Would an up-to-date install of KDE first installed a year ago differ from a fresh install?

This may be a very stupid question but I’m having trouble understanding what’s going on. I’ve had Manjaro KDE on an HP G71 Notebook for at least a year and it has worked great. Yesterday I put the same edition on an HP Elitedesk 800 G3 and it is different. I thought it had to do with the graphics card but there are other smaller items, such as the prompt in Konsole is different; no matter how many times I put in the WiFi password and save it, it asks for it again when I attempt to connect; the colors are different in the programs and there is a something like a haze over the screen making it not as bright. For example, the GUI package manager has a blue background to the header which it did not before. Most of these are minor but I don’t understand why, after I choose the very same settings on both machines, the appearance is different.

The question is does it matter what version was first installed or should the exact same settings result in the exact same appearance as long as both machines have all the recent updates? Should an install from a new downlad of the ISO differ at all from an up-to-date year-old initial install?

I switched the kernel from 515 on the desktop to match the 510 on the laptop and it resulted in no change.

If I hook the laptop up to the same screen as the desktop, it is bright and clear but when on the desktop it is a little hazy. To rule out the machine itself I reinstalled Windows 10 which came with the machine and it displays bright and clear on the same screen.

I downloaded the ISO SHA1 and sig files from Manjaro Downloads and the sha1sum matched and the sig verifcation is:

gpg --verify manjaro-kde-21.3.7-220816-linux515.iso.sig manjaro-kde-21.3.7-220816-linux515.iso                                                                                                                    
gpg: Signature made Tue 16 Aug 2022 08:53:56 AM EDT
gpg:                using RSA key 3B794DE6D4320FCE594F4171279E7CF5D8D56EC8
gpg: Good signature from "Manjaro Build Server <build@manjaro.org>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 3B79 4DE6 D432 0FCE 594F  4171 279E 7CF5 D8D5 6EC8

I don’t know what I might be doing wrong. Thank you for any guidance you may be able to provide.

I don’t mean to be a pest with these questions the past two days but I’ve come to rely on Manjaro KDE and do not want to use Windows again; and it makes no sense to me why this newer machine wouldn’t have the same appearance as the older one.

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Manjaro is a rolling release distro. If all you have done is update the year old machine, it has the same packages as a just released install iso. The difference is likely hardware based or changes you made over the last year to configuration files…

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The result packages after full system update should bring all system to same state. However, latest KDE ISO is probably different from your initial ISO you used for first installation, as the default settings, the default themes, default configuration for lot of things have probably changed since then, so probably what you see as difference.

For the packages you can compare the two text files located at /desktopfs-pkgs.txt and /rootfs-pkgs.txt on both machines and see what is or is not on each machine (list of packages installed initially).

There are things on top of my head that I can confirm you have changed like the shell in Konsole has changed from bash to zsh so you could recreate a new profile in Konsole, make sure to configure bash as the shell, make the profile the default one and restart Konsole. Also the default theme in KDE has changed too which has color scheme, panel, icons, and all that might have changed this is what makes the whole desktop appearance in the end.

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:upside_down_face:

Thank you for the explanations. Funny thing, and I have no explanation for it, but I made a new bootable USB from the same downloaded ISO but on a different USB drive using Rufus (same as the first time) and installed it and this time it all looks better. The haziness in the display was the main issue and it disappeared and the date and time were right without having to set them. The previous installs were 10 hours ahead of my time zone and I picked the right one, at least the same one as this time. It doesn’t make sense to me that this would be the issue but all seems well now.

There are some minor color differences but that is nothing to me. The previous installs had differences in which areas were darker and lighter and I chose all the same settings in the system setting for appearance. Also, the network connections accepted my WiFi password and stored it on the first attempt and previously it would not save it at all.

If I was doing something wrong/stupid in the previosu three install attempts, then I got lucky this time when I switched to a different bootable USB drive.

Seems too strange to be the cause of these issues but they appear to be gone now.

Thanks again.

Did you check the hash of the first iso image you installed? If not it could have been a bad download.

I checked the sha1 and signature file and put results of sig check in orignal question. I didn’t download the iso again but only used the same download to make a new bootable USB on a different flash drive; and I used Rufus both times. Perhaps I did something wrong the first time in Rufus. I got a warning each time that I can’t recall the exact details of but it was something like that the creators of the iso file didn’t provide something or make it a certain way and Rufus was going to use a “DD” of some sort. Ican check that again to get the full message but have to get on a different machine to do so and can’t access it until the morning.

Settings in your $HOME will differ over time, e.g. Plasma will change some default keyboard shortcuts ($HOME/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc) but since you already have that file with shortcuts it won’t overwrite it. Same goes for anything else.

This is also a reason (well, it might be) that over time you might experience some unexplained glitches or weird stuff going on because there are some old settings somewhere in your files and you might need to do some cleaning, i.e. delete some config files so Plasma regenerates fresh ones with new defaults.

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