KDE notes/tips

[khem]

If you like KDE/Plasma like me and use it regularly then this weekly post from Nate is interesting which covers latest developments in KDE world from end user point of view.

Adventures in Linux and KDE

Merry 'K’ristmas

[cbrake]

I’ve been liking KDE a lot! Thanks for the pointer to Nate’s blog!

I’ve you’ve not used KDE in recent history – definitely worth a look. Not the bloat-ware it was 10 years ago. Things like audio are well integrated, and Gnome apps (I still prefer Files) still work fine in KDE.

[cbrake]

With 3 monitors now, virtual desktops seemed a little less nice for providing a context for different projects/activities. So I started looking into KDE Activities. They are a lot like virtual desktops, but seem a little cleaner. One neat thing is you can select which Activities you want an app to show up in. This allows me to show email in my HM default activity but hide when I’m working on projects to minimize distraction. If I need email for a bit in an activity, I can also enable it for that activity.

KDE has a lot of customizations for activities – one example is the menu favorites can be changed per activity.

[cbrake]

@khem running plasma 5.23 here:

[khem]

I am also running plasma 5.23 on wayland !!!
this is much better than 5.22, its not as polished yet but its usable.
On laptop which has intel graphics I can not launch brave/chromium browser with ozone/wayland backend it works ok on nvidia card.

[cbrake]

One thing that is useful is to to set a window rule to show an app, such as your notes app, in all activities. This can be done by:

• Window-Rules
  • Window class, Exact Match: WorkFlowy
  • Add Property → Activities: Apply Initially: All Activities

[khem]

Fedora is planning to remove X11 completely with KDE/Plasma switch to QT6

https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/347

These are reasons

Three reasons for this removal:

• Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 and will be dropped in “a future major RHEL release”.
• Graphics fallback modes are Wayland-friendly now with SimpleDRM enabled since F36.
• NVIDIA drivers (since v495~v515) support GBM for Wayland instead of EGLStreams. Wayland is fully supported on current NVIDIA drivers.

I think this is a good move.

[khem]

Finally Plasma6 has reached Main Arch repositories !!!

[cbrake]

The upgrade worked fine here on computer #1.

The release article is pretty impressive:

KDE MegaRelease 6

[khem]

cool, are you using wayland ?

[cbrake]

Yes, on Intel laptop with Intel graphics – Wayland worked great. I think the text looks even better than before.

AMD workstation with Nvidia graphics has been another story.

• could not log in under my main account with X11 or Wayland
• logging in with some other accounts worked with X11
• logging in with Wayland on any account gives me three black screens with a large cursor in the middle of each screen, nothing else
• had to nuke my account and create a new one with useradd before I could log in with x11.

So, setting my main user account back up. Good to do this occasionally anyway to clean out the cruft …

Wish everything was as easy as Intel graphics …

[cbrake]

And workstation has a fairly modern Nvidia card:

4K monitor setup

As video cards are available again after the cryto crash, upgraded to a ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 3050. 3d board rendering in KiCad was not working which is what drove the upgrade. No complaints so far – mainstream nividia drivers in Arch just work. Plugs in directly to 3, 4K screens using DisplayPort cables. Still not as smooth as my son’s Macbook Air with a M1 chip – ohh well, plenty good for what I do. Bottom is old, top is new: [image] [image] [image]

[khem]

I have two machines, one is XPS with intel graphics, that is what I moved to using it first about 2 weeks ago using kde-unstable pacman feeds. The desktop has Nvidia card in it.

lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB]
        Kernel driver in use: nouveau

I have had it not boot into wayland for several months with Plasma 5, some random crash in KDE. I switched to using nouveau driver and it got magically fixed and it seems Plasma6+wayland seems to be holding on with nouveau too …

maybe I should try nvidia closed source driver again.

[cbrake]

There is also the nvidia-open package:

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/nvidia-open/

Alternatively for the Turing (NV160/TUXXX) series or newer the nvidia-open package may be installed for open source kernel modules on the linux kernel (On other kernels nvidia-open-dkms must be used).

I switched to that – still have problems with Wayland, but plan to run with this driver on X11 for now.

I think the Wayland problem is confusion between Radeon and Nvidia graphics or something AMD-related.

Chris C. reported success on two Intel/Nvidia systems with KDE 6 + Wayland.

[khem]

today I tried switching from nouveau to nvidia drivers and they worked fine too.

❯ lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"                 
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB]
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia

[cbrake]

Thanks, all this is pointing to an AMD issue …