Fedora Upgrade from 21 to 22 Experience

Fedora 22 is without a doubt the most broken KDE has been in literal years.

Foreward
So this is a long somewhat ranting list about problems I had with Fedora 22. I don't want readers to mistake my opinion on Fedora, Linux, and KDE in general. I love Linux. It makes me happy to use it, and I have trouble imagining my Linux experience without KDE. Lastly Fedora 21 has treated me very very nicely, and I'm sticking with Fedora and KDE even through this.

Overview
The breakage is to be expected somewhat, with all their huge move to KDE5 apps. But the amount of breakage across so many apps is horrible. I wouldn't let this thing out of ALPHA testing at this point, some of these bugs are very bad for users.

I feel I should restate though that I really love KDE as a whole and I'm sure they will iron out most of their problems. (Though they SERIOUSLY need to give Gwenview some love. It's been neglected for years....)

The Good
The default color scene is better, the default window decorations are better as well. They are still a little avant-garde for my tastes, but not bad.

Only... it's horrible broken. So while it looks nice it functionally fails thoroughly. Read on.

The Not So Bad
It's been weeks, possibly months and several major bugs haven't been fixed. Also I keep finding new ones.

I think my favorite non-rage inducing bug is when I had two VLC windows open. One was open, paused mid-video and minimized. I was watching another video, and somehow, when my instant messenger beeped me (Skype, which is itself its own massive shit pile when it comes to Linux sound integration), my OTHER minimized VLC window suddenly started playing again! ... What?


The Bad
The new version of Klipper for KDE unfortunately VERY unstable. Using it for much of anything locks up the Plasma Shell and causes a runaway memory leak. Thank God I memorized the unattended reboot command for KDE. It is also missing some important features. One of them being Pasting as Plain Text. Two, being able to TURN IT OFF if you want. Three, USING AN ALTERNATIVE CLIPBOARD MANAGER. I'm sure some of these will be eventually address. Another problem with the user interface is that the preview area of the text snippets is notably smaller than the previous version.


KDE-Telepathy popped up and would not go away. I could only hide it but not quit the program. Eventually I had to find the package name and uninstall it to stop the app from autostarting.

Which is another thing, how to disable auto-loading of some services like Telepathy is not obvious.

Shutting down occasionally my laptop takes a LOOOOONG time. Almost a full minute before it actually kicks off. Update: This appears to be have been mitigated after a recent update.

Wine Systemtray icons aren't working properly, but I remember the KDE system tray got a big overhaul lately. Wonderful, and by that I mean totally not. (Not KDE's fault, but still annoying.)

Gwenview Zooming: Even after all these years, those ugly artifacts with Gwenview zoom-in / zoom-out still remain. This program needs some serious love.


The Worse
All my KDE session data was completely lost. The dozens of Gwenview windows I had open were gone. All my Konquorer windows and tabs were gone. All my Kate sessions were gone. This is really something special because I had backed up my session data to file folders as well.

Konsole lost EVERYTHING! All my konsole settings, which have worked for half a decade, failed to be imported. There was a serious bug with never removing the window frame as well. Update 1: Good news is the location for the konsole settings was moved, and all that was required was moving my config files to there. Annoying but fixable. Update 2: The window frame bug has to do with the management themes... which isn't user error because these were the default chosen themes and default packaged themes. But if you find the right combination the problem won't appear.

Window Management Bugs: There are several small bugs that keep popping up. The desktop slideshow wallpapers layer over each other as they change. Shading a window still leaves the window-border. Update 1: The window frame bug has to do with the management themes... which isn't user error because these were the default chosen themes and default packaged themes. But if you find the right combination the problem won't appear.

Good news: Turns out the problem was a bug in one of the default Application appearance themes. Under Application Style -> Window Decorations, pick something other than Plastik.

KDE Keyboard configurations were completely fucked, no matter if I exported from a working prior version and reinstalled. Nothing worked. I had to manually redo every single damn thing. Also many previously working global hotkeys were missing, but I attribute that to applications themselves (probably). Days later, the Global Keyboard shortcuts area is still fairly buggy. If you try to export all your keyboard settings (and why isn't there a Select-All options? SERIOUSLY!!?), but don't save, and try to export again, the System-Settings locks up.

The desktop wallpapers fail to clean themselves up as they slideshow through. Small annoyance but very ugly. At least it will probably be an easy fix for some developer.

Color schemes are somehow broken for Firefox and for Konqueror, pretty badly. I cannot see many icons and I wouldn't know they were present if I hadn't already known. They are basically invisible.

Firefox HTML5 Video / WebM Support: For whatever reason about half the videos on Firefox 38 on Fedora 22 will not work at all.

Shutting Down: Impossible sometimes. This seems to be a KDE5 bug, but basically there are rare cases where trying to trigger a shutdown/restart sequence through the KDE menus fails completely. (Sometimes it causes Plasma to crash and sometimes not.) The only option is to invoke the system command to shutdown. There used to be a KDE specific command you could throw from commandline to do it, back in KDE3. I've never found KDE4's version (and I've looked several times), nor heard of one.

The Terrible
Removing features, that really weren't an improvement: KDE removed some hotkeys to switch to the next desktop wallpaper. I wouldn't even call them hotkeys, but more like assisted underlined letters in mouse-menu commands. I cannot for the love of God fathom why these were removed. I should put in a feature request to get them restored.

Widgets: The Motif of new KDE in Fedora (or maybe it's new KDE and not Fedora's doing?) is TOO artsy, because many times I am not aware "hey, that widget is actually a button!" or "hey, there's an expand-folder arrow there!" because the style blends too much together. Sometimes it is completely invisible. This has happened about five times now, and it's not going to get any better without some change. This is a major major design flaw. I'm not sure if it is due to my color scheme not meshing well, but that's something that should have been accounted for, since I chose one of the built-in color schemes that are standard packaged with KDE.

Good news: You can fix this by going to system-settings -> Application Styles -> Widget styles -> Select something different than Breeze, as that is the source of the problem.


File-Saving / File-Picker Dialogues: The name field for saving filenames in QT applications seems to be trying to help, but is in fact really hindering.
For example, say you had a prior file like this name:

"kde4 shortcut keys layout all 2015-05-28 (Fedora 22 KDE 4.14.8)" and you wanted to edit the date for a new save file. You select it and start editing the numbers. QT/KDE auto-highlight everything else after your cursor, and any further keypresses will erase it. Worse, CTRL+Z does not bring it back. So it effectively destroys an important time saving feature of reusing text input. This is just awful and I swear to god if it is not a bug, someone needs to go back to school on interface design.

Randomly missing Keystrokes: The application Kate/Kwrite suddenly forgo 95% of all my keystrokes, even CTRL+V. KDE's Run command doesn't respond to the up-arrow for recalling previous entries.

The Absolute Worst of All --> GTK3 or the Gnome Developers

I hate to sound like a ranting lunatic but GTK3's default settings are, without a doubt, the biggest FUCK-YOU to its users I have ever seen. They would make Microsoft proud. And no, I'm not exaggerating here.

Long story short, Mnemonics are gone and many of the shortcut keys have been removed, so not only are they hidden some won't work. Lastly key-stroke accelatores are gone permanently. I would personally slap the developer(s) who thought removing keystroke accelators was a good idea. That is fucking horrible. Horrible. Gnome developers, are you listening to us?!!!

Actually I know they won't hear me. I've tried talking to the Gnome developers about four times in the past, and it is like talking to a rude concrete wall. They don't want help and they don't care about community input or external developer code. They are, and I hate to say this, the Microsoft of the Linux community

Gnome and the GTK3 team are clearly invested in spreading decelerators. Yes, that is the correct word, and no, any Gnome devs who read this you can't deny it. You know this is true. You have slowed down the speed of use, the elegance of design, and the order of presentation. I think I'll have to use the word decelerators from now on when describing this problem. Perhaps vile decelerators.

The End

After letting that Fedora 22 installation operate on my Laptop, with various problems building and building (and never any fixes coming down the pipe), it has finally rotted until I can no longer stand it. I don't know what caused it, but this afternoon I woke it up from suspend, and the Wireless network stopped working. I rebooted it. It never came back and the widget was blank. I connected via wired input, but still nothing. I tried several commands to bring up the network, and it all died.

It may be premature to judge, since there is the remote possibility this problem is hardware related. But I'm more willing to bet somehow it is this botched upgrade. I'll be reinstalling Fedora tonight, and it won't be version 22, I can tell you. Thus ends the absolute worst instance of Linux I've ever run in my 12 plus years in the genuinely wonderful world of Open-Source. To anyone reading, this isn't normal. In fact it is very very rare, and I can only think of one or two other times tops, where this has happened.

Ironically, my experience was made all the more aggravating because of the coincidence of Gnome GTK3's fuckery with punching their users in the face with decelerators. You can endure a lot when your web-browser is okay, but when that's screwed, you really feel it.

