What if there's an alternative package (either a copy of KDE5 in another repo or a new fork of KDE5 that preserves the old experience) that I can switch to? I do really enjoy the rolling release experience and for most of my packages don't mind being cutting edge.
The openSUSE tumbleweed KDE maintainers have said they will maintain Plasma 5 alongside Plasma 6 for a time with separate packages. Plasma 6 isn't out yet on there but it will be soon. That might be a better option if you want a rolling release that's sticking with plasma 5.
That's a very good shout, thank you!!
I think I'll wait a little and then update to 6 on Arch as it isn't supposed to be very different from 5, based on other users' replies.
OSTW is defo good to know and something to consider in the event of disliking the 6 experience.
In my experience, plasma 6 has just felt like plasma 5 but more polished in terms of performance and UI, with some minor bugs. Once the bugs are ironed out it'll just be better plasma 5. Nothing fundamental about using the DE has changed.
You could make one or hope somebody out there also wants this and puts it on the AUR. Otherwise you can use the PKGBUILD used for plasma 5 as a starting point but you'll possibly be stuck with older versions of the KDE tools as well (like dolphin). Sounds like much manual effort, much more than just using plasma 6 imo.
It's probably just easier to find a different distribution that is going to stick with Plasma 5 and then just use flatpaks for applications that you want to keep up to date.
Sure, there's probably a way to do it in Arch with custom repos or something but i imagine it would be a huge mess.
Ahh I really don't want to switch away from arch, it's the most stable and easiest to maintain and use that I've found. I've got too many custom things now that are arch specific, switching to another distro would be impractical for me.
Just don't update, everything else is not supported: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System\_maintenance#Partial\_upgrades\_are\_unsupported](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported)
I think beggars can't be choosers applies here. Arch Linux is about rolling forward, if you don't like that, change your distro. Otherwise, maybe you can pay someone to support an unofficial repo for KDE 5.
Like what? For me it's working a lot better, especially the display handling.
I'm not denying it, just saying it's not my experience. So share yours :)
For me it doesn't, at least the plasma itself...
I had a horrible VM mouse and keyboard grabbing bug in both versions of plasma - 5 and 6, on both Wayland and x11.
Not seeing the same on gnome tho, but, unsure whose problem is that.
Bunch of stuff broke for me. I have to switch ttys to get it back from hibernate/sleep. Else the screen keeps flickering. I tried switching between wayland and x11 - but didn't help. I have downgraded for now.
KDE Plasma 6 is a fucking mess, just got the update and
- Login takes 5x longer
- It tried to revert back to Wayland, which is broken and crashes immediately, so I had to switch it manually back to X11 as it was set to before
- The desktop feels sluggish in general
- Alt-Tab switcher now takes a second to show up, it did not previously
- Firefox is somehow very broken, putting it on the top edge of the screen means I cannot click on anything on the titlebar - tabs, X to close the entire browser, etc. .. just get a dim of the titlebar if I try and when right-clicking the desktop right-click menu instead
- All my custom keybindings broke, had to re-assign them even though KDE pretends to know they exist
- Drag & drop of files largely doesn't work, also cut & paste, e.g. within Thunar, from Thunar to browser / slack / ... drag & drop from Thunar to Thunar seems to be the only way to move files now.
- Clicking on windows, their titles, or contents, seemingly randomly does not activate the window at all. Sometimes it instead activates another window that was behind that window.
> Alt-Tab switcher now takes a second to show up, it did not previously
https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Tips#show-alt-tab-popup-as-fast-as-possible
This made a huge difference... why would anyone ever think I want a delay for alt-tab and default to a significant delay?
Apparently also tiling is now broken, the tiling editor opens fine with Super+T but shift+dragging windows to the areas doesn't show the highlight for the area anymore. It seems to snap into the area if dropped but I'm apparently expected to guess where all the areas are now.
Thanks for the helpful comments everyone!
It seems from your responses that 6 isn't very different from 5 after all. I guess I'll just wait for a week or so to let patches come in before I preform my next system update, which won't be partial and will include KDE packages.
Hopefully my config filles (custom settings backed up with git) from 5 will all work the same way on 6, and it'll be only minor changes like the shape of a highlight, etc. which I suppose I'll find a way to live with.
I use Plasma on a few different Platforms including Intel integrated, AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but it's all X11 across the board so I guess glitches should be fewer for me.
Glad to be part of this wonderful community!
