Yes I agree 100% with what you are saying, it’s part of why I switched from MacOS to Garuda Dr460nized for my main OS. But all I meant by my suggestion was some kind of tool that would take as much KDE configuration from an old home directory and apply it to a fresh one. Basically make it into a basic template that would change a lot of the standard settings in a fresh install to what you had before. That wouldn’t interfere with freedom, it would just give you a head start on setting up a fresh install the way you like it. Another thing it could do is give you a list of everything you had installed with pacman and let you manually check what you want to install again, and it could do it all at once. I mean, this is what I do anyway by dumping pacman -Q to a file but it would automate it a bit more.
Anyway, I just think it would be neat. I hate how much downtime doing a fresh install causes.
As for my problems with KDE, I’ll probably do a fresh install of Dr460nized on a VM whenever a new ISO is released and try to figure out what’s wrong from there.
It sure is. Then what you need is NixOS. It is one of the purpose of using NixOS. But Nix has its own challenges in other aspects, although it can handle what you are suggesting or close to that, as far as I am aware of.
Back on non-Nix, other team members could comment but I believe it would be quite difficult to track down all possible changes someone does to his installation. In order to take the home config, we need to identify everything that has been done to it. What if you created a file somewhere with a specific config in it, how can a program identify that file and know for sure it is part of your config. Then when something goes wrong with that code, Garuda would be responsible to screw up user’s files.
Certainly someone with skills and lots of time could probably do something, as anything is possible with Linux, but if it were that easy, some distro would already have done it. Maybe a similar solution exists, I haven’t noticed, but I haven’t looked for it either. I will keep my eyes open for the future, in case.
Plz report back, as it is really messed up on your screenshots and the behaviors you mentioned, it seems something different than bugs, like corruption or similar.
As a half-measure though, in Plasma 5 there was a widget called Plasma Config Saver which was backuping your theme config files and some plasma rc files.
Not sure something exists now with Plasma 6, but that widget was not 100% perfect, however it could be useful in some situations or at least cut down on time.
Of course when Plasma makes changes to how their stuff is handled (like Plasma 5 to 6 upgrade), these types of widgets are useless.
This was successfully done with Linspire, formerly Lindows, in the early 2000s. They had a Store to select apps, which would then batch-install them, and Click-n-Run (CNR) to selectively reinstall them. Linspire - Wikipedia
BTW, I was involved with Lindows/Linspire at the time, and given a nice little credit and acknowledgement (among others) in the Prentice Hall book Guide to Linux by Peter van der Linden, for help given the author. My online nick at that time was ~deadcats.
I made a VM, and installed Dr460nized from scratch. Went though the full system update, clicked apply for the KDE6 migration, rebooted and switched to X11 session…
There was nothing wrong with my KDE config. The VM is behaving pretty much identically to how it does on my actual system. Panel settings are completely broken, sliders on “custom” height mode don’t move or work. The icons all go up to the top and the slider snaps down to the lower half of the screen and is unmovable. No difference with a fresh install.
Seems like KDE6 is just as broken as I thought.
EDIT:
I was able to find the drag handles on the VM and move the sliders. I thought my problems were over, but no… It only worked in the VM.
I tried wiping my whole KDE config and starting from scratch. Same thing, it doesn’t work.
Now I realized something insane is going on. I cannot drag icons to any panels. None at all, anywhere. I tried creating a new user… same thing.
All panels are broken on my system. On a freshly created user I can add the default panels, but whatever apps are in the panel are what I am stuck with. dragging anythign else to them just causes them to disappear.
This is getting ridiculous… I’m starting to wonder if there is just no hope for KDE on my system anymore. I want to go back to KDE5.
final update:
I restored a snapshot to get my system back to a usable state. My problems are not going to be solved by a fresh install or new user account or anything else like that. I am certain these are just awful bugs in KDE6, and they don’t manifest on everyone’s system. But there’s nothing wrong with my config… I’m pretty sure of that now.
I still can’t drag any apps to any panels. Considering I could at the time the snapshot I restored was from… I think this is just a new broken thing in KDE6 that I’ll have to live with for now. At least I got all the apps back in my dock for now from the restore.
I really think someone else is going to have to set it up for you. I just reinstalled a copy of the 040724 test ISO to see if the nVidia driver issue was resolved and the panels are exactly as thy shoulds be. I have tested various test releases shince the request for testers and EVERYTIME the panels EXACTY as they should be.
FYI: There is one aspect with the panels that the KDE devs did flock up, and that is in the past rather you had your panels set to always show or autohide you could always drag icons to them. Since Plasma 6 you must have the panels set to always show to be able to actually drag icons to them, THEN once you have eveything on them you want I can set to autohide. Annoying as all hell cause it breaks routine.
