Hello,
I have been a great fan of OpenSUSE 13.1 and 13.2 KDE 64 bit Distros. I am still hogging onto KDE4 and OpenSUSE 13.2.
I have tested LEAP 42.1 several times, and a few other linux distros. Short version is that I will steer clear from Plasma 5 and Gnome 3. I found KDE 3 good, KDE 4 tolerable, and Plasma 5 is where I draw the line. Similarly to Gnome 1 good, Gnome 2 tolerable, Gnome 3 is endgame.
Is there any way to get LEAP 42.2 in KDE 3 or 4?
Is there any way to get LEAP 42.2 in KDE 3 or 4?
A quick Google led me to this…
https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/OpenSUSE_Trinity_Repository_Installation_Instructions
You might consider trying another lightweight DE via a Live system first. Check out the following…
I keep my base at 13.1 as KDE 4 is (IMO) the best desktop for me, I missed the 13.2 upgrade, and do not have the ISO for 13.2.
I do have Leap 42.1 (KDE 5/Plasma). Leap is sound, the KDE desktop is marginal, lacking a LOT of customization features. I would LOVE to install KDE 4 on Leap 42.x.
How ?
You still can, but KDE 4 itself is not being actively maintained…
From YaST > Software > Softaware Management > View > Patterns
there is both ‘Plasma 5 Desktop’ and ‘KDE Desktop Environment’ available.
It’s been outlined previously in this post (concerning Leap 42.1 but should be relevant to 42.2 as well)
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/513411-How-Can-I-Change-My-Desktop-from-Gnome-to-KDE?p=2753322#post2753322
Have you checked out XFCE desktop? Might be suitable, so test the Gecko Linux live XFCE disk, to find out.
In between laptop upgrades.
I’ve decided to give LEAP 42.2 KDE a go.
Holy cow! You guys literally changed everything that I disliked about LEAP 42.1KDE, well maybe with small exceptions(lock screens, this I will need to address). Default KSuperkey, and smoothtask2-similar task manager, Desktop Icons actually existing again.
I think I am officially back on OpenSUSE again.
…or you could try MATE desktop…
you can have kde3 and kde4 on leap it’s just kde4 can’t coexist with plasma 5 you’d have to remove that desktop
but most kde4 apps have been ported to kf5 so you’d be running a mixed desktop
as most people said for kde3 ether add the old kde3 repo or better yet use trinity
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/PunisherHD:/Trinity:/stable/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/
kde4 is availoble from the main repo just install the kdebase4 packages and zypper should ask to remove the conflicting plasma 5 packages
you can search yast for kdebase4 or just do
zypper in kdebase4 kdebase4-workspace kdebase4-runtime kdebase4-session kdm
I would recommend you try lxqt it’s a light Qt based desktop that has been maturing nicely it’s a hybrid of the old razorqt and lxde projects
to try it search yast for it or zypper
zypper in lxqt-session pcmanfm-qt
that should pull most of lxqt
Is the customization for date-format History? for example Shortdate:mm:YY?
Please explain why it’s intolerable ? I’ve just updated from 12.3 to leap 42.2 so am a bit curious. I’ve run kde since 2. something.
**@ I_A:
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kde4 is availoble from the main repo just install the kdebase4 packages and zypper should ask to remove the conflicting plasma 5 packages
you can search yast for kdebase4 or just dozypper in kdebase4 kdebase4-workspace kdebase4-runtime kdebase4-session kdm
Only if it were that simple. There is no ‘kdebase4-session’ in the main repo. The other components will install but there is no KDE4 session to choose or run.
One can indeed find ‘kdebase4-session’ here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/wolfi323:/branches:/KDE:/Frameworks5/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/
However, installing from a clean Plasma5 system will result in a broken system, showing login, doing something for 30sec then going back to login. Changed sddm with kdm in displaymanger - still NG; changed nouveau to nvidia prop - NG; gave up on further troubleshooting.
The closest I got to working KDE4 was installing Leap 42.2 Xfce only, then adding wolfi323 repo, then installing kdebase4*, changed to kdm and manually selecting the KDE4 session. It is usable but needs some cleaning and tweaking - missing any SUSE applications defaults or branding, has all the Xfce settings underneath, desktop icons, etc.
