How to avoid Plasma5 with Leap42.1 and Leap42.2?

Hi

After nearly one year of experimenting with the Leap42.1 as an upgrade from OpenSuse13.2, I have probably found a way out of the dilemma: With Yast, I unloaded plasma5-packages and some breeze-packages. Now, my desktop is again the desktop, that I know from 13.2. But I am not sure, weather this is a stable approach. It might turn out, that some dependencies are broken. But at least I am getting rid of most of the bad features of plasma5. Unfortunately, the switching between MiB and MB does not work, even if the “Country/Region and Language”-Settings do show the old KDE4-View, where I can select Metric Units instead of JEDEC Units. But Dolphin does not switch as under 13.2.

For me, a switch to Leap42.* is really not very appealing as long as the functionality that I am getting from 13.2 is not available in the Leaps. I would be pleased, If there would be a possibility of using the old KDE environment also on Leap*. I can not judge the quality of my experiments but experts will know, what problems might arise.

If this removal is acceptable, it might be a way for me, to go from 13.2 to 42.1. (Up to now I was not willing to switch). I will make more experiments with this “stripped” 42.1.

Can the experts comment on this way of getting rid of plasma5? Could one upgrade the 13.2 and at the same time avoiding the upgrade to plasma5, i.e. keeping the “old” KDE4?

greetings flexwippi

No use. KDE4 is declared dead by kde.org, not by openSUSE or any other distro.
And, to be fair, specially for people with NVIDIA cards the state of Plasma5 in Leap 42.1 on release wasn’t what we intended to deliver, but … the KDE devs have done a lot of work and by now my family is very satisfied and pleased with how it runs.

Of course there are ways to avoid Plasma5. The first one that comes to mind is GNOME :smiley:

…the second should be to install wolfi repos and use KDE4 :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

:slight_smile:

Even wolfi can’t maintain everything forever. :slight_smile:

Right.
I managed to fix all build problems for 42.2 last weekend though… :wink:

In the end it’s probably really better to come to terms with Plasma5 though.
It has improvements over KDE4 in many regards (and also fixes some long-standing bugs in KDE4 that were due to the design), and it has come a long way in 5.8, even compared to 5.5 in 42.1… :wink:

The mentioned unit problems are still not fixed though, and actually caused by dropping KDE’s own custom locale system in favor of using Qt’s and the system facilities (which has its advantages too, because it is compatible with everything else like GNOME).
In other words, this will never be fixed from the KDE side.

PS: it doesn’t help to change the locale (“Country/Region and Language”) settings in KDE4’s systemsettings, this will just be ignored (unless you use KDE4 applications, like konqueror or dolphin4).

That is awesome. Just wanted to make some counter noise. Some people think it’s all automagically happening.

I did a fresh tumbleweed install 2 weeks ago using one of the lighter dm’s (ignoring plasma5 and gnome) and then installed the kdebase4-session rpm from:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Distro:/Factory/openSUSE_Factory/noarch/

this then pulled in the main kde4 packages giving me the latest kernel / base system with kde4. I did need to install a few other packages like kmix and kwallet.

I did a similar thing, installing Leap42.1 with XFCE desktop on a spare machine. I then added wolfi’s repository, also added the KDE:Frameworks5 repo (needed to be able to install wolfi’s Plasma5 packages), did a vendor change, & installed the KDE 4 apps: kdebase4-session, kdebase4-workspace, kdebase4-workspace-addons, kdebase4-workspace-ksysguardd, kdebase4-workspace-liboxygenstyle, kdeartwork4-colorschemes,kdeartwork4-decorations, kdeartwork4-desktopthemes,kdeartwork4-icons, kdeartwork4-styles, kde-gtk-config,kde-gtk-config-lang, hplip, chromium, ksnapshot,kdeartwork4-screensaver. Also checked that either krandr or kscreen is installed. It’s working reasonably well, but I may have to do some more tweaking.
As an aside; I changed my main machines from openSUSE to Debian Jessie 8.6 KDE which still used KDE 4 & is supported until 2020. Also, there have been many protests to the KDE devs about KDE Framework 5, which has prompted at least one of the KDE devs (David Edmundson) to look into making a KDE 4 spin off. ( See Bugzilla: 341143 – Bring back per-virtual-desktop wallpapers ).

Well, if somebody wants to support 13.1 or 13.2 until 2020, they can.
The former Evergreen maintainer would be more than grateful to introduce people that step up. :wink:

The main problem is getting/keeping everything to build when the rest of the system is updated (I suppose that’s not a problem for Debian Jessie 8.6 :wink: ).
And for an official inclusion in the distribution, you have to also take care of bug reports and security vulnerabilities that might turn up.
KDE4 (the desktop) is dead upsteam since over a year, so you have to do all that yourself.

Also, there have been many protests to the KDE devs about KDE Framework 5, which has prompted at least one of the KDE devs (David Edmundson) to look into making a KDE 4 spin off. ( See Bugzilla: 341143 – Bring back per-virtual-desktop wallpapers ).

That’s a misunderstanding.

David Edmundson is not at all looking into making “a KDE4 spin off”.
He’s actually looking into re-implementing that requested feature (different wallpapers and/or widgets on different virtual desktops) in Plasma5.

Btw, KDE 1 got released today in a version for modern Linux systems!
Would maybe be an alternative too? :wink:
http://www.heliocastro.info/?p=291

AIUI, that’s mainly done for nostalgy though because today is KDE’s 20th birthday… :wink:

Ah, my bad! However if the features (different wallpapers and/or widgets on different virtual desktops) are re-implemented in the present KDE version, IMO it would be a good thing.
IMO it’s one of the features that makes KDE different from the other DEs. :slight_smile:

KDE 1? Wow, I remember using that way back when I first started using the (then) SuSE Linux distro way back in 1998. I remember Kandalf, or did he not appear until KDE 2…
Anyway this may be wandering OT for this list, but thanks for the information. :slight_smile:

Just for clarity, David Edmundson is one of the main Plasma5 developers, he wasn’t even there in KDE4 times…

And KDE4 didn’t have it right from the start either.
It got hacked in later in 4.5 or so, because people complained.

And it caused problems…

That’s why the developers decided to leave it out again in Plasma5.

KDE 1? Wow, I remember using that way back when I first started using the (then) SuSE Linux distro way back in 1998. I remember Kandalf, or did he not appear until KDE 2…

I’m not sure.
According to Wikipedia, it was there in KDE2 and replaced by Konqi in KDE3:

Kandalf was the former mascot for the KDE community during its 2.x versions. He was subsequently replaced by Konqi, a green dragon, possibly due to copyright infringement issues related to **Kandalf’**s similarity to the wizardGandalf (from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings).

I remember seeing him at the university (where they still had KDE2), but never saw him on my own (open)SUSE systems.
I started with SuSE 8.1 which had KDE 3.0, so…