Also when you go to edit a panel if the top panel is set to autohide the menubar that pops up for editing is hidden behind the top panel. The only way to get out of edit mode at this point is to launch any application.
I would like to know how you guys are living in a different reality than me… because apparently in my reality the ability to drag apps to panels was removed…
The rest of us are not having the issue. Minor annoyances with the panels, but nothing on this scale. IMHO if the OP is also having it happen in a VM it is something the OP is doing wrong or they got a bad ISO. I suggest downloading a fresh copy of the latest test build of Garuda and give it a spin in a VM. then if no issues there do a fresh install using it. If the issues presist in this instance I would reccomend installing SimpleScreenRecorder and making and uploading a short video of how you are doing things.
EDIT:
just for test purposes you can try Utterly Nord gobal theme cause it and it’s subcomponents work including the Kvantum theme.
It’s not exactly the same in the VM. I am able to shrink the panel after a bit of struggle. The handles are invisible and just off the edge of the bottom of the screen… but I was eventually able to find them by seeing the mouse cursor change and then could drag them up. It’s still broken but not as bad.
On my real system, the bar where the handles should be doesn’t even extend all the way to the bottom of the screen, but there are no handles anywhere. So it is 100% impossible to resize.
The other issue I was having with suddenly being unable to drag applications to the task manager or any panel at all is not unique to my system. It was apparently removed from KDE6… which is incredible and another strike against this messed up “upgrade”. But whatever, now that I know that’s just the way it is, I’ve figured out how to add and remove things to panels using the other methods.
If you guys can still drag and drop applications to panels right now… then you truly are living in a different reality than me. Because I was told the feature was completely removed.
Since there is some improvement of the panel behaviour in a VM I’m wondering if this bug only manifests with amdgpu and 4K monitors or something? Anyone else running a Navi 21 card and 4K?
I just tried that, and it’s identical with the exception of half my app icons are invisible because they point to Sweet svgs.
AGAIN no it was not removed. Read my post. As I stated I did a fresh install of Garuda yesterday and have dragged my program shortcuts to their appropriate panel without issue.
One question are you creating empty panels or are you using one of the other options. For anything other than the main panel I suggest using the Empty Panel option.
I don’t know how you communicated that to the KDE devs but the feature is not gone.
As for the icons find a icon theme that works with Plasma 6. I just had one and with the latest update the folders in it became broken. I just switch icon themes and alls good again.
I have no idea if the person was a dev, but see my reddit link I posted earlier.
It is definitely gone. It’s impossible to do with a fresh install of Garuda in a VM. The feature seems to have been removed only a day or two ago, because I was still able to before that. Now if you drag an app to the icons-only task manager, the existing icons do not move to make space, and if you drop it there, it just instantly vanishes. If you try to drap an app to the panel outside of the task manager, it does shift to make space, but when you let go, it also vanishes.
Dragging apps to panels was very buggy before, half the time it put it somewhere I didn’t want it.. I guess rather than fix that they just decided to remove the ability completely. I think they made a terrible choice, but at least I know it’s not just my system.
I did figure out how to add an app to a panel without a task manager, you can use the Quicklaunch widget.
I can drag and drop on the task manager with ease on the latest ISO… The ability is still there, there’s just something borked with your setups apparently. I tested on both Wayland and X11 as well.
Of course ytou can’t drop a icon into the Icons-Only-Task-Manager widget. You can place widgets before or after IOTM’s widget but not in it’s widget if icons can be dragged to a panel with IOTM they will be before or after that widget not in it.
I just tested and I can drag Nuclear and place it AFTER or BEFORE but not in with the icons in the IOTM’s widget.
“Of course”? You do realize that you used to be able to drag applications to the task manager, right? It used to behave exactly like the MacOS dock.
All of a sudden you no longer can. Because the feature was removed.
You also used to be able to drag applications directly to a panel without a task manager. Now you cannot, because the feature was removed. I never said you can’t drag widgets to a panel… only applications, which are not widgets. But you used to be able to. In fact it was a big annoyance in KDE5 that half the time I dragged an application to the task manager, it would open up space and look like it would drop where the cursor was… but instead it would go outside the task manager, directly into the panel. But now you can’t even do that.
To place an application into a panel now, it must either be contained in a task manager or a quicklaunch widget. That’s fine, now that I know about it… I never used the quicklaunch widget before.
So now we have some people saying you can drop into the task manager, and you saying “of course you can’t”… so which is it? Is your system broken too? Or is the feature removed?