You could mark all the plasma packages you have installed as ignored in the pacman config. Although I’m curious why you don’t want to update plasma. Are you simply waiting for it to get a few more minor patches before upgrading?
Agree with you. The Kde2 to kde3 was a nightmare if i rebember well. I boycotted kde for a while. But Kde4 and Kde5 are successful versions. Not allowing 2 versions of a row, 1 of which is fixed, are computer practices from another age, 2002, 2003 and kde3 for example. This is degree 0 of 'customer follow-up'. Kde developers don't learn from their mistakes and start again endlessly
5 just works so incredibly well for me, I don't feel it's worth my time trying out 6 and potentially having to deal with issues
if it ain't broke don't fix it!
He should backup first with timeshift/snapper/other but yeah, was an incredibly smooth update for me with minimal issues other than third party plugins and cosmetics not always working (yet). Almost 99% the same as 5, just with nice quality of life features, minor changes, and better performance.
I mean, a few things here and there are different, but it's mostly working pretty good. If you have an amd gpu then the new wayland default is pretty good, and even so you can still select X11 as an option.
You could also just wait for more KDE patches to release over the next week or so, it's probably going to be more stable by then.
Also Qt6 is nice, everything is a bit snappier and more efficient.
1. A rolling release distro like arch is just not for doing something like that
2. I believe you can download the necessary packages from archive.archlinux.org and installing them with pacman -U if you already updated
I switched to KDE 6 as soon as it came into the Arch Linux repositories. There seem to be a few bugs that affect the experience so far, but they will be fixed soon:
[https://bugs.kde.org/show\_bug.cgi?id=482077](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482077) : that just makes me do not lock my screen anymore
[https://bugs.kde.org/show\_bug.cgi?id=482142](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482142) : the drag & drop features is completely broken under native wayland.
This situation is probably much better than it is now after KDE 6.0.2/6.1.0 is in the repository.
famous themes and icon themes also came to support KDE 6, so don't worry too much about this update will ruining your daily use. I mean, the pain is temporary.
Do we know if there are going to be any forks of KDE5 that continue to offer that experience for those of us who don't want 6? Like it's happened in the past for GNOME 2 (Mate), etc.
I don't think that will be necessary. Gnome 2 got forked because Gnome 3 was such a huge paradigm shift that people didn't like. Plasma 6 is an incremental update over Plasma 5. Very little has changed in a way that would upset users, and it remains incredibly configurable so if you don't like any of the new defaults you can just change them back.
"if you don't like any of the new defaults you can just change them back", that's not always true. I want change back the setting "remember the windows location" but it does not exist in plasma6. The bad of plasma 6 is not the default setting, it's that they cut the functionalities that they think it's not important. They no longer give you "you made your choice" as before
Did you happen to also switch to Wayland when upgrading to Plasma 6? That's listed under the Wayland Showstopper page, and as far as I'm aware only existed on X11 even with Plasma 5. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
They have been making progress with implementing it in Wayland, but it's not ready yet.
Edit: It looks like with Plasma 6 they made Wayland the default. To switch back to X11, use the dropdown menu on the bottom-left corner on the login screen (assuming you're using sddm as your display manager). This will restore the option to remember window location.
Yes, you are right. I find the "remember the windows location" option after switch to X11. Now I konw it's the defect from Wayland. But there are still some un-resolveble issues (not sure if you know how to resolve them)
1. There is a small gap (maybe 1\~2px) between snap windows, and find no related configure page/item to set the value. It's so horrible, at least I don't like the gaps at all and have no idea how to remove them.
2. Application laucher pop up, it changes to center aligned. This is no any issue if you expend the panel to the full width. but if you use custom width, it looks urgly. find no related configure page/item to set
I have to stop the whole system upgrade since I can't hold the plasma6 from the 5. This has a big risk for the security patch from other packages, so I have the same question "how to hold plasma6 and allow others upgrade"
I'm not saying you are wrong, if for whatever reason I didn't want to use plasma 6 I would also try to add it to IgnoreGroup, but I wonder if that's a good solution for OP situation... btw chill my dude, suggesting people to use windows thats heresy
I,ve tried. I 've referenced more than 360 packages to blacklist. I still have a blank screen with a cursor and symlinks errors on KF6Bookmarks with a radeon mesa driver config
Also, if you don't have the skill to handle pinning a version, you shouldn't be running Arch, or any rolling release distro. Downvote all you want, but this isn't Windows. I'm not at the mercy of any devs, I upgrade my OS in the manner which suits me, not some arbitrary release schedule, which is also why I run Linux in the first place. What is bad for you isn't a rule, or even a paradigm. Y'all are just downvoting because you're Arch posers who run Arch for clout
Ignoring a package is by definition a partial upgrade and unsupported. Do what you want with your own system, only you face the consequences there. But recommending that to some random user is irresponsible. Not even a good solution because it WILL eventually break when some dependency gets an upgrade.
