Problems with Plasma5

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1

Hi,

I gave Plasma5 a try a few days back and have been struggling with it since. Hopefully it is my knowledge that is the problem and not Plasma5 itself…

I’m running openSUSE 64 bit 13.2 and my first try was with the official openSUSE repos ( http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/13.2/repo/oss/

and http://download.opensuse.org/update/13.2/) when I didn’t manage to get it working 100% (or at least 60%) I added
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Qt5/openSUSE_13.2 and
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Frameworks5/openSUSE_13.2/ and switched the packages installed to those. Still the same problems.

The major problem is instability related to display issues. Dual monitor detection and setup isn’t working; screens is sometime broken in the middle, everything looks like a mess after screen locking and other problems. The instability issues are extremely hard to reproduce but it is constantly happening.

Other problems that I can reproduce 100% are:
Changing fonts; After restart General, Small, Toolbar and Menu is set to Oxygen-Sans, Fixed width to monospace, Windows title, Taskbar and Desktop is still what I set them to.

DPI problems; Graphics scales wrong. Some graphics and fonts are huge. Disabling Edi detection of DPI and setting it to a fixed value in xorg.conf solves the problem but will cause other problems when changing monitors etc.

kscreen-locker doesn’t accepts my password

Changing theme reverts back to Breeze

Changing colours reverts back to Breeze

The rendering is sluggish (maybe this isn’t a graphic issue but my impression is that it feels like I’m on a much older CPU, less memory etc compared to Plasma4).

I’m using kdm (tried sddm but it was even worse with a lot of other issues) and NVidia’s proprietary drivers (349.16 on a Quadro K2000M).

KInfocenter says Plasma 5.3.0, QT 5.4.1 and Frameworks 5.9.0

Hopefully there are solutions to all of this; conflicting packages, missing packages, basic configuration that needs to be done?

Best regards,
Tobias

2

Just found that the problems with fonts/colours/theme is a conflict with the old Desktop Settings (systemsettings provided by kdebase4-workspace-addons). The right one to use is System Settings…

Still have problems with screen locker and display issues.

Is there any way to get rid of all packages that might cause conflicts (wipe plasma4) without loosing all KDE applications? There seems to be a lot of dependencies to the old plasma/workspace packages.

Best regards,
Tobias

3

Most likely related to the graphics driver.
Do your problems disappear when you disable desktop effects in systemsettings5?

DPI problems; Graphics scales wrong. Some graphics and fonts are huge. Disabling Edi detection of DPI and setting it to a fixed value in xorg.conf solves the problem but will cause other problems when changing monitors etc.

Plasma5 takes the DPI into account for most things to make it work better on HiDPI displays.
Apparently your monitor reports its size wrongly.
As I don’t use multiple monitors, I’m not sure at the moment what the best way to fix this would be. Maybe there’s a way to tie the DPI setting to a particular monitor in the xorg.conf?

kscreen-locker doesn’t accepts my password

This might be a problem with your PAM setup.
Do you have any .rpmnew files in /etc/pam.d/?
Make sure that you use pam_unix.so, and not the older (and deprecated) pam_unix2.so. Using the latter causes exactly a problem like this.

grep unix /etc/pam.d/*

I’m using kdm (tried sddm but it was even worse with a lot of other issues) and NVidia’s proprietary drivers (349.16 on a Quadro K2000M).

The display manager should not make a difference.

Is the nvidia driver fully working?
Please install Mesa-demo-x if not installed, and post the output of:

glxinfo | grep render

KInfocenter says Plasma 5.3.0, QT 5.4.1 and Frameworks 5.9.0

Ok. I would still recommend you do a full repository vendor switch upgrade to the Qt5 and Frameworks5 repos (if you haven’t done that in the first place), you might have an incompatible mix of packages:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Vendor_change_update#Full_repository_Vendor_change

Well, it’s not really a conflict, but Plasma5/KF5 stores its settings in ~/.config/ (the standard since years) instead of the older ~/.kde4/share/config/. KDE4’s systemsettings (“Configure Desktop”) modifies the latter, i.e. KDE4’s settings, obviously.

Still have problems with screen locker and display issues.

See above.

Is there any way to get rid of all packages that might cause conflicts (wipe plasma4) without loosing all KDE applications? There seems to be a lot of dependencies to the old plasma/workspace packages.

The Plasma5 packages shouldn’t have any “dependencies to the old plasma/workspace packages”, in fact they conflict with them.
If you install Plasma5, the conflicting KDE4 workspace packages will be removed automatically.
Note that you will probably will still have things like kdebase4-workspace-libs and -addons installed (and also kdelibs4, kdebase4-runtime, and so on), but that’s on purpose and (still) necessary (if you don’t want to remove all KDE4 applications too). In any case it shouldn’t cause a problem.

4

with packages,
pam and pam-32bit installed
is it safe to delete
pam-modules and pam-modules-32bit?
as the later two seem to contain the most pam_unix2… files

cheers

5

Well, yes, it is probably safe to uninstall them. (the other modules that are contained are not used normally either)

But this will break your login completely if pam_unix2 is still referenced in the PAM config in /etc/pam.d/.

So I don’t really see the point in recommending/suggesting this. It doesn’t cause problems if the modules are installed, it “just” causes problems (with Plasma5’s lockscreen at least) when they (pam_unix2 in particular) are used. But it causes even more problems (i.e. you cannot login at all any more) if they are configured to be used but are not installed.

6

after looking through the file lists it was decided the packages were complementary

was just wondering as the output of grep unix /etc/pam.d/* was :-

/etc/pam.d/common-account:account       requisite       pam_unix.so     try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-account.pam-config-backup:account     required        pam_unix.so     try_first_pass
/etc/pam.d/common-account-pc:account    requisite       pam_unix.so     try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-auth:auth     sufficient      pam_unix.so     try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-auth.pam-config-backup:auth   required        pam_unix.so     try_first_pass
/etc/pam.d/common-auth-pc:auth  sufficient      pam_unix.so     try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-password:password     sufficient      pam_unix.so     use_authtok shadow try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-password.pam-config-backup:password        required        pam_unix.so     use_authtok nullok try_first_pass
/etc/pam.d/common-password-pc:password  sufficient      pam_unix.so     use_authtok shadow try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-session:session       required        pam_unix.so     try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-session.pam-config-backup:session     required        pam_unix.so     try_first_pass
/etc/pam.d/common-session-pc:session    required        pam_unix.so     try_first_pass 
/etc/pam.d/common-session.rpmnew:session        required        pam_unix.so     try_first_pass

thx for the insight

cheers

7

First of all; thanks for your detailed answer!

Most of the problems disappeared when I used the right configuration tool (systemsettings5 vs systemsettings). Strange although that a fresh start didn’t help (created a new user), but after running systemsettings5 most was ok.
Still a issue with the dpi and I discovered that with a two monitor set-up the dimensions of the monitor (the total area of both monitors) is wrong. This has nothing to do with Plasma or the framework but obviously the UI in Plasma4 looked better with wrong DPI.

Spot on! I changed the configuration files and removed pam-modules. No idea why this was installed in the first place; never thought about it until now.

I’ve been using the nvidia driver for years on my laptop. I think its stable.

jtl@w530-tolj:~> glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Quadro K2000M/PCIe/SSE2
    GL_ARB_compute_variable_group_size, GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted, 
    GL_KTX_buffer_region, GL_NVX_conditional_render, GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info, 
    GL_NV_compute_program5, GL_NV_conditional_render, 
    GL_NV_path_rendering, GL_NV_pixel_data_range, GL_NV_point_sprite, 
    GL_ARB_compute_variable_group_size, GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted, 
    GL_KTX_buffer_region, GL_NVX_conditional_render, GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info, 
    GL_NV_compute_program5, GL_NV_conditional_render, 
    GL_NV_path_rendering, GL_NV_pixel_data_range, GL_NV_point_sprite, 
    GL_EXT_render_snorm, GL_EXT_robustness, GL_EXT_sRGB, 
    GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_copy_buffer, GL_NV_copy_image, 
    GL_NV_packed_float_linear, GL_NV_path_rendering, 
    GL_OES_fbo_render_mipmap, GL_OES_geometry_point_size, 
jtl@w530-tolj:~>

So far it looks good, solved by running systemsettings5.

