So I just did a zypper dup on this machine, running Tumbleweed. I had it on KDE4, as KDE5 is too immature at this stage for doing actual work.
What happens now is that I cannot login to any user accounts in the normal way. If I try to do so, i.e., enter a username and password, it just goes back to the KDM greeter after a second. I have no idea what’s going wrong or where to look for clues. /var/log/messages, /var/log/kdm, /var/log/Xorg.0.log offer no clues. Neither existing no newly created users can login.
Non-KDE environments work. What also works is clocking on “Failsafe” (not “KDE Failsafe”) for the session type. This brings up a terminal window with a purple-coloured background, from which one can start kwin and then plasma-desktop, and then things work almost as normal, save that neither the lock screen nor the log out commands work.
If I install plasma5 it works normally, but as I said, that is not an option at this point. So I “taboo” plasma5-session and go back to KDE4. Nothing gets worse, but nothing gets better either.
So in summary, any pointers as to how to run KDE4 with the latest Tumbleweed are appreciated.
Note: Please do stick to the request as asked. If I were interested on an interview as to my motives for wanting / not wanting to run / not run something or other, I would have invited you to do so. I haven’t.
Ok, so zapping kwin5 did not make the slightest bit of difference.
But on the other hand, firing up /usr/bin/startkde by hand gave me a clue: krandr was no longer installed, for whatever reason. I just installed it and now things are back to normal.
The problem is that kscreen (the KDE4 version, and also plasma-nm) did not build any more and have been removed from the distribution (over a month ago already) as KDE4 is not supported any more anyway.
Therefore also the dependency has been removed.
But KDE4’s startkde does still run “krandrstartup” on login to apply the krandr settings. (kscreen contains a dummy script)
krandr is the predecessor of kscreen and has been deprecated and replaced 2 years ago (but it’s still available).
Hello Wolf, thank you for the explanation. I had seen one of your previous posts about kscreen but at the time I did not fully appreciate its relevance to my problem. I’ll leave things as they are for now but will come back to this post on my next zypper dup.
When you say that “KDE4 is not supported any more”, you mean not supported by whom? By KDE? By OpenSUSE? Or by Tumbleweed?
There is, IMO, some rather critical bits missing from KDE5 and, frankly, I find it aesthetically much worse than KDE4.
KDE dropped support for KDE4, the desktop, in August, that’s when the final version was released. Other parts of “KDE4” are unmaintained (by KDE) even longer already.
openSUSE switched to Plasma5 as default KDE desktop in Tumbleweed in May, since then the KDE4 desktop is not really supported by openSUSE any more. It wasn’t actively removed, but as time goes on more and more bits fail to build and nobody from the openSUSE KDE team is going to fix them any more, and upstream/KDE neither.
We (openSUSE’s KDE team) don’t have the resources to maintain KDE4 on our own, in addition to Plasma5 and all KDE applications.
Also, more and more KDE4 applications are ported to KF5, and the KDE4 versions are dropped. They should run fine in a KDE4 desktop (or any other desktop actually), but certain things will not work: service menus, thumbnailers, device actions, …
Also it won’t get tested any more, and problems are unlikely to get fixed, neither by openSUSE nor KDE.
There is, IMO, some rather critical bits missing from KDE5 and, frankly, I find it aesthetically much worse than KDE4.
Well, you can change the look and feel, KDE4’s oxygen theme is still available as well.
I can’t say much about “rather critical bits missing”, as this is not very specific.
I’d rather tend to disagree there though.
Hi Wolfi, thanks for the explanation. I do wish these KDE transitions were a bit less painful though, I guess we all remember the KDE3 → KDE4 fracas.
I wasn’t specific on purpose, as I could not remember what those issues were. But two showstoppers for me at the moment are:
Kate / KWrite’s file open dialogues cannot work with remote files. As nearly all my work is with remote files, that’s a major inconvenience even if there are workarounds.
The clock widget thing on the panel does not show calendar events (nor holidays?). Again, major workflow issue for me.
In my opinion the changes between KDE3 and KDE4 were on a completely different level.
KDE4’s desktop was a complete metaphor change.
And the desktop also was not finished/ready at all when it had been released in 4.0.
Kate / KWrite’s file open dialogues cannot work with remote files. As nearly all my work is with remote files, that’s a major inconvenience even if there are workarounds.
Works fine here.
What kind of “remote files” are you talking about? What happens when you try to open them?
But that doesn’t have anything to do with the desktop at all anyway.
You’d have the same problem if you used the latest Kate/KWrite version on a KDE4 desktop, or even GNOME, XFCE, whatever.
The clock widget thing on the panel does not show calendar events (nor holidays?). Again, major workflow issue for me.
The KDEPIM libraries have only been ported to KDE Frameworks5 a few months ago. This has been added to Plasma5 since, and should work with KDE Frameworks 5.17.0, to be released on Saturday (it will of course take a while until it is in Tumbleweed).