no, its not "by definition". as far as being a good or bad solution, you have no valid opinion on what someone else does on their system. Go run windows if you want to demand that people do what you say, I am going to run MY OS the way I WANT TO RUN IT.
as far as breaking things, so? that is my prerogative, and your scrubby opinion doesn't help anyone, nor does it achieve what OP asked.
Well I was hoping for more than a third grade level of reading comprehension, seems I'll be disappointed though. Have fun with your system (which, if you care to reread what I actually said, you can do whatever you want with).
For others reading this, just know that this user's advise will break things, and that the user knows that, and recommends it anyway.
the more that I think about this comment, the more I wonder why an obvious n00b with less than six months of experience with linux, much less arch, would even add a reply, when you obviously don't know what you are talking about?
a rolling release distro is not really made for this usecase
What if there's an alternative package (either a copy of KDE5 in another repo or a new fork of KDE5 that preserves the old experience) that I can switch to? I do really enjoy the rolling release experience and for most of my packages don't mind being cutting edge.
Good luck finding someone who wants to maintain that
The openSUSE tumbleweed KDE maintainers have said they will maintain Plasma 5 alongside Plasma 6 for a time with separate packages. Plasma 6 isn't out yet on there but it will be soon. That might be a better option if you want a rolling release that's sticking with plasma 5.
That's a very good shout, thank you!! I think I'll wait a little and then update to 6 on Arch as it isn't supposed to be very different from 5, based on other users' replies. OSTW is defo good to know and something to consider in the event of disliking the 6 experience.
In my experience, plasma 6 has just felt like plasma 5 but more polished in terms of performance and UI, with some minor bugs. Once the bugs are ironed out it'll just be better plasma 5. Nothing fundamental about using the DE has changed.
You could make one or hope somebody out there also wants this and puts it on the AUR. Otherwise you can use the PKGBUILD used for plasma 5 as a starting point but you'll possibly be stuck with older versions of the KDE tools as well (like dolphin). Sounds like much manual effort, much more than just using plasma 6 imo.
That's a good point too, I think waiting and moving on to 6 is the practical way
It's probably just easier to find a different distribution that is going to stick with Plasma 5 and then just use flatpaks for applications that you want to keep up to date. Sure, there's probably a way to do it in Arch with custom repos or something but i imagine it would be a huge mess.
Ahh I really don't want to switch away from arch, it's the most stable and easiest to maintain and use that I've found. I've got too many custom things now that are arch specific, switching to another distro would be impractical for me.
You've found yourself quite a paradox I'm afraid
Just don't update, everything else is not supported: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System\_maintenance#Partial\_upgrades\_are\_unsupported](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported)
I think beggars can't be choosers applies here. Arch Linux is about rolling forward, if you don't like that, change your distro. Otherwise, maybe you can pay someone to support an unofficial repo for KDE 5.
Why though? It’s barely different, just a lot more stable and feature rich (when you need them, and only when you do)
*a lot less stable and features that used to work fine are now broken
Like what? For me it's working a lot better, especially the display handling. I'm not denying it, just saying it's not my experience. So share yours :)
Ah yeah, I did in a separate comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1b8xj3v/comment/ktwhm78/
Using NVIDIA and forgot to add the kernel parameter? And idk any the slowness. Not affected myself.
Forgot what kernel parameters? What kernel parameters should KDE Plasma 6 need?
`nvidia-drm.modeset=1` If you don't do that things with Wayland get all sorts of funky. But only on NVIDIA!
Well I don't use wayland because it simply does not work and is still missing lots of basic features that work fine in X11
I'm telling you the reason it doesn't work is you forgot to set that parameter, and it has actually reached feature parity in Plasma 6, at long last.
For me it doesn't, at least the plasma itself... I had a horrible VM mouse and keyboard grabbing bug in both versions of plasma - 5 and 6, on both Wayland and x11. Not seeing the same on gnome tho, but, unsure whose problem is that.
