Back in May, I installed Rocky Linux and I installed KDE Plasma and then I completely removed Gnome. I’ve never liked Gnome, and I especially don’t like it now. All worked fine. No issues. KDE worked as expected and I was happy.
However, earlier this month, I mucked up my install by make some other changes with left things in a bad state, so I decided to do a complete fresh re-install and start over only this time KDE is not working as before.
The issue seems to be with SDDM. SDDM does not display the login screen, nor when the screen locks. Upon boot and first login I just get a black screen. If I change from SDDM to GDM I can log in just fine and all seems to work, but the screen locks, I get the screen background, but no login.
I’ve poked around and tried different things. I don’t see anything in log files that is an issue. I’m not sure why it worked a month ago, but now, it doesn’t work.
The kernel in 8.6 has new backports. Qt5 uses them. Would use, if they were more complete. Now, you get what you see: broken Qt-based apps. RH is supposedly working on fixes.
Yep, Poor KDE Plasma, I am having as lot of issues also and waiting for a fix, even KSysguard is dead in the water, you have to disable Screen locking or your locked out, I keep getting random KDE crashes which I never had before the 6.8 update. lots of widgets don’t work any more, not very happy one bit…
Yes, but KDE was deprecated by RedHat a long time ago, and the qt5 bug might be only part of the issue. I’m interested to know how did you even manage to install KDE from the official Rocky repos?
He didn’t , he used the epel repos …strangely “extra packages for ENTERPRISE LINUX” (from RH’s official upstream project) which RH purports to be… possibly following these instructions.
If RH is publishing a general operating system (and RL is a clone of same) then any sofware conforming to the docs and guidelines should work. Any argument to the contrary is b****x.
RH don’t get to “deprecate” software they don’t produce in the same way that if I write an application for android google don’t get to deprecate it. They may alter their requirements for it to run but if I meet those requirements and they **** up and drop the ball and what should work doesn’t it is THEIR fault not mine.
Red Hat can deprecate what they want because it is their platform, not yours. Whether you agree with that or not is something entirely different.
Your application is your problem and not theirs. Therefore if they change their platform and your application stops working then it is your problem to fix because it is your application that you built.
Android is Google’s platform so they can do what they want as well and if your app does not work it is your problem to fix.
Also EPEL is a third party repository it is not official. Otherwise it would be in their subscriptions. Therefore if you use it and it doesn’t work then it it not Red Hat’s problem.
This may all be true, but I guess most of us here use RHEL clones because they’re not moving targets and don’t integrate nasty surprises at every update. I’m managing a few networks in our local school, in public libraries etc. I’ve been using CentOS since version 4.x for the job, and when they changed their paradigm I switched to Rocky Linux.
I spent quite some time on a no-bullshit setup for an enterprise class desktop based on Rocky Linux and KDE. No I won’t go with GNOME because it’s a steaming pile of crap, and Red Hat’s decision to ditch KDE is utterly stupid.
Since the update to 8.6 this setup is basically useless. So I’m still running Rocky Linux on all my servers, but on the desktop it’s OpenSUSE Leap + KDE.
With changes coming to openSuse Leap (15.5 final version, rebase on ALP, possible no KDE in immutable OS) we may need a replacement. A stable RPM distro with lots of supported 3d party software and KDE integration.
Something like KDE Neon but instead of basing on Ubuntu LTS basing on RHEL/Rocky/Alma/Oracle
You won’t touch GNOME and Red Hat won’t touch KDE. They may very well see KDE like you see GNOME. I wonder why they don’t see GNOME as “steaming pile of crap”?
One of those inexplicable questions is that that RH-RHEL is based on various Fedora spins fixed in time. OK. But Fedora has a KDE Spin. RH use to support both GNOME AND KDE before they decided to stick with ONLY GNOME. openSUSE and many other distros have both a GNOME as well as a KDE offering… other than – of course – Red Hat. Given that RHEL is based upon some version/s of Fedora, and that Red Hat once supported both GNOME and KDE for years and years, now makes no sense. It is the finger in the eye. Yeah, I get it: RHEL is suppose to be ONLY for servers, which IMHO is a gigantic mistake. Beyond “Servers” there are a lot – an understatement if there were any – of people who run WORKSTATIONS. A business – any business – succeeds or fails based on good customer relations as well as good word of mouth. Within the past 2 years Red Hat screwed over the CentOS Community, a very vibrant community; second they decided to no longer support KDE. That Red Hat is creating a lot of ill will with its actions as of late can’t be understated. If Red Hat pisses too many people off, it would not be inconceivable that someone might fork Red Hat’s code.
I’m still waiting for Red Hat to issue a new kernel to supersede kernel 9.1 which came out over a month ago and is buggy as it goes. Maybe Red Hat is throwing all its eggs into the RHEL 9.0 basket and ignoring RHEL 8.x. The problem with that strategy is that any XYX.0 release is is filled with bugs, and is seldom ready for Prime Time before the XYZ.2 or .3 release comes out – that’s 1-2 YEARS down the road.
As to KDE… I have a Love/Hate relationship with KDE 5. Someone should have put KDE 5 out of misery a long time ago – someone should have stuck a fork into it a long time ago – it is DONE!! But still it drags on now at version 5.26 (!!) KDE 4 was killed off at 4.14, and it was a superior DE in many ways to KDE 5, and far less buggy. KDE 5 is the Zombie DE that refuses to die!!
