kde4 dead: how to select window manager and restore the kde environment

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1

Greetings !!

I had an issue that needed to be fixed quick and I think I handle it like a real dumb.
KDE environment on a unique computer using 13.2 has issues with responsiveness of dolphin and general kde applications.
I tried to dig the logs to see if there was informations about the strange behaviour.

As the student hasn’t patience to let me find a solution I decided, like a dumb, to remove the .kde4 file, the **.dbus **and the **.config **files.
I was believing as they were located in the user directory those folders could not mess the system… I was wrong.

Rebooting drived us to an horrible graphic environment called icewm that wasn’t fully operationnal…

I had to clean install the system to recover kde…

My question is: how to change the default window manager ?

2

Actually removing those directories should not break anything (you’ll lose settings and data though of course).
Otherwise fresh user accounts wouldn’t work either.

Rebooting drived us to an horrible graphic environment called icewm that wasn’t fully operationnal…

Well, you may call icewm “horrible” (I don’t agree, but that’s a matter of taste I suppose, it is quite minimal in any case), but what do you mean with “wasn’t fully operational”?

Anyway, if you ended up with IceWM after a reboot, you must have done something else as well other than just removing those mentioned user directories.

My question is: how to change the default window manager ?

DEFAULT_WM in /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager

But most display managers should allow to select it on the login screen and remember your last choice too.

3

First,
Expanding on what wolfi posted about /etc/sysconfig,
If you use YAST > /etc/sysconfig editor > Desktop > Window Manager > DEFAULT_WM, IIRC kde4 should be offered as one of the dropdown options.
You can set the above value to whatever you wish, but your choice must be supported by selected Desktop Manager, else the DM will determine on its own what WM is used.

Also wondering.
If you do a force re-install of the KDE pattern, I’d expect that not only would all your files be updated and re-installed, configuration files should be replaced with their defaults which might include resetting your Window Manager to its default.

TSU

4

Take a look at the 13.2 /etc/skel/ directory.
The content is exactly that which an “empty” (“fresh”) user’s login directory needs at the first login – or, what a user’s login directory needs to “start again from scratch” – creating a new user copies these files and directories to the new user’s login directory and sets the ownership (user and group) to that of the new user:


 > LANG=C l /etc/skel/
total 60
drwxr-xr-x   7 root root  4096 Nov  4 09:05 ./
drwxr-xr-x 133 root root 12288 Jan 20 19:48 ../
-rw-------   1 root root     0 May 18  1996 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1177 Oct 26 16:38 .bashrc
drwx------   2 root root  4096 Sep 25  2014 **.config/**
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1637 Sep 11  2014 .emacs
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Sep 25  2014 **.fonts/**
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   861 Sep 11  2014 .inputrc
drwx------   2 root root  4096 Sep 25  2014 **.local/**
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1028 Oct 26 16:38 .profile
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1940 Sep 25  2014 .xim.template
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root  1112 Sep 25  2014 .xinitrc.template*
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Sep 25  2014 **bin/**
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Oct 26  2014 **public_html/**
 >

And, the permissions are also exactly those which 99.9999% of the user community need for a safe and secure computing experience.

KDE4 Plasma or any other User Desktop, will create any other directories needed – for example .kde4/ .cache/ .dbus/ .local/ .thumbnails/ and so on . . .

5

Well removing user directories/files will not break the system but it sure may break the users desktop. Removing ~/.kde4 should reset the desktop to the defaults in KDE4 but since you also removed other things that may not regenerate I don’t know :X

6

No, “kde4” would be invalid as I think I tried to explain to you a few times already… :wink:

If you want KDE4 as default desktop session, you’d need to set it to “kde-plasma” (that’s how the KDE4 session is called since years).

7

It’s right that those files are copied to a fresh user account when it is created.

But they are absolutely not necessary for login (or the start of a KDE4 session) to work…

8

Dolphin was slow to access remote folders (in the same local network) as I interpreted the situation. But I saw that all kde environment applications were also “very slow” to open just as Kate, Snapshot, Konsole and so on…

I dug the forums and saw these kinds of issues would be related to dbus that was broken or corrupted. As dbus-launch dolphin produced the same behaviour.
Some source told me to check if libqt5sql5-sqlite was installed.
It wasn’t so I installed it but it changes nothing regarding the behaviour.
The remote folder contains not so much folders and the preview option was set to off: it took sometimes 10 seconds, freezing the whole desktop to load.
The other 12 computers with same distribution were working very good, not such unresponsiveness.