Miscellaneous issues with KDE Plasma

pming · Jul 29, 2022

I have been running KDE Plasma for my main workstation PC for a few months now and I have to say I am quite happy with how things are working. I am even slowly beginning to become independent from using my MacBook and Windows installation on another drive of my workstation and feeling great about it!

However there are still some quirks which I would like to try to eliminate to make my FreeBSD Desktop experience even better.

Issue #0: drkonqi.core dump / crash after logout
Initially I got this file "drkonqi.core" in my user home every time I shut down the machine.
By applying this fix I was able to narrow it down so it only happens when I log out of the Plasma session: https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/...wn-or-reboot-in-kde-plasma5.77871/post-485805
Running pkaction I was not able to identify a "login/logout" action to which I could possibly apply another rule...

Issue #1: Managing Applications in the app launcher, app launcher settings
Starting off I wanted to enable buttons for shutdown and reboot in the app launcher settings. You can choose to enable "session" buttons (logout, lock, switch user) and "energy" (suspend, shutdown, reboot) buttons or both categories. Switching them in the app launcher settings had no effect at all. I then deleted some files according to post #17 in this discussion: https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/kde-can-t-add-favorites-to-app-starter-menu/33538.
The files I deleted were:
~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/resources/*
~/.config/kactivitymanagerd-statsrc
~/.config/menus (this was mentioned in another discussion)
After reboot the buttons of the "energy" management category appeared in the app launcher, I was then able to manage these categories in the app launcher settings, having them change immediately after I pressing "apply" in the app launcher settings menu.
But another problem I have is that I cannot add or remove favorite apps. Well, basically I can but it needs improving. When doing a right-click on an application in the app launcher and pressing "add to favorites" or "remove from favorites" (for an app that's already a favorite), nothing happens. But if I then switch the app launcher mode by right-clicking on the app launcher symbol, choosing "show alternatives" and switching to a different type of app launcher, the application that I wanted to add or to remove will show up under favorites or be removed. So basically it works, but I would prefer not having to do this every time I make a change to the favorites menu.

Issue #2: Numpad in login screen is off
I enabled the numpad in BIOS however it acts in quite a funky way. Booting the system, the numpad is active, but as soon as KDE loads (as soon as the system gets to the login screen), it's not active anymore. When I press the numlock key while at the KDE login screen the numpad will get activated, however, as soon as I log out (back to the login screen), it will get deactivated immediately, clearly noticeable by the LED on my keyboard. I remember that I had to enable some sort of "keyboard service" to get KDE to recognize the correct keyboard layout, otherwise it would always stay in the default layout, but that didn't help with this problem.

I haven't done a whole lot of research on the following issues YET so I can't really point out the details:
Issue #3: Energy saving
In KDE system settings / energy management I chose to turn off my screens after 10 minutes. That's not happening.

Issue #4: Kate performance
Kate, the default KDE text editor sometimes hangs for a few seconds. Also, very very rarely the whole KDE Desktop seems to lag or freeze for a few seconds. I suspect both of those issues might be related to my wireless mouse (which I normally use plugged in, but its micro-USB connector has a bit of wear on it after some years of use, sometimes disrupting the connection). I should examine /var/log/messages to see if it gets disconnected momentarily, right? Any other pointers to possible performance issues, where I should look or what I could tune? Any known issues with Kate? Hardware should generally not be the issue (all new AMD 5950x, 64G RAM, NVME SSD...)

Issue #5: KDE Discover - no backends available
This is probably a minor issue. KDE discover reports that no backends are available. I don't need to use KDE Discover basically at all, really, but maybe this is pointing to an underlying cause that something in general doesn't work right or that a service isn't running properly...

I am currently reading up on some forum threads about KDE, so I'm sure I'll find some good information in the mean time.
Any help is greatly appreciated!

uname -a

Code:

FreeBSD mymachine 13.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE releng/13.1-n250148-fc952ac2212 GENERIC amd64

Plasma version is 5.24.6

Best regards

zirias@ · Jul 29, 2022

pming said:
Issue #5: KDE Discover - no backends available
This is probably a minor issue. KDE discover reports that no backends are available. I don't need to use KDE Discover basically at all, really, but maybe this is pointing to an underlying cause that something in general doesn't work right or that a service isn't running properly...

