Heya folks! It's Friday, and that means it's time for the weekly Solus roundup!

KDE Plasma 6

This week, KDE Plasma 6 comes to the Solus stable repository, available for everyone to use! To help ensure that the updates go as smooth as possible, Plasma users should ensure that their system does not go to sleep while updates are being applied. The system should also be rebooted after applying these updates.

Plasma 6 is the latest major release of KDE Plasma. With it comes the move to Qt 6, improved Wayland support, and much, much more. If you're curious about what else Plasma 6 brings, check out their release post. Stable users will first get Plasma 6.0.3, containing many bug fixes from the initial Plasma 6 release. As with any major software release, there are going to be issues. That said, the Solus and KDE teams are doing everything they can to make sure that issues are addressed quickly. This update also includes the latest KDE Gear 24.03.1 and Qt 6.6.3.

With the new Plasma comes some new default settings:

On Solus, Plasma is still X11 by default. This release brings many Wayland improvements, however, so you may want to try it to see whether it works for you. By identifying what doesn't work, issues can be filed, tracked and addressed, to the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

Note also that we're currently in the middle of removing qt5-webkit from the repositories. Qt5-webkit is unmaintained upstream and is very insecure for applications to use. We'd kept it around in hopes that many applications would migrate to the maintained qt5-webengine. That has happened for many applications, and now it's time for the remaining ones to be removed.

All the following applications have been removed from the repository and will be uninstalled from your systems automatically:

  • goldendict
  • quiterss (rssguard and akregator are both well-maintained RSS readers that use Qt, please use those)
  • smtube
  • notepadqq
  • subsurface
  • trojita
  • wkhtmltopdf

And finally, with the release of Plasma 6 and (and Qt6 support being added to the Breeze theme), we've begun the conversion of applications that build with Qt5 to Qt6. You will likely see many applications change slightly, visually; this is a result of the conversion process, and more applications will be switched in the coming months.

Offline updates

One pain point that always comes up with major updates such as Plasma 6 and GNOME upgrades is our lack of support for "offline updates." Offline updates are a way to safely update a system without having to worry about core libraries changing while the system is running, such as the Kernel or session management. This lack of support is why it is sometimes necessary to hard-reboot a system after updating because the usual controls no longer work.

Here's how it works with systemd:

  1. Updated packages are downloaded from the repository, but not installed
  2. A file is created to let systemd know there are pending updates
  3. The user is prompted to reboot the system
  4. When the system next boots up, systemd sees that updates are pending
  5. Instead of fully booting, the updates are installed
  6. The system is rebooted after the updates are complete

To address this shortcoming, @joebonrichie began exploring how we might add this support to eopkg and the Solus Software Center. Though GNOME Software and KDE Discover both support offline updates, they aren't yet ready for general use on Solus. After working out how to do this manually, Joey started working on getting eopkg to do the necessary steps.

Once this work is complete in eopkg and the Software Center, installing updates on Solus will be safer than ever. Figuring out how to do offline updates here also makes it easier to do the same thing in moss and Serpent OS, benefiting both projects.

Translations for Solus MATE Transition Tool

We're looking for translators to help us localize the Solus MATE Transition Tool. If you are reasonably fluent in a language other than English, we would love to have your help. The whole tool has about 50 individual strings that need to be translated. If this interests you, check out this post for more information.

Security updates

A backdoor was discovered in XZ tools, leading to a compromised ssh server on affected systems, possibly enabling unauthorized remote access. Linux distributions, including us, have worked quickly to mitigate the issue. For more information on this issue, see this CISA page along with the Red Hat advisory linked on that page.

Make sure you install these updates as soon as possible!

Notable updates

GNOME was updated to 45.5. This is a bugfix release, and should be a pretty safe and uneventful update for users.

QtStylePlugins to QAdwaitaDecorations

The GTK2 based style plugins are quite broken for modern Qt5 apps and do not work with Qt6 apps. Additionally, QGnomePlatform is deprecated, but it also had styling issues, especially with KDE apps heavily focused on the Breeze theme.

That leaves us with QAdwaitaDecorations, which only replaces the titlebar with one themed by libadwaita, to fit in the GNOME environment, but leaving general theming to the application and Qt stack.

Other significant updates

  • gstreamer has been updated to 1.24
  • network-manager has been updated to 1.44
  • WirePlumber has been updated to 0.5
  • ibus has been updated to 1.5.29
  • mdns now works with IPv6 networks
  • Waybar has been updated to 0.10
  • freerdp 3 has been added in preparation for GNOME 46

General updates

Due to the Plasma 6 update and the extended sync cycle, listing all the updated packages in the forum post isn't really possible; the text is far too long. Instead, the entire list has been uploaded as a public gist on Github!

