su -

… or, for those of you who’ve disabled the root account, … :arrow_down:

sudo su -

Next, as root, issue these following commands… :arrow_down:

mkdir /var/cache/pacman/plasma-lts
cd /var/cache/pacman/plasma-lts
mv /home/your-username-here/Downloads/plasma-5.24.7-LTS.zip ./
unzip plasma-5.24.7-LTS.zip
repo-add plasma-lts.db.tar.xz *.zst
rm -f plasma-5.24.7-LTS.zip
cp /etc/pacman.conf /etc/pacman.conf.bak

Next, you’re going to have to edit /etc/pacman.conf. You can do this by way of a console-based editor like nano, vim, emacs or whichever one you prefer — I’m assuming you know how to save a file and exit the editor — or, considering that you’re already working in Plasma now, you can use Kate. You don’t need to be root for that, given that Kate is polkit-aware and will prompt you for a password when trying to save a file in a directory that’s only writable to the root account.

So… :arrow_down:

nano /etc/pacman.conf

… or just open the file in Kate as your regular user account.

Now, look for the section where the repos are being defined, and add your own local repo between the [core] section and the [extra] section… :arrow_down:

[core]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

[plasma-lts]                                # ← this is the new section to add
Server=file:///var/cache/pacman/plasma-lts  # ← this is the new section to add
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll                # ← this is the new section to add

[extra]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

[community]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Save the file — if you’re not familiar with nano, press Ctrl+O followed by Enter and then exit the editor with Ctrl+X.

Next, log out of Plasma completely — you have to be looking at the SDDM login screen — and switch to a tty with Ctrl+Alt+F2. Log in as yourself and issue the following command to update your system while also allowing the downgrade of Plasma from 5.26.x to 5.24.x LTS… :arrow_down:

sudo pacman -Syuu

After this step, it is not strictly necessary to reboot, but it might be a good idea nevertheless. :arrow_down:

sudo systemctl reboot

Upon the reboot, you should now be logging into Plasma 5.24.7. However, bear in mind that this will probably lead to issues in the very foreseeable future due to updates to qt5 and/or frameworks, unless someone is willing to take it upon themselves to rebuild all of the Plasma 5.24.7 packages against these newer qt5 and frameworks packages and make them available to the community, and to follow suite if/when KDE releases another LTS update, which would then be Plasma 5.24.8.

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I cheated when I opted for 5.24.7. I used Krusader in root. :slight_smile:

No hurry to update.

3 Likes

Welp. So far, so good. I feel like the exception to the rule, though.

But, I will keep an eye on it.

:man_shrugging:

1 Like

Hello,

I am not sure it’s KDE related. Last week I installed Manjaro KDE stable on my old acer aspire P3 and immediately upgraded to plasma 5.26. The desktop was totally unstable with a lot of freezing, the processor cooling fan got crazy. I didn’t check anything as I thought something went wrong during the update. So I decided to download the kde-unstable testing builds and install this one. But I already got the same issues in the live environment and I even didn’t manage to install it because calamares froze the whole time.
So I decided to install arch linux and see if it had the same problems. But after quiet some time, I have plasma 5.26.2 running on the acer aspire p3 without freezing and I don’t even notice there is a fan inside. OK, I have other issues, it’s not easy to get a streamlined arch build with the skills I have, and the KDE documentation isn’t also very helpfull.

Therefore I want to congratulate the manjaro team to build those nice, complete and finished editions. It surely takes a lot of time to make and maintain them!

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If Arch doesn’t have any problems with Plasma 5.26.x while Manjaro does, then there must be something wrong with the way those packages are built — or perhaps what they are built against — by the Manjaro team. :thinking:

Pinging @philm

They are same packages.

pacman -Sg plasma | cut -d' ' -f2 | pacman -Si - | grep Packager

Seems plausible, but meanwhile, I’ve had zero problems on Manjaro with either of the three latest versions, 5.24, 5.25 and 5.26 on my Lenovo Legion 5 with Intel/Nvidia.
Edit: Maybe worth mentioning that I’m on X11.

I did a very basic arch install just for testing. I have plasma-wayland running without bells and whistles and installed acpi. Then some applications I need.
Because manjaro has a lot of hardware to support, it’s possible there is some kind of configuration that misbehaves in relation with some hardware.

In fact I had to start from a base manjaro install in stead off arch linux.

Hardware has nothing to do with it. Manjaro doesn’t support anything more than arch does.

So on latest Plasma (on Testing branch), I still have the issue when waking up the computer with dual monitors where my primary monitor wouldn’t go back up and the second one would only show a black screen with mouse cursor (it can move it is not frozen but I can basically do nothing from there). After reboot the primary monitor is still not working but I can use the second monitor to open Nvidia panel and set up monitors properly.

Related issue Primary screen not working after wake from sleep (only KDE 5.26)

I think I will go back to Plasma LTS for now as this one issue is a deal breaker for me.

Try creating newuser first.

Jumping the gun here a bit, maybe, but for info, after the latest update to 5.26.3 no hitches…everything seems to be A-OK(stable?) after an equally uneventful reboot.

:v:

4 Likes

Hello there :slightly_smiling_face:
I realised that if I move windows around with the meta key in order to quick tile them, the windows get frozen and text gets a little bit blurred (happens to all applications and on different screens). If I move a window with meta + left/right to the left or right side of the screen there is actually no issue. The issue occurs if I divide the screen into four or when I split the screen horizontally.
It is possible to “recover” the frozen window if I drag it a little bit with the mouse or by meta + left for example. If I drag the window to the preffered size/position manually, I also didn’t faced any issues as well.
I noticed it since 2 releases (not 100% sure) and currently running KDE plasma version 5.26.3. Didn’t found this behaviour described anywhere.
Is there anything to troubleshoot or could you recommend watching any logs? Anything else I can do?

Have a great evening!

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Most issues are migration from older Plasma installs. Those scripts to update settings mostly don’t work properly. So create a new user with fresh settings and see if it is still an issue. You can also test a new ISO with 5.26.3 preinstalled: Release 202211150747 · manjaro/release-review · GitHub

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Another dissatisfied 5.26.3 customer… :arrow_down:

1 Like