Issues upgrading to KDE Plasma 6 (from Plasma 5)
In this article I will attempt to address issues upgrading to KDE Plasma 6 from Plasma 5 that I have encountered lately. This is not an exhaustive list. But having undertaken a number of Debian 12 (“Bookworm”) to Debian 13 (“Trixie”) upgrades recently, these are the KDE issues that cropped up for me. I thought I should write them up in the hope it might help someone else too.
Select desktop
If you have just upgraded your system and you are starting KDE plasma 6 for the first time, then you need to move your mouse pointer along the bottom left of your screen to check to see which desktop is selected. It is likely “Gnome on Wayland” or similar. You need to click this and select “Plasma (Wayland)” from the popup menu – assuming that’s what you want, of course. Unfortunately one cannot screengrab this screen. However the following photo should give you and idea where to look and what to select from the popup menu:-
Gripes and fixes
Overall, Plasma 6 is superb. However, the Plasma 5 to plasma 6 upgrade is massive. The remarkable thing about this upgrade is that compared to previous KDE version upgrades, we have so few problems this time around. However, there are still a number of minor annoyments. Fortunately these are trivially easy to fix, once you know how.
Firstly, things may not be appearing on the desktop or task bar as expected and/or the Spectacle screen capture (PrtScn) feature may be broken. Fortunately, there is is an easy fix for this, described in detail here:-
In a nutshell, you simply need to open a terminal type the following and hit return:-
sudo apt install --reinstall xdg-desktop-portal-kde
Update KDE Plasma Widgets
It is also possible that some KDE Plasma desktop widgets may not work – especially those provided by third parties. In most cases there are new versions available. On most of the machines I look after the three widgets that needed replacing were: Kick Off Legacy popup menu, Advanced Radio Player (ARP) and Weather widdget 2.
In most cases I replaced Kickoff Legacy with the new Application Dashboard.
The latest ARP is available from the widgets dialogue, though you may need to uninstall and fully remove the old one first. The files that comprise these Plasma widgets live in:-
- ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/
My favourite weather widget, KateBLackAdder’s “Weather WIdget 2” has been replaced by version 3.0.4, and is available to download as an installable ‘Plasmoid’ from her GitHub:-
Install missing QML dependencies
When you install replacement widgets you may get some errors complaining that various QML components are missing. A blanket fix for this is simply to install all the possible QML dependencies. This can be done in one hit and hopefully future-proofs one if one adds further dependent widgets. OK, I admit it is something of a sledgehammer solution, insofar as one is not determining which dependency is actually missing. On the other hand, these dependencies are quite small and only require about 20MiB of disk space:-
sudo apt install qml6-module-*
Restart plasmashell
Having installed the QML dependencies, it is likely that you will also need to restart plasmashell. My favourite way of doing this is to invoke “krunner” by simultaneously pressing alt and space-bar keys, then typing or pasting the following and hitting return:-
killall plasmashell ; plasmashell
Note this is a command you run as a user. You do not use sudo.
Updated stations list for ARP (Advance Radio Player widget)
To celebrate the release of the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux, GarfNet has produced an updated ARP radio station database file, which you can import into your ARP widget. You may download from here:-
BBC stations database file for Advanced Radio Player widget for KDE Plasma desktop
Conclusion
In my humble opinion, getting the latest KDE Plasma desktop is arguably the best thing about the recent Debian upgrade. Well that and the fact that Wayland is becoming a lot more mature now. Do feel free to leave a comment with regard to how if any of these little fixes worked for you. And you you have any KDE fixes to suggest in this context then again, please leave a comment below. 🙂
Disclaimer
These fixes come with no warranty, express or implied.