Nope, there just isn't a backend integrating with FreeBSD's pkg(8).
this commit message encourages you to write one

pming · Jul 30, 2022

Zirias said:
Nope, there just isn't a backend integrating with FreeBSD's pkg(8).
this commit message encourages you to write one

Okay, I'll try to help. It would be great if you could give me a QRD on what it would take to complete that task.

pming · Jul 30, 2022

I was able to solve Issues 0 and 2 by adding
/usr/local/etc/polkit-1/rules.d/40-wheel-group.rules

Code:

polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
                if (subject.isInGroup("wheel")) {
                        return polkit.Result.YES;
}
});

I think this solved the crash of drkonqi on logout.

And I ran sddm --example-config >> /usr/local/etc/sddm.conf
Because I had no sddm.conf. The Numlock issue was fixed by changing "Numlock=none" to "Numlock=on".

This helped: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD/Setup. Apparently I didn't create these files when I installed KDE.

zirias@ · Jul 31, 2022

pming said:
Okay, I'll try to help. It would be great if you could give me a QRD on what it would take to complete that task.

In short, what's needed to use plasma discover on FreeBSD would be a pkg(8) backend for PackageKit.

Here's an introduction to PackageKit, and pkg(8) provides a C API in /usr/local/include/pkg.h (to better understand it, a look at https://github.com/freebsd/pkg is probably helpful), so I assume it would be possible to write a "compiled backend" for PackageKit.

It's probably not a simple task. One thing to consider is that PackageKit expects backends to work fully async, so you'll probably have to delegate any pkg API functions that do I/O to threads.

pming · Jul 31, 2022

Zirias said:
In short, what's needed to use plasma discover on FreeBSD would be a pkg(8) backend for PackageKit. Here's an introduction to PackageKit, and pkg(8) provides a C API in /usr/local/include/pkg.h (to better understand it, a look at https://github.com/freebsd/pkg is probably helpful), so I assume it would be possible to write a "compiled backend" for PackageKit. It's probably not a simple task. One thing to consider is that PackageKit expects backends to work fully async, so you'll probably have to delegate any pkg API functions that do I/O to threads.

Thanks, I'll read up on it. I have some questions but I don't want to derail from the original topic. I'm sure there already threads about this...

zirias@ · Jul 31, 2022

pming said:
Thanks, I'll read up on it. I have some questions but I don't want to derail from the original topic. I'm sure there already threads about this...

I didn't expect you want to "get down and dirty" doing some actual coding to "fix" this

– I'd be surprised to find a thread about it*), such topics are typically discussed on the mailing lists (e.g. freebsd-hackers@) or on IRC

*) edit: still nothing wrong with opening one I guess, "userland programming and scripting" would most likely be appropriate!

pming · Aug 18, 2022

zirias@ said:
I didn't expect you want to "get down and dirty" doing some actual coding to "fix" this – I'd be surprised to find a thread about it*), such topics are typically discussed on the mailing lists (e.g. freebsd-hackers@) or on IRC

*) edit: still nothing wrong with opening one I guess, "userland programming and scripting" would most likely be appropriate!

I had some spare time and was looking for something to do, but yeah, this is too big of a task for me, at least for the moment...

pming · Aug 18, 2022

To update on the remaining issues:
#1: I added my favorite apps to the launcher as described and didn't find out anything more about this problem. I can live with having to do this from time to time. I won't have to change this menu everyday...
#3: Turning off screens still isn't working. Also, I can manually start "Standby" and resume by pressing the power button on my PC, but it won't go into standby automatically after the time I set in KDE system settings.
I did play around with xset dpms for turning the screens off, that only seems to work when I run xset dpms or xset dpms 10 0 0 in a shell. I could not get it to work automatically neither by setting this in /usr/local/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, ~/.xinitrc nor ~/.xsession. Maybe I should try adding an autostart script for this...
#4: I don't get any lags or hangups anymore while my mouse still disconnects. I'm pretty sure it was somehow fixed by updating KDE / Plasma packages.

Miscellaneous issues with KDE Plasma

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