@** ajohnw:**
Please explain why it’s intolerable ? I’ve just updated from 12.3 to leap 42.2 so am a bit curious. I’ve run kde since 2. something.
It could literally take days to list all the reasons. I’ve been using SUSE since 9.x and never seen so many problems since Leap. Starting with 5 systems running 13.2, different functions, home site, nearly problem free - I tried Leap 42.1 and gave up after it crashed 5 different ways in 2 hrs. I waited for 42.2 assuming the bugs were mostly addressed. I pushed through and hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon, that started in Dec '16. Now, almost 4 months later, I am still dealing with frequent problems.
Originally, I started documenting the issues with the intent to share the findings once I’m done. After 50 or so, I stopped writing; I checked the bug reports and found there were over 1200 just for Leap 42.2; many of mine not even listed. BTW, I am not counting “problem” anything that takes less than 30 min to figure out.
Plasma5 is related to the majority of the problems but many are not related to plasma. The more roles the system has the worse the problems - a desktop for internet, mail, youtube and light office work is acceptably stable. Nevertheless, the same things are nowadays done well by any $50 tablet. A mutimedia/gaming/development station has most problems, almost every day.
A few examples of issues, from my notes, in no particular order, on several systems, confirmed by reloading HDD image backups after discovered and then troubleshooting:
Anyways, this by no means to say that SUSE is a bad distro, as a matter a fact it is one of the best … and that’s where the big problem resides.
I tried multiple distros and they range from close behind SUSE to failing completely. The SUSE installer is by far most reliable, many distros die on a nvidia + radeon video system and all select a dummy adapter before the monitor, SUSE finds the real monitor and installs no problem. Same with the 4 nics, or the 10 drives on mobo sata and 8 on SAS, all correctly detected, the right order, no surprise grub install or disk format from SUSE. The HW detected correctly, the ADC on firewire, the Xitel audio on usb, hauppage tunners, etc. If I need to install on HW and expect conflicts I can simply pass pci-stub.ids on the kernel line of installer, most other distros you can’t because pci-stub is not in the kernel and the other modules load before it. Whenever I tried for alternative to Suse problems above, I found many more problems and also many missing functions.
So, IMHO, this is the best all around distro and if this is what best is, it lives me with not much hope. Only a couple of years back I was a vocal supporter of Linux, trying to convince anyone I talked to about computers, to make the switch. Now, I can’t honestly open my mouth when I spend 20 hrs a week just trying to keep up with the problems at home, and I’m supposed to be the more experienced one.
Where did we go wrong, I can’t say, but I fear the Linux Desktop is dead by now. Yes, with lots of time and experience, one can get a system to work to your liking but the “non-hobbyist” computer users will never put up with anything close to it, to switch from Windows to Linux.
Meanwhile, here I am, years of disliking Windows, thousands of hours of Linux tinkering, actually considering switching to Windows. The **** thing is on 2 systems (valid license and all) running in qemu-kvm with GPU, NIC and USB controllers passthrough and it doesn’t skip a bit, Plasma crashes and I see a black screen, have no keyboard, but switch KVM to other video output and Windows 10 is still happy. If I look just at the cost for my time, I’m probably better off paying for Windows and programs for all my computers.
I feel the biggest threat is the “golden plating”, you had KDE3 then when nearly “production-ready”, let’s go with KDE4, and before it is even close to stable, here comes Plasma 5 as main desktop, not even out of beta status.
If I were a competitor to Linux, that’s exactly what I would want. I would even pay people to pose as developers and start as many projects as possible, causing shortage of resources and overall confusion (number of distros, anyone?).
I think I read about something like this somewhere, and it was called “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
I can’t say as I have noticed many of those,
Sound - unpleasant noises when a 2nd source blends in with another. Also when the 2nd one finishes. I use sound to signal an email arriving. That aspect seemed to cure itself. Unpleasant sounds when a sound starts playing and some time after it’s finished. Often same sounds when browsing web pages. There is a bug here for my set up that may be down to using an optical output from the card. Cured by disabling the phonon time out load in it’s conf file. I do get a grunt when the desktop comes up. That seems to be worse of late not sure why but probably an update.
Panels pop up and have been designed to pop down via a click. A change in behaviour which hasn’t bothered me.
