KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).

With KDE’s 25th Anniversary and the release of KDE Plamsa 5.23, I got excited to check out a few KDE-focused distros.

Kinoite

First up was Fedora’s KDE-based RPM-OSTree distro, Kinoite. (summary after each video)

https://youtu.be/UoXw1bkVDLg

Fedora Kinoite

Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.

A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up.

*I know the term ricing could be considered racist or insensitive. In this context, it’s simply the term of art used on the subreddit.

So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.

Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now: