It is clear it won’t be in dom0. Anything else is distro, and there there’s no issues, just a matter of preferences, easy to install, remove, etc…
A script / salt configuration to apply a consistent theme (templates follow dom0, both qt and gtk2/3) would be useful for those wishing to use KDE in Dom0, especially in dark mode. @Sven has linked some helpful instructions but those theme QT as GTK, what if you want the other way around?
For various reasons, I’m not qualified to do anything like this, but if
someone can point me to a configuration that would be generally
acceptable I can try to implement it.
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Is KDE being considered as an optional desktop environment for v4.2?
It works quite well, a bit more modern, and being able to split risk level screens via Activities is a nice feature.
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I gave this a try because the screenshots look appealing and immediately met a host of problems some of which I cannot resolve from the get go. I certainly cannot be the only person that met them so hopefully there are solutions somewhere?
- UI is sllow and laggy from the get go - this seems to be helped by switching to xrender renderer (my computer is not really slow, i9-12700K), this problem does not exist in xfce
- Keyboard layouts only switch in dom0. If I type the right
setxkbmapcommand into a terminal - that VM starts working ok until the next restart. This is obviously not scalable at all though. This problems does not exist in xfce. - The activities work great, but you cannot actually change them with hotkeys? Like Meta-Q to show the list and Meta-TAB to cycle through them work, but assigning a hotkey (like meta-1 or Ctrl-1 or Meta/Ctrl-F1, or anything really) does not work
- When you get a confirmation dialog for cross-qube activity (say when using split-SSH), the dialog does not have focus. You then select the dialog and it waits for some timeout before activating the “OK” button. This makes it totally unusable. I know focus stealing is a thing and that’s why the OK availability is timed, but having both makes no sense.
- When you log out, on login all the windows from all activities are bunched into the first default activity that happens to open which defeats the purpose of saved sessions I guess?
- If you logout and login without rebooting - the qubes you had running don’t stop on logout, but instead enter some strange “readonly” mode making them unhappy and you have to restart them manually to get them working again.
- Window title in taskbar at the bottom display
qube-guidinstead of the window name. - cursors in many applications are huge (tends to happen to text cursor the most, very noticeable with e.g. Terminal, but also in Firefox in text fields)
Perhaps some more information about your system will enable troubleshooting. It is still a concern though for considering KDE as an install option.
My older i7-4710HQ laptop works well with KDE and Qubes. Hence the suggestion.
It’s Qubes 4.1.2 using unman’s dnf install kde-settings-qubes and selecting plasma in the menu before login. i9-12700K with 128G RAM and 4K screen, not sure if any other hw details would be relevant.
The system works well if you ignore the problems (and granted some of them are a bit niche so I imagine many people won’t see them even when real) and switch renderer from opengl2(? something 2 anyway that was related to 3d acceleration) that seems to be the default to xrender
Hi @kindagreen
Sorry you’ve had these issues - I’m not sure I can help because I dont
recognise (most of) them.
Not my experience - I’m using the openGL compositor without any
problems.
This used to be an issue in Xfce too.
I’ll look in to it and get back to you.
Really does work, but not obvious how to do it right.
You haven’t actually said what you tried, which would have been useful.
If it was from the Settings dialogue per Activity, that doesn’t work in
Qubes.
Each Activity has a UUID - you can get this from the command line with
qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities CurrentActivity
Then you can use the UUID in hotkeys, or scripts - e.g. I have multiple
shortcuts to switch to activities and open programs there.
If you want to change this, look under Settings->Workspace->WindowManagement->Focus Stealing Prevention
I’ve raised this with a developer - their view was that this was ok - if
you cared which activity a window ends up on you would have rules
to set it. In the absence of any rule allocating to the first activity
is a reasonable compromise.
Absolutely not my experience.
Can log in and out of KDE and Xfce without issue.
Not my experience.
I suspect this is a scaling issue - again, I dont have it and haven’t had
such reports.
None of this is helpful to you, other than the hint about using UUIDs,
and setting rules to fix windows to activities.
We’d need a lot more information before we could hope to deal with
in detail.
Thank you for your reply.
hm, so I installed kde on a laptop I use for tests and there’s no problem there indeed. IT’s much less beefier laptop (Thinkpad T480 with 32G RAM) but it does not have the 4K display resolution, may be that’s why?
In fact (and this is I guess for a different topic) a bunch of things happen faster on the laptop, like starting a firefox in a disposable qube and such. Both are fresh installs.
Thanks. I did see a bunch of forum posts about this not working from the past, but it does work ok in xfce now, so just KDE not working
So the supposed way to bind a hotkey in KDE appears to be to do a global hotkey to “D-Bus command”, but that’s not present in qubes. Missing package in default install?
This is not in your github readme file that only mentions uuids as part of a script to open and switch and having a separate script for each activity seems like a huge overkill.
I found this bit on the internet https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=137658 that makes it somewhat more manageable (just have to figure out what provides that “dbus command” selection
Aha, thanks!
Also has focus follows mouse that appears to work which is great.
I realize it’s not something you can do about, but in a way that’s a very strange decision because why even have saved sessions then? Also it’s not always possible to have such hardcoded rules of X qube windows go into Y activity.
Well, I can log in and logout fine too, the problem is two fold I guess and turns out has nothing to do with KDE per se.
- When you log out (no matter if it’s kde or xfce), normally (as in in any “normal” Linux distro, or Windows or MacOS) all running applications close. So in Qubes they don’t they keep running in the background and once you log back in - they all reappear. This is pretty unexpected to say the least.
- The readonly state seems to be not 100%, but rather sporadic, I guess I’ll have to observe this one some more.
I guess upon a closer look, the actual windows title is there, it’s just in small font, here’s a picture:
https://imgur.com/a/ADYC7Mv (note the top text of the information about window as you hover the mouse over it/long-press the button)
this indeed might be related to 4K, I don’t see it on the 1080p laptop.
Thank you again.
To be fair, the keyboard layout switch is not working properly in R4.1, even in xfce, too. There is a bunch of open bug tickets about this issue on github. I personally face this issues everyday. In R4.0 it worked flawlessly for me, but in R4.1 it was remade and now half-broken, unfortunately.
Thanks for that input @balko
This is an interesting observation. Undoubtedly the 4k resolution is
an issue, but clearly not the only one.
It’s not missing for me - it’s a standard part of the shortcut
SystemSettings->Shortcuts->CustomShortcuts->Edit->New->GlobalShortcut->D-Bus command
Well, instead you have a separate shortcut defined for each activity?
Once you have the UUID you can use it as you will - I don’t use a
shortcut for switching to activity, because that doesn’t suit my
work flow. AND, because of the adaptive way that switching between
activities works, I don’t find I need it.
But if you do, that’s fine.
For completeness I should include that in the KDE notes.
You can configure Alt+Tab to cycle between all open windows
across activities, so that combined with the other shortcuts covers
switching for me. Again, that’s adaptive to recently used.
I think we’ve now worked through most of the issues you raised, but
perhaps not to resolution.
It seems to me that many of the issues you now have relate to the 4k
display - certainly fixing the scaling issues will help.
I recall that @Sven has posted in another thread on getting scaling
working properly. I’m not sure if that is a guide?
:
the difference is it may be half-broken, but works at least half of the time in xfce (in reality may be 70% of time, sometimes the propagation of the layout switch is missing indeed), and does not work at all in kde though.
aha, the location changed, yes this is present indeed.
Yes. My workflow is activity like a virtual desktop in a way, I guess. But mostly centered around different qubes.
So activity 1 wold be general qubes admin related, activity 2 would be say email, activity3 work and activity 5 - general web browsing
Once the relevant are all open, running a script to reopen say a webbrowser does not make too much sense. and various meta-tab switching is annoying in that depending on what you were working on last - you cannot switch to whre you want to go blindly when you know where you want to go.
thanks, I think this is for the best because workflows differ.
actually I don’t think I have any scaling issues? (other than cursor sizes I guess), because I have a large monitor 4k is a native resolution so it does not need any scaling.