My recent applications currently shows 13 items so that’s ok. Recent doc’s about the same. Menu categories aren’t so neat as they were on 4 but there has been a complete and utter change in this area since the last one I ran which was 12.3. The desktop files cause the lack of sub categories. At the moment if bothered we need to sort this ourselves. They are now using a system called xdg from freedesktoporg. An attempt to standardise certain aspects of all desktops. I have a strong feeling that this wont work correctly unless people log in with SDDM. Certain things have to be done to make use of xdg. It may work with other log in managers but I’m not sure if it does. Any start up scripts are almost bound to have to account for it’s use.
If I move a window about very quickly the edges don’t track if they are over the desktop. They are much much better if over another window. I suspect this aspect will be cured in later releases when X finally gets replaced. It’s going to happen because X hardly does anything any more so a good time to replace it. Maybe leap 42.3. Who knows.
From your other comments I wonder if you did an upgrade rather than a fresh install. There is still a lot of 4 about in 5 so upgrades might not be a good idea. Not sure if they ever are really. Most people back up data anyway and the opensuse dvd allows for the installation of rather a lot of software right from the install. That’s not so obvious as it was.
3 went because it had been messed about with so much that it wasn’t possible to safely do any more work on it. Coding styles had also evolved pretty dramatically, probably a good thing actually. It’s a pity kmail 3 wasn’t retained though. 4 never matched it so many changed and probably wont easily go back to any kmail now. By the time 12.3 came along there wasn’t anything amiss that I am aware of on 4 and the 13 series was probably better in a number of respects. I did stick 13.2 on a netbook that I don’t use much but seemed fine to me. Way way quicker than the windows that was on it.
I suspect 5 is coming along because 4 was a brave new world for the people working on it. That usually means that mistakes are made that can be difficult to correct and a restart is a better
option.
It’s seems one update caused me problems - VLC. The update wasn’t happy if the nvidia driver is about. None other have but I am running all new code. Lots of it most from the dvd and a few packages from the sorfware search via one click. And as of yesterday one which I compiled from scratch as opensuse don’t offer any pulgins for it.
I’ve had auto update block up once because of a dependency problem. I used yast update and it cleared it. The old auto update may have blocked given the same update to do. Who knows?
Earlier KDE’s had their updater in it - use at your peril. It’s gone.
My impression is pretty good, pretty quick and I suspect lower overheads than 4. 
I have mixed feeling about having something that will be set up for finding video and music and that sort of thing and finding my photo’s that way would be a joke however I can do my nefarious things on it and it even now makes a decent job of thumbnailing raw files. Much quicker than 4.
Windows - I need that about for firmware and not long ago bought new laptop. The old one had 95 on it when bought and was upgraded to xp. This one has win 10 on it. It’s awful so good luck if you want to go back to that.
About recent applications, I meant some applications don’t show in recent although they are in the menu and being launched from there. For example, all browsers and Gparted show under recent, so does NVidia Settings but not Gimp, VMware Player, or KSysGuard. Not a big deal anyway, just another example of “work in progress”.
About the update hanging, I actually seen that in 13.2 so I recognized it and not counting against Leap. However, I’ve seen cases when the update of 1 package takes forever (I waited a few hours) and yast doesn’t help either but after rpm --rebuilddb the automatic update install worked correctly.
About install methods, I did not have great luck in the past with the upgrade from DVD and also want to have more control of what I’m doing. I even tried it on my main workstation at the beginning and didn’t go well enough. I generally start with the “zypper dup” method with all the steps involved, and go from there. If the results are close I stick to it and do further tweaking and adjustments. However, if the system is significantly broken then I go to fresh install. I will also point here that the user of a competitive OS should not have to resort to fresh install as standard method for upgrade.
In order to ease the pain of the upgrade process as well as the maintenance I generally use separate volumes, in many cases separate physical drives. For example separate /boot, /, /home, and /work (my thing, for downloads, large projects, etc.). I also keep frequent and multiple backups (especially before updates, upgrades or any planned changes). On a fresh install I then copy all the stuff I need from the last /home backup (data and some programs settings) and just mount /work. Also, when stuff goes bad and can’t revert the damage I restore from backup and try again until I get it right.