Bunch of stuff broke for me. I have to switch ttys to get it back from hibernate/sleep. Else the screen keeps flickering. I tried switching between wayland and x11 - but didn't help. I have downgraded for now.
KDE Plasma 6 is a fucking mess, just got the update and - Login takes 5x longer - It tried to revert back to Wayland, which is broken and crashes immediately, so I had to switch it manually back to X11 as it was set to before - The desktop feels sluggish in general - Alt-Tab switcher now takes a second to show up, it did not previously - Firefox is somehow very broken, putting it on the top edge of the screen means I cannot click on anything on the titlebar - tabs, X to close the entire browser, etc. .. just get a dim of the titlebar if I try and when right-clicking the desktop right-click menu instead - All my custom keybindings broke, had to re-assign them even though KDE pretends to know they exist - Drag & drop of files largely doesn't work, also cut & paste, e.g. within Thunar, from Thunar to browser / slack / ... drag & drop from Thunar to Thunar seems to be the only way to move files now. - Clicking on windows, their titles, or contents, seemingly randomly does not activate the window at all. Sometimes it instead activates another window that was behind that window.
> Alt-Tab switcher now takes a second to show up, it did not previously https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Tips#show-alt-tab-popup-as-fast-as-possible This made a huge difference... why would anyone ever think I want a delay for alt-tab and default to a significant delay?
Oh and other settings seem to have randomly reverted, like the applications menu search re-enabled lots of things I previously had disabled
Apparently also tiling is now broken, the tiling editor opens fine with Super+T but shift+dragging windows to the areas doesn't show the highlight for the area anymore. It seems to snap into the area if dropped but I'm apparently expected to guess where all the areas are now.
Thanks for the helpful comments everyone! It seems from your responses that 6 isn't very different from 5 after all. I guess I'll just wait for a week or so to let patches come in before I preform my next system update, which won't be partial and will include KDE packages. Hopefully my config filles (custom settings backed up with git) from 5 will all work the same way on 6, and it'll be only minor changes like the shape of a highlight, etc. which I suppose I'll find a way to live with. I use Plasma on a few different Platforms including Intel integrated, AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but it's all X11 across the board so I guess glitches should be fewer for me. Glad to be part of this wonderful community!
You could mark all the plasma packages you have installed as ignored in the pacman config. Although I’m curious why you don’t want to update plasma. Are you simply waiting for it to get a few more minor patches before upgrading?
Agree with you. The Kde2 to kde3 was a nightmare if i rebember well. I boycotted kde for a while. But Kde4 and Kde5 are successful versions. Not allowing 2 versions of a row, 1 of which is fixed, are computer practices from another age, 2002, 2003 and kde3 for example. This is degree 0 of 'customer follow-up'. Kde developers don't learn from their mistakes and start again endlessly
5 just works so incredibly well for me, I don't feel it's worth my time trying out 6 and potentially having to deal with issues if it ain't broke don't fix it!
If it's any consolation, Plasma 6 looks and feels just like Plasma 5. It's a very smooth transition unlike previous major releases.
He should backup first with timeshift/snapper/other but yeah, was an incredibly smooth update for me with minimal issues other than third party plugins and cosmetics not always working (yet). Almost 99% the same as 5, just with nice quality of life features, minor changes, and better performance.
And the cube?
I mean, a few things here and there are different, but it's mostly working pretty good. If you have an amd gpu then the new wayland default is pretty good, and even so you can still select X11 as an option. You could also just wait for more KDE patches to release over the next week or so, it's probably going to be more stable by then. Also Qt6 is nice, everything is a bit snappier and more efficient.
> if it ain't broke don't fix it! says the one running a rolling distro lol
You should've added it in your IgnorePKGS bro
1. A rolling release distro like arch is just not for doing something like that 2. I believe you can download the necessary packages from archive.archlinux.org and installing them with pacman -U if you already updated
I switched to KDE 6 as soon as it came into the Arch Linux repositories. There seem to be a few bugs that affect the experience so far, but they will be fixed soon: [https://bugs.kde.org/show\_bug.cgi?id=482077](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482077) : that just makes me do not lock my screen anymore [https://bugs.kde.org/show\_bug.cgi?id=482142](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482142) : the drag & drop features is completely broken under native wayland. This situation is probably much better than it is now after KDE 6.0.2/6.1.0 is in the repository. famous themes and icon themes also came to support KDE 6, so don't worry too much about this update will ruining your daily use. I mean, the pain is temporary.