Updating from Fedora 37 to 38 and KDE will start sys-net, sys-firewall, etc. on boot but nothing connects and no network icons appear in the toolbar (sys-whonix & the “blank” network icon are missing). Booting to the XFCE desktop and the network works fine and if I switch to KDE after booting to XFCE the network will be working then too. A boot-only issue.
I use KDE on a stable installation of Qubes with fedora 37. Installed it with sudo qubes-dom0-update kde-settings-qubes as docs suggest.
In the systray there’s blank icon for ethernet and bluetooth.
Multiple things in the settings are missing too, such as System Settings → Application Style → Widget Style.
Known and long unresolved issue referenced in the top posts in this
thread.
Seconds on ddg suggest that “widget style” was renamed to “application
Style”.
I had not used KDE before Qubes so I dont know what might be missing.
Can you give details on the “Multiple things” that are missing, and what
is their purpose?
But you have got it working, didn’t you? Based on the screenshot.
The whole experience of KDE in Qubes is very different… it doesn’t feel native. With the “widget style” I was just trying to figure out how I can install “Kvantum”: Kvantum/Kvantum/INSTALL.md at master · tsujan/Kvantum · GitHub
I don’t remember exactly, I installed Qubes as my primary as I have only one computer.
I think everything that I think is missing is just things that are not belong to Qubes due to how Qubes implemented.
It is a hundred percent better for me than stock XFCE for sure.
I am testing out qubes 4.2rc and I’d love some insight into the changes with kde in that new version. I have for the past year used KDE with qubes 4.1, because it seemed so much more intuitive and feature-rich to me than the default xfce options.
Since I upgraded to 4.2, I have noticed that the plasma version seems different as well? Some things have changed, but most notably, of course, the new Valentina menu system replaced my normal kde menu. I really like the new Valentina menu, but I can’t seem to customize it really at all, and it almost seems to work better with the xfce environment than it does with kde (partly visually and partly positionally on screen…hard to describe). I wonder if any other users have some practice with the new menu and what everyone else is doing with the 4.2 update and kde?
To add to this a bit, because I feel similarly that KDE feels almost like a thin veneer over qubes sometimes: I believe this may be caused for me by the fact that all of the theming and wallpaper downloads just run into errors (I understand that is because dom0 doesn’t want them to be enabled), and also I constantly feel that if I make a customization or change a setting such as visual changes, it may not apply to dom0 or to my VMs. It leaves me feeling a bit like I have a tenuous curtain that could fall away at any time :-). I know that sounds dramatic, and I’ve learned how to deal with that largely, but I definitely understand why it doesn’t seem like a polished and fully integrated experience.
I feel pretty much the same way using XFCE with qubes. It’s just clear that not everything works as the creator of the desktop environment envisioned sometimes.
Qubes 4.2 KDE -Wayland
Hi, I would like my KDE session work on Wayland.
But there are some miss-match, missing network icon, not showing appVM in qubes, updates works fine .
Any way to fix it ? I could use X11 but smoothness is compelling, compare to Wayland.
Switching to 4.2 (clean install) and going to KDE. I chose to use plasma X11 and the XDG_ environment variable changed again; once I fixed that the menu works properly.
(It should be noted that if you actually deal with the menu links in ~/.config/menus/applications-merged or ~/.local.share/applications the naming convention has changed, for example user-qubes-vm-directory-sys-net now ends in directory_sys_dnet; org,qubes-os.vm.sys_net.debian-xterm.desktop now ends in …vm._sys_dnet.debian-xterm.desktop. I do deal with these since I wrote a script to build my menu [quite a timesaver!])
However, in spite of ensuring that “breeze” is selected in all sub-entries of “Appearance” I no longer have the colored window decorations. All are gray (however the icon in the upper left of the title bar does change color to match the label on the gube). Is there a way to get it back? (This is literally my last remaining issue with 4.2.)
Trying to use wayland instead of X11 leads to no system tray, hence no domains gui (qui-domains). Also, domU terminals don’t appear on screen when called up, so I can’t check to see if the border colors appear in Wayland. (Switching back to X11, all those terminals I called up on Wayland trying to test it, finally do appear.) I’m thinking either I did something wrong, or wayland/qubes/KDE is a combination that just doesn’t work yet.