KDE longer able to handle rars / rar files

Quick one: If you are using KDE (probably on Fedora) in the last several months, and suddenly Ark has stopped being able to open/extract Rar files and gives you the message:

Failed to locate program lsar on disk

This solution may work for you. You need to install the package 'unar', and no that is not a typo. It stands for Unified Archive extractor or something. It's basically a back-end or go-between for Ark to handle multiple file types, such as rar.

Open up the konsole terminal, and type this:

sudo yum install unar

I did not have to even restart KDE, but you may need to restart KDE or reboot before it takes effect.

Kmix Volume Increment

I recently upgraded to KDE 4.10 and noticed that when I scroll over Kmix to increment/decrement the volume, I no longer had the fine control I liked. It would jump the volume by a whopping 15% with each scroll!

Now that's way too much for me, so here's how to give yourself finer control of Kmix's volume changes.

1. Close and quit Kmix.
2. Open the file ~/.kde/share/config/kmixrc
3. In the [Global] section, add this line:
   
   VolumePercentageStep=1.0
4. Close the file.
5. Open Kmix
6. Enjoy

The 1.0 supposedly means 1.0%, but don't call me on that one.

Kubuntu Hidden Wireless Network

Problem
There seems to be general issue with KDE's Network Manager and hidden wireless networks. [You can see (and vote for!) the bug here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209464.] You are trying to connect to a hidden network, and you create a profile for the specific wireless network in the KDE Network Manager. But for some reason you still can't connect.

I have encountered this problem for a while (Kubuntu 9.10, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04, and 12.10], but I finally found a solution today. A quick look tells me this bug has been around existed at least for 2 years. Pity they haven't fixed it.

Solution
Quick solution is to run this from command line:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid name_of_the_hidden_essid

This works even better if you have used KDE Network Manager to create a wireless profile with this hidden network's name already. You can setup password and such. This command only invokes connection to it, which is the real bug in the manager. It will read the profile you have previously stored.

Other solutions are to use a different network Manager, such as the network manager from Gnome/Ubuntu.

An even easier solution would be to just start broadcasting the SSID.

Force Enable KDE File Chooser Previews (KFileDialog)

Just a quick post. In Kubuntu 11.10, running KDE 4.7.2 (and possibly earlier) I have noticed a problem. When using the File-Choosing dialog, I click enable Aside Preivew, which works for the time. Once I choose a file and the dialog closes, if I reopen the File Chooser, the preview option is disabled again and I have to manually re-enable it.

This is a quick fix for force enabling Previews in QT/KDE's File Chooser (KFileDialog).

Open the configuration file '~/.kde/share/config/konquerorrc'. Find the section marked '[KFileDialog Settings]'. Find the line which reads "Previews=false" and change it to "Previews=true".

Save the file and exit it. Restart whatever program you want this to take effect it, and Aside Previews should be enabled by default.

IF YOU NEED HELP EDITING CONFIGURATION FILES UNDER LINUX, please see this link: http://awesomelinux.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-edit-configuration-file.html

Shadows Removed / Missing in KDE 4.7

Overview: Window / Widget shadows are suddenly and COMPLETELY gone in KDE 4.7.

Background Info: So I haven't blogged in a while about any personal issues with the KDE 4 series, because by and large I like what they are doing and I've come to accept the things I don't.

However I just upgraded my system to KDE 4.7 and I noticed a feature is gone that, initially I really hated, but now I really really like. Shadows. Yep, shadows on my windows. Not quite sure how to describe it but my transparent console

Details: Actually, the shadows are both missing and removed, while still present and there. (Big flub-up on KDE's part, IMO. Thumbs way down this time.)

Please see http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/08/shadow-and-no-oxygen/

All users who do not use our default Oxygen widget style and window decoration might have had an unpleasant surprise after upgrading to 4.7. Our old shadow effect provided generic shadows for all windows no matter which widget style or decoration is used. In case the decoration provided its own shadow that one was preferred.
The new shadow system does not provide any generic shadow. The compositor is just providing a service to the widget style for rendering the shadow. This means that the widget style has to implement support for the new shadows.

So, apparently they are still here, but I cannot find any information on getting the shadows back. Neither from their new system or from the Oxygen theme, or whatever. I'm disappointed.

A big thumbs down from me.

KMix Lockups, Freezes, and Performance

Recently I experienced serious problems with using KDE's audio system, which I eventually tracked to the program 'kmix.' The symptoms were extremely slow response on volume-changes and mutes. By slow, I mean taking a full minute or more to apply. Also, it was taking up 100% of the CPU sometimes for minutes at a time (when it was not responding). Thank goodness I have a quad-core.

