I just discovered that what I asked for most likely cannot be done in Manjaro, despite being a very simple patch.
Why is that so? Because Manjaro,
- despite offering a complete rebuild of Arch’s packages;
- despite being a highly customized/themed distro;
- despite offering prebuilt packages that otherwise would have required AUR or 3rd-party repos;
- despite being a major mainstream distro:
- doesn’t apply patches to upstream packages!
From what I see, Manjaro’s customizations are obtained exclusively through adding packages to the rebuilds of upstream packages. A package such as manjaro-kde-settings
can add files, but it cannot change the build of a package.
As it happens, the whole thing with the old Fedora patch that adds that menu entry and that has been integrated in KDE is that it’s exactly that: a patch to the sources. Fine, that one has been done by KDE.
But enabling that menu entry by default requires another patch, which in Fedora is this one:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/plasma-workspace/blob/rawhide/f/plasma-workspace-5.25.90-enable-open-terminal-action.patch
Elementary, but it has to be applied to the sources, before building the plasma-workspace package. And Manjaro prefers to build Arch’s packages without any changes. (Manjaro is not patching Arch the way Ubuntu patches Debian. Honestly, most of Ubuntu’s patches are stupid and add bugs, but the idea is correct.)
So now I discovered I was using a distro which, without using Arch directly, but through rebuilding its packages, did not use this philosophy as an opportunity to add subtle patches that would fix some uninspired upstream decisions.
I am stunned at my own stupidity. A distro with such a distinctive identity, and yet such a missed opportunity.
What’s the purpose of rebuilding Arch’s packages if the result is identical to the upstream, only with a different signature? Just for the sake of delaying “stable” and of creating branches (stable, testing, unstable; plus the specialized kde-unstable/plasma-daily which I don’t remember from which branch is derived, because “unstable” applies to KDE, not to the other packages; and even release-review within the testing branch) that are too many and confusing?
I was stupid; I suppose I still am. But I just realized that Manjaro is not what I need, despite being rock-solid, with minor incidents only over a couple of years. I have to look for another boat, and revisit some of the distros I’ve used in the past…
Farewell.