I just updated my KDE Plasma Manjaro, the widget that should cycle my wallpapers shows just a black wallpaper and when I try to right-click my panel then “Add widgets…” to update them all, the following issue appears in the logs:
Could not find the Plasmoid for Plasma::FrameSvgItem(0x56293fa77110) QQmlContext(0x56293bbdc080) QUrl("file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.private.systemtray/contents/ui/main.qml")
I’m afraid a lot has been broken in the Plasma desktop environment with this stable update, my friend, courtesy of the upgrade from Plasma 5.24 — which was an LTS release — to 5.25.
The KDE developers have rewritten a lot of the compositing code in order to streamline the code between X11 and Wayland, with the latter being a problem child that has so far required and continues to require heavy adaptations and rewrites to the Plasma code base.
I’ve just written a rant on today’s Stable Update announcement thread that we should have stuck with 5.24 LTS instead of placating the newbies who wanted 5.25 in the Stable branch just for the sake of the version number.
Oh, and…
I tried that too, and my desktop froze. The panels disappeared and I couldn’t do anything anymore.
Eventually it came back to life, but it did take some time.
Thanks for your swift reply, that was very helpful for me to understand what’s going on. Lesson learned: I will need to be less responsive to any new upcoming stable update announcements for at least the very first 24h. This was really a major fail.
Would you recommend restoring my setup from my last backup, or should I just wait like this for the next update?
Well, in theory you should be able to mask 5.25, as what @deroberts1 has done, but that’s always tricky, and you may have to upgrade to 5.25 in the future anyway. So I myself am simply going to have to learn to live with 5.25 and the ugliness it has introduced, rather than masking anything.
I am fairly new to Plasma. I have been seeing - literally - 100’s of issues with relation to Plasma.
I began with kwin as the window manager for lxqt - and slowly moved towards applying the desktop to the flow and Wayland - the intention of finding the breaking point - if one could call it that - of Plasma desktop.
I can say I have not reach it yet.
If I am not completely mistaken - when a new snap is made from testing to stable - the issues which inevitably surfaces is mostly related to the customizations the user has made.
I am running a stock Manjaro Plasma and the only issue - and to me it is a minor annoyance - is the multimonitor issue - otherwise I have had no issues worth mentioning.
I am not saying you should do the same - and I am not sure if it is even doable - but perhaps one should - like with Gnome - disable all customization before applying an update - thus avoiding unpleasant surprises.
It always was like that. KDE doesn’t officially support third-party customizations such as kvantum. Though they hope to come up with some solution in KDE6 to unify looks of Qt and GTK theming out-of-the-box (maybe support GTK theme stylesheets?)
That would be aligned with my original report. I have a second user with no customizations whatsoever and the update works fine over there. The thing is that I find the existing defaults utterly boring and not as functional, so it doesn’t work that well for me out-of-the-box.
However, there are not many known styles out there: there’s Unity, Windows and MacOS style. I like the way Gnome has those 3 predefined, so users could just pick their preference without further customizations. KDE Plasma has so many bells and whistles, but sadly doesn’t have that (yet). With such feature, people would less likely customize anything.
Would be great if this could be automated before/during each update, since it’s a pain in the a$$ to do such manual work prior each and every update. Or at least, would be great if the update process could warn a user if it detects any customization that may become troublesome before applying any changes. Otherwise it’s a nightmarish user experience.