I am not sure if the problem is the result of using KDE 4.6.0 or not, since it is very recent and it might have introduced some bugs.

Regardless, I eventually figured a solution to the problem: Quit kmix. You may need to actually kill the program. Next move (or delete or rename) the folder 'kmix' in the folder '~/.kde/share/apps/. Restart kmix, and it will recreate a default '~/.kde/share/apps/kmix/' folder with default settings.

This fixed my problem. Hopefully it will help with yours.

Harddrive Space Disappearance and Freespace

Overview
This is just a quick list of places to look to free up space on your harddrive when using KDE. (In this article, I am dealing with version 4, but some of it does work for version 3 too.) This can be helpful if you ever suffer an anomaly of used space you just can't seem to locate and free up under the great KDE desktop.

Background Information
Sometimes rarely in Linux (running KDE) I receive the message that I'm running low on diskspace on my root (/) partition. (I only give it about 15 GBs total.) After emptying my Trash, most of the space on root (/) was still in use. So I began to dig around to find out the cause of this.

Akonadi
Size: 140.9 MB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/akonadi
Though I own a Droid X smartphone, I do not use any of KDE's utilities to synchronize my devices. So I was quite surprised to see it taking up that much space. Please note, this is not the location of the installed program, just some data it had accrued about me personally and stored in my home directory.

Nepomuk
Size: 378.2 MB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk
Since no services in KDE actually use Nepomuk (and no programs I know of connect to it), currently is a 100% completely useless service. Don't let it run on your system, since it will only take up space and resources that you cannot use.

Thumbnails
Size: 4.6 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.thumbnails
Now this one makes sense. I collect literally tens-of-thousands of images and regularly browse them, so I'm not surprised this is so large. Still, it would be nice to specify a limit to the size of this folder.

Clearing out this folder took a bit of skill. I had over 100,000 files in this directory total, and even doing `rm .thumbnails/normal/*` threw a rarely seen error: "Argument list too long"

The simple solution is just to delete the sub folder 'normal' and 'large' inside of '.thumbnails'. I could tell you some nifty console commands to hack around this, but this works just fine.


Apt cache (a.k.a. the System Package Cache)
Size: 1.3 GB (on my system)
Location: /var/cache/apt/archives/
If you are not a seasoned and knowledgeable Linux user, chances are you don't know about this one. Whenever you install any new updates or packages through any number of GUI / Graphical front-ends (such as Synaptic or Software Management) or through command-line program like dpkg or apt, all downloaded files (called packages) have to be placed somewhere while downloading. This location varies a little between Linux distributions, like Ubuntu versus Red Hat. Under Ubuntu and Debian (and any Debian forks) are placed in /var/cache/apt/archives. This can become very full with lots of temporary download files. There are a couple of ways to clear this folder out. My favorite is simply from command line:

sudo apt-get clean

Yum/DNF cache (a.k.a. the System Package Cache)
Size: 1.3 GB (on my system)
Location: /var/cache/yum/
If you are not a seasoned and knowledgeable Linux user, chances are you don't know about this one. Whenever you install any new updates or packages through any number of GUI / Graphical front-ends (such as Synaptic or Software Management) or through command-line program like dpkg or apt, all downloaded files (called packages) have to be placed somewhere while downloading. This location varies a little between Linux distributions, like Ubuntu versus Red Hat. Under Ubuntu and Debian (and any Debian forks) are placed in /var/cache/yum. This can become very full with lots of temporary download files

You should manually clear any folders of files you don't need.

Wine
Size: 5.0 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.wine
The Wine folder. I was pretty surprised by this one also. All my Windows applications are installed in non-home-directory locations and I haven't done much with Wine lately, so this folder should have been relatively small. After doing some quick checking, I found the folder (.wine/drive_c/users/MY_USER_NAME/Local Settings/Temporary Internet Files) to be the culprit. I suspect this came from updating a videogame of mine recently, since it had a multiple Gigabytes to download and install.

Trash Files (Lost/Forgotten)
Size: 2.0 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.local/share/Trash/files/
Even after emptying the Trash through the regular interface, some large files persisted. I found them here and manually deleted them. (Side Note: I have to say, though I generally love KDE, their trash system is fairly broken with two major problems. The first is if you open the Trash to look inside, it copies all the files to the /tmp/kde-username/ folder, consuming harddrive space. In my case, I let my trash become huge, so this immediately fills up all freespace on the root / partition. This is a terrible bug they absolutely should have fixed years ago. The other problem is, like this situation, occasionally letting files slip through the cracks and not be correctly deleted.)

