Plasma 5.24.0 is buggy in my heavy modified and personalized desktop

Unfortunately, it does nothing to me. I still see the same, uglly with bad fonts pamac. If that worked for you, it looks that a different mechanism is in play for me. And because simple configs do work for you and my issue seems to be config unrelated (is also present on vanilla, testing user).

Thanks @cscs:

grep -r "GTK_USE_PORTAL" / 2>/dev/null
/etc/profile.d/mozilla-common.sh:export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1

So it looks like my portal setting is for Firefox only and if I understand it right, it won’t affect other apps.

It seems like my issue root lies elsewhere, and it’s preceding all other causes: GTK_USE_PORTAL and gsettings. It’s quite interesting that there are many root causes of the same problem.

If this isn’t a user config or GTK_USE_PORTAL system-wide, my be is with packages. Maybe some packages that I installed and that were important in the past are no longer needed and causing this issue? What about all gtk related packages as:

gtk-engine-murrine (I have no idea why I have this)
gtk-shap-2
gtk-update-icon-cache
gtkmm3
gtksourceview3
gtkspell3
appmenu-gtk-module (was needed for appmenu of gtk apps in Plasma, is it still needed?)
spice-gtk (???)
wxgtk3
wxgtk-common
xdg-user-dirs-gtk

and many more, that seem more legit and needed.

Remove /etc/profile.d/mozilla-common.sh (backup it somewhere for later), reboot, confirm the issue is gone or not.

Also give the content of /etc/profile.d/mozilla-common.sh

1 Like

I renamed it mozilla-common.sh.bak, rebooted and the issue is gone! Thank you! So it was this portal problem after all. However, Firefox now uses GTK file choose instead. Is there a way to “marry” those seemingly excluding settings: give file KDE file chooser in Firefox (that is what PORTAL was for) and yet have normal gtk look under the wayland?

By the way, why PORTAL that should influence file choose changes the look of GTK apps as pamac? This makes no sense!

Edit the Firefox.desktop file locally to add the GTK PORTAL thing in its launch command line.

1 Like

Thanks! That works great! Now I have KDE file chooser in Firefox as well and no issue on Wayland with GTK.

I edited Firefox startup to: env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox %u

I guess, the update could reset it, so I need to save it in my notices, just in case.

So now, to my biggest Plasma 5.24 gripe: new overview effect is not showing up in my regular user account. I still see the old overview effect, but the vanilla, test user has a new overview. Some config is at fault here, and I can’t find which one. I already tried kwin, plasma, kde related configs and still nothing. Any ideas? If you find a fix for that, you will be better than KDE devs which couldn’t help me with this so far (I submitted it as a plasma bug) ;).

You probably want to copy the desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and edit that.

1 Like

Will do that. In the meantime, I submitted a bug to KDE, because PORTAL should not influence GTK look under Wayland.

There is a high chance, that someone already submitted it, but I found out a long ago, that the best way to find it out is to submit a duplicate myself. Finding a source bug submission is an impossible chore for a regular user. Luckily, there are those who sift the new bugs and apply duplicate status if the older submission exists.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450175

I’d start with moving kwinrc to kwinrc.bak and relogin.

Btw that’s a bad way to find if your bug has been submitted. Basically you make devs triage more instead of fixing bugs or implementing new stuff.
As for ~PORTAL env, that’s a well-known fact.

You need to enable it in Desktop Effects.

This was the first thing I did. It didn’t change a thing.

I know that, but there is no other way. Everyone names bug report differently, it’s not always clear which part of KDE is really responsible, and the bug search engine is just stupid, so a regular user like me have no way of finding out if some bug was really already submitted or not. This is a problem of bug sites. We need to submit bugs either way, because often times, we don’t and then complain why it is not fixed yet.

It is. Besides, it worked before it was even enabled, because the effect was enabled before the update. Enabling it didn’t do anything. It worked before, it works now, but with an issue that it’s still the old effect and only on one user, so some config is making this. I already tried various kwin, plasma and kde configs, and none of them made any difference with this bug.

An oh, after enabling it, I disable it to check if the setting works. It did - after disabling it, overview was gone. Enabling it, brought it back, still in old form. I also deleted .cache, rebooted many times. Still no change.

Just going to mention again the normal thing … though it ‘resets’ your desktop:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Configuration_related

1 Like

I submitted this bug and they claim, it’s GTK upstream related. Even Nate didn’t hear about that bug, so this is puzzling - if that is a well known fact, to who? Maybe it’s only in Arch circles, which would suggest Arch packaging issue.

Do you have any references, links?

I am going to cut in again and mention that export means you were applying it in general.
-not just for the singular firefox instance-
You could use env, or the way I do it is like this (for the multiple different exec lines in the desktop file):

/usr/bin/sh -c "GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox %u"
1 Like

I fixed the issue with old overview. It turned out it that there are two effects now:

  1. Present Window - the old overview
  2. Overview - the new one

The issue was, that the Present Window had modified shortcut and it somehow interfered with the new Overview. For example, disabling Overview was disabling the Present Windows and both had the same shortcut assigned. I just defaulted Overview to meta+d and it “uncoupled” the effects, so at the moment both are enabled and triggered by different key bindings. Probably some configs conflict after the update. Now both effects are independent and work.

Still, the regression about the lack of startup sound (this is a third time this regression is showing up after Plasma upgrade…) is not resolved yet, and it’s being worked upon.

It looks better and better now. There are some weird quirks of the new Plasma, sometimes hard to pinpoint. For example, SOMETIMES I can’t open apps from dock, but I can from terminal, although both use the same exec command. System reboot fixes it. Since this is a random and rare occurrence, it’s hard to replicate on my system, so I’m not sure how to submit it. Will need more time to observe it.

Thanks @cscs for the info about the environment variable. It’s helpful.

I’ve seen that being talked about in Plasma Matrix room, for example, and somewhere among comments to Nate’s blog.

1 Like