Life with KDE [2]

Things are getting back to normal with KDE on mainpc and I am getting on with work today.

I was planning to have the same configuration on bedroompc (the NUC) but have run into problems with the Linux implementation of EFI when this platform is set to boot UEFI and install Debian or Ubuntu in that mode. So far with numerous tests and tweaks we seem to have hit some kind of internal limitation in the efibootmgr module for the number of times a Linux operating system can be installed on the platform (in this case, the NUC6CAYH PC with the NUC6CAYB board installed). 

Since this is a fairly new NUC it is still under warranty, but since Intel doesn't really support Linux and as I have flashed it to the latest BIOS, AND it can install and run Windows 10 without any issue, it seems it falls down onto the Debian or Ubuntu maintainers to take a look at what is going on with efibootmgr which is unable to complete the setup task of installing and configuring grub-efi-amd64. Enough of grub does get installed for the hard disk to be recognised as bootable in the NUC's EFI bios and grub to start up to a command prompt, it seems the issue is the part of grub where it should be booting into the operating system is at fault.

Since I have tested the boot with both Debian and Kubuntu it must fall on the boot manager code and the fact of this apparent perception of a limitation to the number of installs. This computer has been successfully running other Linuxes since new, mostly Xubuntu and Debian, without problems. In fact I only recently installed the same version 9.5 of Debian with XFCE on it a few weeks ago. Given that the BIOS has been wiped and upgraded, that grub can boot to a shell, and that Win10 can run OK, it looks like I now have a process ahead of me of working with the Linux community to try and debug the problem in their EFI boot implementation.

Life with KDE [1]

Having jumped in boots and all into KDE on mainpc (having had to reinstall Debian and choosing KDE instead of XFCE) there are a few things to be aware of. At least we do get 5.8 version of KDE Plasma on Stretch, I would have half expected it to be 4.x because of Debian's reppo for older versions of stuff but having a 5.x release is good, of course I would want 5.13 but maybe Buster will have something like it when it comes out next year.

The standard KDE install task from Debian is only a minimal desktop that lacks some useful stuff and it also defaults to an ugly looking logon screen with Debian wallpapers. On my test config I installed extra packages for the breeze login theme. I had to install synaptic package manager to find them as the KDE software centre could not list them.

To make life easy you can install kde-full package which just puts all the KDE stuff in because Debian doesn't do this at install time. This will overcome numerous frustrations and trying to figure out why something doesn't work like it should (like the printer not being detected when you plug it in). Probably this situation is no different from other desktops like XFCE not being completely installed, the difference is there is so much more in KDE that you are going to be missing out on a lot probably, there something like 500 packages left out. OK you may not need them all but if you have a powerful system and are not too worried about bloat then it is probably easier just to install the whole lot at once.

After getting these extra packages installed the printer was straightforward to get going and print from. I  have spent much of the evening tweaking various KDE things and really getting up to speed on it which has been slow but tomorrow I will get some real work done as I have really lost a day but unfortunately it has been that kind of week of getting very little done overall.

KDE remote desktop sharing

One of the best things about KDE is the amount of apps they have available that are integrated into the shell. As XFCE lacks its own remote access integration you have to install x11vnc and muck around trying to get it to run as a service which I have yet to be able to complete. In KDE you have several apps available, I chose to use Krfb (RFB is the protocol that VNC uses) and it comes up as "Desktop Sharing" which is essentially the correct description of what I want to achieve.

With just a few clicks I was able to enable the desktop sharing and also enable it as unattended because I want to be able to connect to this desktop all the time without having to go to it to authorise a connection.

It will be interesting to see how Plasma develops in its latest high efficiency optimisation. It is quite possible some of my computers will be switched to KDE instead of XFCE but there is no huge rush as I just want to spend some time figuring out how everything works with KDE. Most of my PCs are fast enough to have few issues with the somewhat greater resource use in KDE and I will be keeping Debian as the base OS, no more Ubuntu for now. 

The only real thing with the Debian install of KDE is the clunky default logon theme which you'll want to change to the Breeze logon, for which you have to install additional packages. I last had a play with the Breeze logon when I had LXQt on one or two of my computers. Incidentally LXQt is now an option to install in the Buster alpha and the next release of Lubuntu will use it by default.

One of the reasons KDE looks good is because they are making steady progress towards integrating Wayland, something XFCE is falling further and further behind on. Pretty soon Wayland will replace X11 as the default display protocol and then some of the Linux desktop environments will not support it very well. Interestingly enough Ubuntu 17.10 installs Wayland by default (Xubuntu doesn't, so I won't have seen Wayland on anything yet). In Ubuntu 18.04 they reverted to Xorg after discovering Wayland still has some issues.

Mainpc at the moment is getting reinstalled with Debian and KDE because some sort of stupid crap bug resulted in an apt autoremove command removing a lot of core install packages including all of LibreOffice and some essential stuff, basically stuffing the system and making it unable to connect to the internet. So Debian 9.5 will be on it along with KDE and this will be only the second time I have tried KDE on one of my major computers that I use every day. This time hopefully I can make it stick (last time it was too hard to migrate from XFCE).