I realize that my usage of “conflicts” is totally wrong and not what I actually meant. I did a full switch to the new repositories and there are no conflicts between packages and everything seems to work. What I actualy meant was more like “how can I get rid of everything I don’t need if I’m not planning to switch between Plasma5 and 4”.
After your, good, answer I realize that I can’t; I just have to get used to the fact that there are things still needed and I have to figure out which one to use.

To summarize my problems;
There is a DPI issue with underlying drivers/software that is more obvious in Plasma5 and Breeze compared to Plasma4 and Oxygen.
Even with a fresh start (new user) you should run systemsettings5 (System Settings) and review all UI options (just open and click Apply is enough).
pam_unix2 doesn’t work with Plasma5’s screen locker and there isn’t any reason for using it.

8

Yes. Plasma4 didn’t really care about the DPI (except for fonts). That’s a problem on HiDPI screens though, as most UI elements will get too small.

Spot on! I changed the configuration files and removed pam-modules. No idea why this was installed in the first place; never thought about it until now.

Well, again, the problem is not that they are installed. And they are probably still installed by default, as pam_unix2 in particular might be used in the PAM config. Not installing or even removing it will break login completely in this case as mentioned.

In earlier openSUSE releases pam_unix2 was used by default. This has changed at some point (definitely with 13.1, maybe earlier) to use pam_unix now.

The possible problem regarding the screenlocker (because the PAM config isn’t changed on updates/upgrades) is known btw, but I don’t know whether a solution is in sight or even possible. (at least some users/admins will probably complain if the config would be changed to use pam_unix automatically, and it can even cause problems as the options are different)

I’ve been using the nvidia driver for years on my laptop. I think its stable.
…
So far it looks good, solved by running systemsettings5.

Yes, it does. That was just a guess, as graphics driver problems can easily cause instabilities, graphics corruptions, and sluggish rendering, which you mentioned. Especially as OpenGL is used more heavily.

I realize that my usage of “conflicts” is totally wrong and not what I actually meant. I did a full switch to the new repositories and there are no conflicts between packages and everything seems to work. What I actualy meant was more like “how can I get rid of everything I don’t need if I’m not planning to switch between Plasma5 and 4”.
After your, good, answer I realize that I can’t; I just have to get used to the fact that there are things still needed and I have to figure out which one to use.

Well, with KDE Applications 15.04 (released a few weeks ago: https://kde.org/announcements/applications/15.04.0/), ~70 more applications are KF5 based now. This is available for 13.2 as well from the repo KDE:Applications. You could add this and do a full switch to it, those KF5 packages have the same name as the older KDE4 versions so will replace them. And you’ll also get the latest version of the applications that are still KDE4 based this way.
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Applications/openSUSE_13.2/

To summarize my problems;
There is a DPI issue with underlying drivers/software that is more obvious in Plasma5 and Breeze compared to Plasma4 and Oxygen.

Correct. Plasma5 takes the reported DPI into account for most of its UI, whereas Plasma4 basically ignored it.

Even with a fresh start (new user) you should run systemsettings5 (System Settings) and review all UI options (just open and click Apply is enough).

Hm, I cannot really confirm this, but I’m not sure I understand you completely.
With a fresh user, you get the default Plasma5 settings of course. Which means the Breeze style and window decoration, and the Oxygen fonts. (I’m not sure at the moment what’s the default color scheme)
Opening systemsettings5 and clicking OK should not be necessary to “apply” the defaults.

One problem might be that the Oxygen fonts probably are not installed by default (on 13.2 at least), which can cause problems in particular with Konsole.

But yes, you have to use systemsettings5 to configure Plasma5. This also sets the corresponding settings for KDE4 btw, if applicable, but not the other way round. Although I think, at least some settings should be migrated from KDE4 on first start (i.e. when they are not explicitely set for Plasma5/KF5 yet). Maybe this is what causes your impression that one “should run systemsettings5 and review all UI options”?

pam_unix2 doesn’t work with Plasma5’s screen locker and there isn’t any reason for using it.

Yes.
And it isn’t used on fresh installations since some time.