KVM, KDE, upgrading from 8.6 to 8.7 (rant)

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

Hi,

I’ve been running Rocky Linux on all my servers since 8.4 was published. A few weeks ago, I decided to also move my desktop clients to a mix of Rocky Linux and KDE from EPEL, since I was weary of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s weekly upgrade tsunami (and Leap’s future is more than uncertain).

So my workstation was almost complete. Last thing to setup was KVM, libvirt and virt-manager to manage virtual machines, and… uh oh. Trying to setup a VM using virt-manager results in a hard freeze.

Hard reboot, try again, same result: freeze.

So let’s upgrade everything first. Before doing that, I’ll give it a spin on my sandbox PC, which is running the same setup. Uh oh, upgrade conflicts, so I do a dnf remove qt5-* to get rid of KDE, we’ll deal with that later. Upgrade goes fine, so now I have to reinstall the KDE Plasma Workspaces package group. There’s a bunch of conflicts, but since the new KDE is in EPEL Testing, I enable this repository. This time the install goes fine, but I have to reinstall the nvidia-x11-drv-470xx driver. Reboot to SDDM and… uh oh. No login manager, just a black screen with my mouse pointer, and no SDDM. Looks like something shit the bed again with KDE vs. RHEL like in 8.5.

So now I have an unusable system and another one I can’t update.

The whole point of running an enterprise class system (because that’s what I’ve been doing since the days of CentOS 4.x) was precisely to avoid this kind of nasty surprises.

This is one of these days where I seriously consider moving to Debian and deal with their shorter support cycle.

Edit: looks like KDE from EPEL only works on even point releases (8.4, 8.6, etc.) but not on uneven point releases (8.5, 8.7, etc.)

Edit 2: Why do minor upgrades break basic things like variables in /etc/os-release ?!? Why ?!?

2

Rocky 8.7 released newer QT packages, and so EPEL needs to rebase it on these. So until EPEL catches up, KDE is lagging behind and this is why it works with 8.6.

Had KDE been natively in RHEL/Rocky like Gnome is, then it would have worked immediately.

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Isn’t it contradictory to run an enterprise class system to avoid surprises and then install an unsupported desktop environment?

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It isn’t if you intensely dislike gnome.

Emmett

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5

My unfiltered views on GNOME would probably earn me a lifetime ban from this forum. :upside_down_face:

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I did some more testing, and this time I managed to do a fresh install of minimal Rocky 8.7, X11 and then KDE from EPEL Testing. Looks fine so far.

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What, no way :slight_smile: don’t worry you’re not the only one I hate it too :stuck_out_tongue: I use Cinnamon :slight_smile:

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OK KDE Lovers. You can now install KDE in RL 8.7!! I just installed it on my WS. Thank God!! XFCE was driving me nuts. OH BTW: your VD will still remain the way you had them in 8.6!!!