For example I too lost VLC and Kaffeine, both causing segmentation faults - could not figure out what exactly happens (no info). I restored a backup earlier and sure enough VLC was still working, however, kaffeine was still broken. I went back 2 backups and then both vlc and kaffeine were working, then I switched to packman as main repo and all the updates installed fine with all media players working fine.
For backup I’m using this scheme:
And now, here’s the kicker, looks like I’ll need to use all the stuff above, again.
My workstation was working fine in the morning and in the evening it failed to boot with “unexpected inconsistency run fsck manually”. Found the culprit was /home and fsck reported a bunch of problems.
I noticed references to “Fallout New Vegas” files and sure enough, it is no longer running, even though fsck sees no more problems and the system boots ok (using it now). So it looks like I don’t know what else was lost so I’m better off restoring the last backup.
Although I made no HW changes from 13.2 to 42.2, this never happened before and I’ve seen it about 4 times since the upgrade, I am not willing to blame Leap for this, yet. I have to do some detailed troubleshooting.
The problems only happened with / and /home but not /boot or /work. “/” and “/home” are logical volumes each on 2 SSDs (2 stripes for speed). /boot is on SSD but standard volume, /work is also LV but on 2 x 2TB HDD (2 stripes for speed).
The same exact configuration was used without problems with 13.2, I just formatted and did fresh install. I figure it could be caused by many things, including failing HW - I will post results if anything relevant.
Regards,
Nick
I usually try to fix things myself when they go wrong such as the case with vlc. I usually start with a web search, In this case it showed that there can and has been several reasons why vlc may break this way so I tried an unsupported version from the software search. Same problem so asked on here. That didn’t go too well from my point of view. So I went my own way which meant completely removing vlc. If clean up is selected in yast it made a remarkable job of that. Then tried again. Same problem so removed it again and found a post on here that offered several solutions for this problem. One of them worked. It seems to have caused auto update some problems though.
The dvd install offers complete control but not as obvious as it has been. It used to have an option for default and custom. That’s gone so the correct panels need clicking on. It didn’t import my partitioning correctly so put /home in the wrong place. I use a flash drive for system files and boot but my home is on raid 0. It put it on /home. Not much of a problem really if I had known that it had done this. Confusing though 'cause it took a while to find out. I made the update more complex than it needed to be by not upgrading disks etc first. Decided to sort that out when it was up and running. I put swap which is never used somewhere on the basis that it would be easy to change the drive that was on. Turns out that it isn’t and that it can be done with varying degrees of complication. Not good because changing drives now and again is needed and aught to be simple. I found a simple way. Linux + kde can run without swap. Removing it with yast and adding it later with the same circumvents a number of complications. The new replacement drive can be prepared in a usb dock.
I’m not convinced that a comprehensive update will ever be 100% on my system anyway or even really on one that just contains totally supported software. As 13.3 never happened I upgraded from 12.3. I do have 13.2 on netbook that I hardly use and went to leap 42.2 as it was an opportune moment hoping that there will be a point 3 with the usual support period. Perhaps 13.2 was a step towards tumbleweed and when it reached point 3 standards it was just a matter of time before support stopped rather than having a separate release. I expected 42.2 to be a decent beta release. It looks to be to me and has had some interesting detail changes.
Ksysgaurd does come up in recent for me. The GIMP doesn’t but updates to that are generally very slow. High colour depth has been coming for ages not that it needs it really given what it’s intended for. Linux users can have a photoshop but it needs several different applications but can be just as good. If good is the right word to use.
I did use a nas in the past. Drives didn’t last that long probably because many don’t store them horizontally. I’ve been around pc’s for a very very long time and have noticed that before. I bought the bits for a file server with a redundant array and then thought better of it so never did it. The redundancy is in my pc so just need to cobble something up to tell me it’s not well. Desktop users aren’t covered at all in that respect. The caches in the drives I use are large enough to swallow any file I write with ease and apps are loaded from ssd just leaving setting on the hard disks. The disks I have fitted now have about 1/2 the read rate of the previous ones and there is no detectable difference as a user. Hardly surprising really as settings files aren’t very big,
I’m a pariah however as I only use the console if I have to. Part of that comes from the field I work in. The syntax is archaic so I am highly unlikely to ever even want to get fully to grips with it.
