Plasma 6

[Zema Bus]

In a thread on BBF I was playing around with the Plasma 6 beta and found that there was no way of creating launchers in the panel other than by creating them on the desktop and then moving them to the panel. Now with Plasma 6 being released I took another look at it. I updated the Neon-unstable VM, which now has the Plasma 6.1 dev branch but it shouldn't be any different from Plasma 6 release yet. They did fix this issue for the release.

This is the default wallpaper when set to a dark theme (the light theme uses a lighter version of this wallpaper). The bottom panel I added in testing it. It is a floating panel by default.

Plasma_6.jpg (72.04 KiB) Viewed 386 times

Here's the previously missing 'add to panel' link they added to the release.

Plasma_6_create_launchers.jpg (76.21 KiB) Viewed 386 times

Opening the panel configuration:

Plasma_6_add_panels.jpg (76 KiB) Viewed 386 times

The 'add new panel' link was missing from the right click menu on the desktop, they moved it to the panel. With the panel at the top the link is covered up but it's easy to get at with the panel at the bottom of the screen. One thing I wonder about - if this requires an existing panel to create a new panel, what if you lose all your panels? This has occasionally happened with Plasma 5 and it was a simple matter of right clicking the desktop to create a new panel. But that link is absent in Plasma 6. Maybe there's another way.

Plasma_6_add_panels_button_blocked.jpg (81.17 KiB) Viewed 386 times

Plasma_6_add_panels_button.jpg (80.83 KiB) Viewed 386 times

They also brought back the cube, I haven't looked at that yet. Overall I think I'll be able to live in this.

[Grogan]

What about Panels in the KDE Control Center, if no desktop right click? You could probably add a new panel in there.

Good that they fixed the add shortcut behaviour though. That would have been a UI disconnect.

I don't think I'll install Plasma again though, I hate the mess it makes and it's really hard to remove all the dependencies after. I still have paranoid IgnoreGroup directives to prevent anything plasma or KDE from coming back (though there's nothing left that will pull in those deps). Nice, but too complex for me.

I'll probably go with XFCE at first, then copy over my /usr/local that has my old school window managers. I'm partial to my IceWM for game focus behaviour.

[Zema Bus]

I looked under all the categories in the Control Center and didn't see anything for the panels. Yeah in Slackware 15 which now has a very stale version of Plasma I went to get XFCE configured but some things are messed up by the presence of that old Plasma install. So I've just been sticking with the MATE desktop I compiled from a Slackbuild last year.

[Grogan]

and yes, that's another thing. These desktop environments step on each others' configuration these days. That's because they dump shit to ~/.config and friends messily rather than self contained in their own directories. Back in the old days all of KDE's configuration was stored in ~/.kde which could simply be deleted if KDE got messed up.

That would be a pretty serious omission if there was no other way to configure panels in KDE 6.

[Zema Bus]

Plasma 6.0.1 is now in Arch so I'll see it next time I update it.

[Grogan]

Maybe I should do a trial run of Arch first and install that. I could play with it for a while, then wipe it and start getting serious. Wiping the setup would be easier than trying to remove Plasma and its dependency bloat, pollution of ~/.config and other user locations... at that point before having done a lot of work on it.

P.S. Better than just wiping it, tar up the system right before I install all that tasty poo and blast it back again. This way I won't lose all my configuration. I deviate a lot from "the arch way" including booting and networking.

This is a perfect opportunity to try Plasma 6 (and it's pointless in a VM).

[Zema Bus]

This happened tonight. I guess not surprising for a new major release of Plasma. I discovered that screen captures aren't working in Gimp since the upgrade to Plasma 6, I had to use my phone.

PXL_20240309_084051719.jpg (221.17 KiB) Viewed 359 times

[Grogan]

Did plasmashell reload itself seamlessly like kwin used to when it crashed?

[Zema Bus]

Yeah it came back immediately, followed by the crash handler notification.

[Grogan]

Ahh, when kwin used to crash it just briefly showed a bit of tooltip text in the systray

Don't forget about

"dbus-launch gimp"

That's the only thing I can think of that would prevent the screenshot plugin from working, IPC shit.

I just tried to open gimp and... I forgot I don't have it yet. I guess I'll just install a distro package for now. I don't have to configure it at least (I hate that... going through all gimp's settings categories and I always forget something).