KDE Plasma not working as expected

Rocky Linux Help & Support
21

That’s what I don’t understand: While I understand that Red Hat has been GNOME centric like forever, they also supported KDE as well, until about 2 years ago. That RHEL is based on FEDORA – a Red Hat supported project – and there is a FEDORA KDE spin, it can not be that difficult to have incorporated both GNOME and KDE in RHEL. Virtually every distro – including the major heavy hitters such as SUSE and Kubuntu and Arch Linux , with SUSE definitely playing in the “Enterprise” space – offer at least GNOME and KDE.

The actions of Red Hat within the past two years – between killing off CentOS with its vibrant community, and no longer supporting KDE – seems to be they have a death wish.

There might be one explanation: Red Hat was bought out by IBM, and possibly IBM wants to make RHEL narrowly focused to work on BIG IRON only – ie Servers and Server Farms, in which case they really do not need a GUI. Simply put IBM does not care about people who run WORKSTATIONS, that said, that would be REALLY shortsighted that most BUSINESSES, have a raft of WORKSTATIONS, that run in conjunction with those Servers. Trying to force businesses to use ONLY GNOME, when many prefer to use KDE, could force those businesses to that their business elsewhere – like SUSE, a strong competitor to RHEL. IBM could also be betting that that workstations will become a thing of the past, and that the future is in VIRTUAL COMPUTING and “CLOUD” storage, that will be based on those Servers and Server Farms.

22

OK, being “different” is not the same as being “bad” (as other have claimed).

Assumption of “stupidity” could be interpreted as trying to be “user friendly”, which might be considered good or bad depending on how you look at it, but again I’d be interested in a concrete example of where it treats you as stupid?

Regarding making access to the system “difficult or impossible”, can you give some examples of what it prevents you from doing or makes it really difficult?

As far as I can tell the “System Settings” applet is installed as part of Gnome on RHEL and Rocky, no need for any extra packages.

In my case I dislike the default Gnome user interface, where you have to “shove a mouse” into the top left corner, but you can switch to Gnome classic which is quite different; you end up with start button, cascading menus, tabs for windows, multiple workspaces, desktop icons etc. I especially like the terminal windows with dark background which I find really helpful when using ssh sessions into multiple servers.

23

"Regarding making access to the system “difficult or impossible”, can you give some examples of what it prevents you from doing or makes it really difficult?

As far as I can tell the “System Settings” applet is installed as part of Gnome on RHEL and Rocky, no need for any extra packages."

Agree!! I keep GNOME… and Cinnamon, and Mate, and… as alternatives just in case KDE blows up, then I can test to see if its id the OS or the DE. My favorite alternative has to be Cinnamon. Each DE has its pluses and minuses. GNOME is not simply as slick as KDE, which is far more configurable than GNOME. Still, for a down and dirty DE for it will do for short periods of time – I’d hate to be confined to that God Awful DE and GDM for more than a short period of time… it would drive me bananas!!

D’ Cat

24

I suppose you’d have to ask the designers why they did what they did - why they thought their way was better, but look at the main tool/application/task bar, workspace selection and top left hotspot and think what happens when you have an extended desktop across multiple screens, particularly with one on your left …

There’s more but that just jumps out as bad design - it certainly feels like they were oblivious to a multi-monitor setup when they did it and yes there are ways to deal with it but none of that effort/web searching/customisation is necessary on any other DE - they just work as you’d expect on multi-display systems.

There’s also a lot more inconsistency in application window controls in Gnome than in KDE.

1 Like
25

Frankly, Gnome, Windows, Mate, OS X, XFCE, etc all look same to me. Some clickety clack GUI crap. They all can open terminal and that is good enough for me.

26

surely that’s more of a terminal thing ?

Not all terminals are created equal - there’s no KDE ctrl-shift-k equiv in Gnome - its a very basic terminal application and without a GUI/DE using a terminal is a real pain for most people: no copy/paste, endless esoteric chants and spells - when I ssh to a server I do it from a DE terminal app so I can copy/paste… and I get long paths by right clicking on a file in Netbeans and selecting “copy path”… saves me loads of boring typing.

27

Bobar, pay no attention to jlehtone, he’s a “Terminal Case” :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

D’ Cat

1 Like
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Only if you are very, very, lucky and own a GENUINE IBM Model M Keyboard :grin:. There are some that come pretty damn close to that GENUINE IBM Model M Keyboard FEEL and SOUND, but there is still only one IBM Model M Keyboard (and I have one)! :smiling_imp:

29

I refer to mouse clicks, but isn’t it interesting that all UIs “click”?

30

Yes, but I assume you’re still using some kind of GUI, unless you’re doing the whole thing in a full screen console window? So in that case, the GUI that you use is still important, even if it’s just to display four terminal windows.