As to your problem with KDE Plasma not working as expected part of the problem is induced by Red Hat, and Part by KDE. KDE works fine in openSUSE 15.3 Leap which makes me think that part of the problem is induced by Red Hat; that said KDE 5 manages to screw up lots of things – in one version XYZ works fine, but then they introduce new code that breaks XYZ, then they fix XYZ, but that breaks ABC, and so on and so forth; now throw Red Hat into the mix and… you get the drift.
The best way to solve the problem is to give Red Hat the finger and ditch SDDM altogether, as well as GDM. Install LightDM. Back in CentOS 7.x GDM lead to run away processes, so I installed SDDM to get around the GDM problem. On the very next point release Red Hat managed to royally screw up SDDM as well. Once again i was forced to find an alternative, and I stumbled upon LightDM. Highly configurable and it should fix most of your problems. I have it installed on my Workstation running Rocky Linux 8.5, with a KDE DE. I can’t say if it will work in 8.6, as 8.6 blew up my system and I had to roll back to 8.5.
If you are running Nvidia under 8.6 that is so far a no go, but it works fine under 8.5. There is something really screwed up in RHEL 8.6 (and its children). I can only hope that Red Hat is going to release a new kernel very shortly has 9.1 is a disaster.
Like you I am a Red Hat sort of guy having started using Red Hat since Red Hat 7.x (NOT RHEL 7.x) and some of it clones such as Mandrake Linux which became Mandrivia Linux, then Fedora Linux which became Fedora, and finally CentOS which I started using in CentOS 5.x, the 6.x, and currently 7.x up to 7.9. I then started messing with CentOS 8.x but finally found it to be usable at 8.3, and started migrating things over when 8.4 then got chopped off at the knees by Red Hat so now I’m in Rocky Linux. RL 8.5 is fairly good but – so far – 8.6 is a disaster.
I always use a Primary and a Secondary OS. My Primary OS I am struggling to make Rocky Linux, but it has – thanks to Red Hat, and NOT Rocky Linux – a LOT of problems especially if you use KDE. Yeah I keep hearing that the reason KDE does not work well is because Red Hat does not support it therefore it is NOT red Hat’s fault. Give me a break: Red Hat supported KDE for YEARS – at least as far as I can remember – then a few years ago they simply no longer decided to support it. The problem with this logic is that RHEL is based on on FEDORA specific spins, and and FEDORA has a KDE spin. That Red Hat chooses to use ONLY the GNOME spin and not the KDE spin as well is a Red Hat choice, but given that FEDORA is a Red Hat project means that Red Hat could have included KDE in RHEL just as much as they included GNOME. That most major distros include a KDE option means that Red Hat is simply a Bully that wants to flex its muscles by NOT including a KDE option.
I said that I have both a Primary and a Secondary OS. My Secondary OS is openSUSE 15.3 (soon to be 15.4) Leap which is also an Enterprise Grade OS. Putting openSUSE 15.3 Leap next RHEL 8.5 (and its children) and comparing them down the line they are virtually identical, the big difference is that openSUSE simply WORKS and things I use to run in CentOS 7.9 can be found in an updated form in openSUSE 15.3, but can not be found in RHEL (and its children) 8.5. My biggest beef with openSUSE is their seemingly chaotic way of doing things in all things Red Hat you know things can be found; in SUSE, it is a Chinese Puzzle Box. That said once you have it set up your good to go, and everything you want can be found.
Right now I am waiting for Red Hat to update the Kernel (9.1) in RHEL 8.6, as 9.1 is a disaster. Thus as I sit waiting for that update I am running openSUSE 15.3 which I may soon be updating to 15.4… IF I can figure out HOW to it…
Back in 2006, Patrick Volkerding (the creator of the first usable Linux distribution) decided to remove GNOME from Slackware Linux, because it was basically unmaintainable.
I’ve started out on Slackware Linux a long time ago, and I’ve built KDE, GNOME and Xfce from source back in the days. Starting with version 3.0, GNOME turned into a nightmare.
Yup, that’s when I stopped using it. Gnome 2 was great. I did use KDE3 for a bit before that though. Now I use Cinammon because it’s far better than Gnome. For lightweight desktops I like LXDE. Enlightenment is great also but there aren’t many distros that include it with an up-to-date version of it. Fluxbox isn’t bad also if you like minimalistic. But then we are talking about window managers rather than desktop environments. Haven’t used any newer KDE versions as such, I think I did fire up KDE4 once, but wasn’t all that keen on it. But then we all have our own personal preferences for desktops
This is absolutely the case. I’ve noticed they stop “rebasing” software around half way through the support period, which makes the second part of the “LTS” support almost useless, but it’s similar with other vendors, where they lose interest after a new version is released.
The extreme dislike of Gnome makes me wonder what exatly is bad about it? There must be some concrete examples of things that don’t work, or don’t provide a good user experince.
It is the UI paradigm. It is so different from any other UI I’ve ever worked with that is is unusable. That is exacerbated by gnome assuming I am stupid and so makes access to the system difficult or impossible. There isn’t even a system configuration dialog without installing extra packages. It has been a while so that may be different now. Still, the UI paradigm is so different from what I am used to that I was not able to be productive.
I Don’t “hate” gnome, however I do dislike that RH seems determined to undermine KDE. To me KDE has been stable and usable for a very long time and it is what I am used to. Why not support any of the open source window managers that keep people coming back to Linux.
Having said that… Even though RH doesn’t support KDE, I have found it to be easy enough to get installed on new workstations. A couple of quick searches leads me to instructions on where to find what I need, and there continues to be multiple repositories containing the RPMs needed to get KDE up an running.
I’d like to stay with a RPM based (RH) OS and so far RockyLinux seems to be a good replacement for CentOS. Thanks for that.