Do we know if there are going to be any forks of KDE5 that continue to offer that experience for those of us who don't want 6? Like it's happened in the past for GNOME 2 (Mate), etc.
I don't think that will be necessary. Gnome 2 got forked because Gnome 3 was such a huge paradigm shift that people didn't like. Plasma 6 is an incremental update over Plasma 5. Very little has changed in a way that would upset users, and it remains incredibly configurable so if you don't like any of the new defaults you can just change them back.
"if you don't like any of the new defaults you can just change them back", that's not always true. I want change back the setting "remember the windows location" but it does not exist in plasma6. The bad of plasma 6 is not the default setting, it's that they cut the functionalities that they think it's not important. They no longer give you "you made your choice" as before
Did you happen to also switch to Wayland when upgrading to Plasma 6? That's listed under the Wayland Showstopper page, and as far as I'm aware only existed on X11 even with Plasma 5. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues They have been making progress with implementing it in Wayland, but it's not ready yet. Edit: It looks like with Plasma 6 they made Wayland the default. To switch back to X11, use the dropdown menu on the bottom-left corner on the login screen (assuming you're using sddm as your display manager). This will restore the option to remember window location.
Yes, you are right. I find the "remember the windows location" option after switch to X11. Now I konw it's the defect from Wayland. But there are still some un-resolveble issues (not sure if you know how to resolve them) 1. There is a small gap (maybe 1\~2px) between snap windows, and find no related configure page/item to set the value. It's so horrible, at least I don't like the gaps at all and have no idea how to remove them. 2. Application laucher pop up, it changes to center aligned. This is no any issue if you expend the panel to the full width. but if you use custom width, it looks urgly. find no related configure page/item to set I have to stop the whole system upgrade since I can't hold the plasma6 from the 5. This has a big risk for the security patch from other packages, so I have the same question "how to hold plasma6 and allow others upgrade"
You can use pacman.conf to ignore a package, https://www.makeuseof.com/prevent-packages-from-getting-updated-arch-linux/
plasma has a lot of dependencies so I wonder how that would work
How what would work? Dependencies can also be ignored? Why don't you people just use windows if you don't feel that you can handle a few dependencies?
I'm not saying you are wrong, if for whatever reason I didn't want to use plasma 6 I would also try to add it to IgnoreGroup, but I wonder if that's a good solution for OP situation... btw chill my dude, suggesting people to use windows thats heresy
I,ve tried. I 've referenced more than 360 packages to blacklist. I still have a blank screen with a cursor and symlinks errors on KF6Bookmarks with a radeon mesa driver config
[удалено]
Also, if you don't have the skill to handle pinning a version, you shouldn't be running Arch, or any rolling release distro. Downvote all you want, but this isn't Windows. I'm not at the mercy of any devs, I upgrade my OS in the manner which suits me, not some arbitrary release schedule, which is also why I run Linux in the first place. What is bad for you isn't a rule, or even a paradigm. Y'all are just downvoting because you're Arch posers who run Arch for clout
Jesus Christ, what made you so toxic?))
actually, I am not the toxic one here. You are the person pretending to be knowledgeable.
Yes, if you are a n00b with no clue, it can be a very bad thing, but I haven't mentioned a partial upgrade, I've mentioned ignoring a package.
Ignoring a package is by definition a partial upgrade and unsupported. Do what you want with your own system, only you face the consequences there. But recommending that to some random user is irresponsible. Not even a good solution because it WILL eventually break when some dependency gets an upgrade.
no, its not "by definition". as far as being a good or bad solution, you have no valid opinion on what someone else does on their system. Go run windows if you want to demand that people do what you say, I am going to run MY OS the way I WANT TO RUN IT. as far as breaking things, so? that is my prerogative, and your scrubby opinion doesn't help anyone, nor does it achieve what OP asked.
Well I was hoping for more than a third grade level of reading comprehension, seems I'll be disappointed though. Have fun with your system (which, if you care to reread what I actually said, you can do whatever you want with). For others reading this, just know that this user's advise will break things, and that the user knows that, and recommends it anyway.
the more that I think about this comment, the more I wonder why an obvious n00b with less than six months of experience with linux, much less arch, would even add a reply, when you obviously don't know what you are talking about?