It’s also important that linux (and open source) in general can do everything that other closed source operating systems can do; e.g. Office suite, pdfs, print preview, 3d modelling, gaming, web browsing, multi-media and so on.

31

jlehtone

1d

I refer to mouse clicks, but isn’t it interesting that all UIs “click”?

HUMMMMMMM Morning Chuckles!!! Point taken. The is probably a leftover artifact in the English Language from back in the day when when the God Forsaken M$ was used which made that characteristic “click” sound. That sound however can’t be totally ignored even if you choose to go with a Terminal Only setup assuming you Cut and Paste, and you use a Mouse – any Mouse – indeed if you don’t have a mouse BIOS is going to throw a fit during POST that you don’t have a Mouse (or Keyboard). Hell here is another thing to consider: When you CUT text you se a pair of scissors and what sound goes with scissors?? That’s right “snip” ! So the mouse goes “click”, scissors go “snip”, so what do we do with paste – usually associated with a brush – maybe “splat”? So maybe when we Cut “snip” and Paste “splat”, we could go “snip” “splat”? Maybe we could make a song out of this:

“Old Jlehtone had a rig, E I E I O, and on his rig he had a MOUSE, E I E I O with a “click” " click” here, and a “click” “click” there, here a “click”, there a “click”, everywhere a “click” “click” Old Jlehtone had a rig, E I E I O, and with his rig he would SNIP some text, E I E I O with a “snip” “snip” here and a “snip” “snip” there, here a “snip”, there a “snip” everywhere a “snip” “snip” Old Jlehtone had a rig, E I E I O and with his rig he would PASTE some text, E I E I O, with a “splat” “splat” here and a “splat” “splat” there, here a “splat”, there a “splat” everywhere a “splat” “splat” Old Jlehtone had a rig, E I E I O" :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Note: apparently “< >” does not work so I used " " .

Any rate guys I have to go prop open my eyes and get some coffee – and take my various meds. But there is a 50% chance of RAIN today, and that means my Migraines will be BAAACK, and that means I’ll be pretty much stoned by later this afternoon:

“But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned”

Bob Dylan - “Everybody Must Get Stoned”

D’ Cat

32

Looks like AlmaLinux 9 provides live images with ” GNOME, GNOME-mini, KDE, Xfce and more “
and it comes preloaded with the required repos, must check this out…

33

We provide live images as well for those variants for 8 and they’ll be there for 9 as well - In fact I’ve been working on verifying our kickstarts the past couple days to make sure they work before we release 9.0. Both us and Alma find high value in providing live images like that for our users, which is great. That was something I personally missed from CentOS 7.

34

So, KDE in Rocky 9 is stable and everything works?

35

When you say live image, is this like the direction CentOS is going, where its constantly connected to the internet and constantly updating?

36

AFAIK, “live image” is usually a pre-made installation on removable media. You drop the image on media and can then boot and run from that media. Since it is “full install”, it has typical user applications and it does not require any storage from the machine. In other words, you can boot and use “a Linux desktop” without actually installing one. The downside is that you can’t really modify the installation or save data.

Such live image does not require any network. The only way to “update” such image is to create new image with new content.

The Rocky installer images are also something that you can boot and run, but they have only one application: the “Anaconda*” installer that installs Rocky to (local) storage of the computer.

*Not to be confused with Python utility “Anaconda” (aka Conda).

37

You say that KDE images are available for Rocky 8, but according to your www site there is only Gnome and Xfce, where is the KDE, so where is the KDE download image and will there be a KDE download image for 9?

38

@TonyH First, he said they provide live images, he didn’t write that there is a KDE one. That doesn’t mean in the future there won’t be one.

Also Rocky 9 hasn’t been released yet, so you cannot download any images for it until there is. So therefore KDE in Rocky 9 also hasn’t been prepared yet either. KDE comes from third-party repositories as well.

39

Alma don’t have KDE/kfce images for 8.6 either - you’re not gonna get that 'cause its broke in RHEL and clones (quite rightly) don’t apply their own fixes. I did see someone somewhere doing a build where they did the obvious fix - report the broken API as unavailable so qt etc fell back to the original approach but you’d be dealing with lots of unknowns there.

It’s likely 8.7 will put everything back to normal.

If you’re going to 9 anyway, Alma have a 9 KDE live img now.

Right now if you want KDE you can either stay on 8.5 and wait for 8.7 (fingers crossed but I’d take that bet) or move to 9. If staying on 8.5 set your repos to archive or local repos so it doesn’t use 8.6 repos but you can still get stuff or disable them completely.

40

Well nazunalika did say “We provide live images as well for those variants for 8 and they’ll be there for 9 as well”, so I assumed the variants were what we were talking about, including KDE.
BTW I won’t be upgrading to 9 as it isn’t compatible with Houdini, I will wait, it’s a pity, but such is life…