I did find some bash that was a lot better however recently so who knows. I also posted a script that dumps the current xdg setup. Would I ever write code like that - no way.
mmmmmmmmm My auto update is blocked again. Twice now and has never ever happened before in all of the time it’s been about. YAST sorted that but unlike last time it’s still blocked. YAST update also offers a lot more flexibility but I haven’t needed to use it for a long time. The problem looks to be down to the latest vlc which is in the repo. The last one was down to a need to downgrade a browser that I had installed myself. That hasn’t happened before and I often choose the latest version of a browser from it’s own site. That goes way back from finding that a browser wouldn’t work correctly on some sites as they assumed everyone was using ms. I’m pretty sure ms did this on purpose and that resulted in newer releases of other browsers.
Ok maybe I can straighten this out things that launch from the panel bar/system tray don’t get added to recent only things started from the menu. If the icon is on the panel then never seen in recent.
Ok. Going back to the original topic, while troubleshooting “unexpected inconsistency” errors I decided to try a few more things on getting KDE4 on Leap 42.2 and mad some progress following these steps:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/wolfi323:/branches:/KDE:/Frameworks5/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/
2a. Switch to this repository as system packages.
3. Open YaST, search and select “kdm”, then search “kdebase4” and select “kdebase4-runtime” “kdebase4-session” and “kdebase4-workspace”, as needed add wallpapers, themes, etc; same thing searching for “kde4” add what seems useful. Install all.
4. Edit /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager and change lightdm to kdm. Reboot and select kde plasma session at login.
The result is a clean KDE4 desktop, with the SUSE apps and the menu working correctly (including recent programs).
However, it is still not 100% KDE4 SUSE, there is no pattern to select for KDE4 streamlined install so some programs like Dolphin, ksnapshot and kmail have to be selected and installed separately.
Habit of a lifetime - I always put what I frequently use on the taskbar. Now that can be done via a right click from the main menu.
There are 2 things I don’t like about the start button panel.
I installed official kfind and couldn’t find it in the menu tree. It had stuck itself on top of the main tree so couldn’t be seen. Noticed when I edited the menu to add it manually. There may not be a way of adding another main category or maybe there is. Haven’t tried that yet.
The worst aspect is the actual menus when it gets to launching things. Looks like a rush job on the dot desktop files in terms of making use of categories so the menu’s are too long. Taking graphics as a for instance I’d expect a photography category as there was on 12.3. However one or two things wouldn’t always put themselves there so had to corrected manually. Bear in mind that I will probably finish up with 8 apps in that. This time I will probably add a separate one for colour management.
:'(I tried to talk to kde about mouse miles once. Simple aspect when trees are expanding. They should expand on the side of the menu that is nearest the mouse. IMHO anyway.
I probably will add another category to the main tree. I have an interest in model engineering and that covers an increasing number of applications so at some point I’ll try and add a main category called engineering - if I can. That will probably involve some unsupported apps.
Apart from that I can’t really see why anyone would want to change other than the fact that a few things are different.
I did notice something odd about the start button panel and wondered if there was something wrong with my monitor then realised that it’s always part transparent. Why became more apparent when I used search as the panel gets bigger. I’d guess I would rather that didn’t happen but will leave alone until I get used to it. I don’t use search for that sort of thing very often also generally drive things via the mouse. Part reason for that is some aspects of linux short cut keys and also having set up windows at work so that I can write, compile and link software with desktop clicks. I’m also inclined to think that window’s basic short cut key sequences are for more sensible than linux’s. As some of those are firmly engraved in my head I am inclined to think what the hell do I have to press multiple keys for to do that so don’t. It also varies form one app to another. Some part follow windows such as f3, other don’t. That probably dates back to prior the appearance of function keys.I can’t remember how long ago that was.
Transparency depends on the theme that is used.
I just got round to adjusting that so that I can read what’s behind a window if I want to.
When this feature first appeared there were some moans on a kde list so I pointed out that it allowed people to read what was behind a window. It then became useful.
:’(What do they do later - decrease the transparency and add blur to the background window. Both can be changed via settings though.
No point in being critical though. It’s the nature of the beast that goes by the name of open source and linux. The other problem is the things that are called windows or panels or what ever are still windows one way or another and haven’t changed at all in terms of the essentials since day one. The technical term for this sort of thing is a mature technology. The only thing that can really change as far as a user is concerned is appearance so that’s what happens.