KTorrent Magnet Links
Size: 8.3 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/kio_magnet
There is a bug with the KDE IO Slave for using Magnet Links in Ktorrent. Instead of downloading files using the temporary storage directory as specified within KTorrent, it dumps them to this location. That's a serious problem. The easy fix to remove this directory, and create a symbolic link (with the same name) to some temporary folder wherever you want.


Hope that helps you clear up some space on your home-directories and root partitions.

Update 1: Added the Wine section.
Update 2: Added the forgotten Trash files section.
Update 3: Added KIO_Magnet /KDE Magnet Links section.

KDE 4.5 Review: Bugs return!

So I've been using KDE 4.5 since the evening it came out. I don't know what it is about every time the KDE claims "this is a stabilizing release" but it seems to be the opposite of my experience. This is easily the buggiest point release of KDE since their last "stabilizing release" of KDE 4.3.

Now admittedly, the list of bugs is small... but they are hitting my hard and frequently. Very frequently. Usually about 12 to 20 times a day. I am hoping (and I'm pretty certain) these bugs are just for my installation.

Konqueror: I use Konqueror as my file manager, and since the upgrade about twice an hour it has a total lockup/total freeze for a duration of anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds. It's pretty horrendous sometimes. It also won't let me close tabs on occasion. There have been some more minor but less frequent bugs but I lost track.

User management: I cannot add a new user to my system, at least not through the GUIs nicely provided by KDE. I wanted to add a new one so I could check his default Konqueror configuration settings against my own. BUT creating a user is proving problematic, since after I create one and set it's password, I switch sessions to log in with it. However, at the login screen it asks me to change the password (root required) it says. HOWEVER YOU CANNOT TYPE ANYTHING INTO THE BOX. At first I thought it was an error with my wireless USB keyboard, so grumbling I plugged in a wired keyboard, but it actually made it worse (the mouse cursor stopped working when I did that). So I cannot log in with the new user I created. That's.... pretty hilariously bad.

Plasma: Presenting all Windows is slow. I don't know why because everything else seems better. This is a pretty minor bug because it does not really impair functionality, mostly. Sometimes it is so slow the cursor doesn't reach the correct window in time when enter is pressed or the window is clicked

Klipper: It stays open after you select some previous entry. It stays this way unless you click it closed. Perhaps this is a feature?

Kubuntu KDE 4.5 Upgrade Problem and solution

So I just did an dist-upgrade of my Kubuntu 10.04 system running KDE 4.4 to KDE 4.5. Upon a reboot, there was a problem. I had no desktop. Just a blank black screen.

So I began to dig around to see what the problem was.

SOLUTION
The solution was to install the package 'kubuntu-desktop' which triggered a group other packages to be installed (such as kdebase-workspace-bin, for example). This group turned out to have everything I was missing. I have NO idea why these packages were not install during the upgrade, but this has been a weird one. (During the past few days, when checking if I had any updates, I was presented with what looked like have available dist-upgrades to KDE 4.5, which would have resulted in some strange installations AND removals had I applied it. I can only assume this was because the packages in the repositories were being updated over a few days and thus the lists had some old and new mixes that didn't jive quite perfectly until all were updated.)

Also, during the install I failed to update the /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc file to the newest version (my fingers slipped on the keyboard, if you can believe it). I don't think this was the cause of my problems, but I did manually upgrade that just to make sure.

Noteably ktorrent is not available in the Kubuntu PPAs because of a version dependency. Strange. Hope they fix that soon.

KDE 4.4 Feature: Drag to edge to Maximize

I do not like the new feature in KDE 4.4 for dragging a window to top of the screen to maximize it. Here is how to disable this feature.

Open System settings -> Workspace Behavior -> Screen Edges

Now deactivate:
* Maximize windows by dragging them to the top of the screen

Thanks to commentors for the updated info.

KDE 4.3 Fails to Load after System Update (Solution)

After installing my system updates yesterday, KDE 4.3 failed to load upon reboot this morning. It boots until it reaches the KDE login screen (with KDM) but it will let me log in from there at all.

The last updates installed were:

• Package: xserver-common, version 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4.1
• Package: xserver-xorg-core, version 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4.1

Though I suspect that the recent updates to gcc/g++ and libc/libstdc++ may have also affected this. I can't be sure.

Either way, I don't know exactly what the problem was, but here is the solution I found. My '.Xauthority' file in my home directory was the problem. I don't know what was wrong with it, but after I cleared that file of all contents, KDM let me log in normally. I hope this fix works for anyone else.