That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

For Plasma users it is really important that you do not let your systems go to sleep or lock during the update. You won't be able to unlock it to get back into the session and if you reboot while it's still doing updates you can break your system. If this happens to you I recommend switching to a different TTY and running sudo eopkg up there. It will error out if it detects that another eopkg process is still running, at which point you should wait and try re-running it in a bit to see if it has completed.

For the best chances of a good upgrade I recommend doing this:

  1. Directly run the update from the command line: sudo eopkg up
  2. Let it complete without leaving your computer. Maybe browse the internet so your computer doesn't lock for inactivity.
  3. Reboot once you notice it's done updating. You might need to do this from the command line as I've seen the reboot button break. sudo reboot
  4. Login to Plasma. Make sure to WAIT during the first login as Plasma runs migrations to migrate/update your config files and you want that to complete.
  5. If it takes more than 15 minutes it may have hung during the migrations. Switch to a TTY and reboot. Log back in. Repeat this until you are back in your session.
  6. If your session is "weird" it's possible the migrations didn't finish. Reboot again.

    Hi guys,
    Both updates went smoothly (one Budgie, one KDE);
    Only graphical reboot didn't work on KDE; I had to go to the terminal and type sudo reboot.
    Apart from that, great job.

    I'm not using Plasma anyway, but do you think it's possible to add an warning message before the update starts to remind users to NOT let their PC shut down during it? It's a bit dangerous for newbies if an update can break the system "that" easily xD I wonder if it's technically possible to modify the sleep parameters for the time of the update? (If it's already there and if I'm talking nonsense, don't mind this message.)

      Solus Plasma, updated via the terminal, with the commands:
      sudo eopkg ur
      sudo eopkg up
      reboot
      There was a black screen after the reboot. I had to turn it off and on manually, via the power button. In general, everything has been updated perfectly. Thank you for the great work you have done. You did well. 🙂

      Needed to reboot from terminal at the end of the update on two machines. This has happened before so was not an issue. Funny to see the shutdown screen close and then just go back to the desktop though.
      On my older laptop everything went fine but when rebooting there was a message that read:
      Failed to open \EFI\com.solus-project - Not Found
      Everything started up OK so probably not a big problem but it would be nice to know for sure.
      Thanks for any feedback.
      Also a big thanks to the Solus Team for their continued support and general excellence.

      My installation (300+ upgrades) went fine for my main laptop. A few minutes to get rid of the stupid floating panels, and to create the dock, and I'm all set. I'd also found nothing wrong with Wayland, although it's obviously still early.

        Gwen Yes, but that would require a change to eopkg. A change that would only take effect on updates AFTER the update that updated eopkg, which means that there's no way to really avoid breaking since Plasma 6 would still update at the same time.

          Gwen This usually isn't an issue; pretty much only during major desktop upgrades. That said, "offline updates" will eliminate the problem entirely, as noted in the Offline Updates section of the update post. Hopefully that can be accomplished sooner rather than later. 🙂

              EbonJaeger Well, it won't fix the weird graphical issues on reboots or the Plasma migrations potentially having issues, but it'll fix the "don't let the computer lock during updates" thingy

                I have been eagerly waiting for the KDE 6 update, thank you!

                EDIT: Btw, I did have some issues when updating; most of my customization wasn't working due to not being updated to Plasma 6 yet so I had to spend some time reconfiguring everything. At least I found out about a cool new tiling WM, Karousel.

                Latte dock has been deprecated/removed from the repo, by chance ? Compatibility issues with Plasma 6 ?

                  thanks from budgie-land 👍️

                  CorvusRuber Yeah it's dead, Jim. Upstream maintainer for it stopped supporting it a while ago but it was kept limping along by someone occasionally contributing a fix. However nobody stepped up to port it to Plasma 6 and as it's completely broken and unusable it had to be removed.

                  You can sort of mimic a dock like it with the built-in Plasma panel tools, see if Wetgeek will show you how he did his.

                  Bismuth was another casualty of the update as it was also not updated (and is unlikely to ever be).

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                      • Post #18

                      Dropped into a black screen with a cursor in the middle of the update. I made sure from a TTY that nothing's going on and rebooted from there. I ended up with missing panel icons and menu entries. usysconf run -f fixed that, but I noticed my icon task lisk is not working at all and the show desktop applet doesn't work. I checked for broken packages and when it didn't yield any, I decided to reboot again. Now it seems to work as it should.

                      ReillyBrogan

                      172 Solus updates (1,07 GiB) treated today.

                      Working on Budgie Desktop, I'm less concerned by the impressive work you've done on Plasma Desktop, which must delight its users.

                      I wanted (humbly) to just make a suggestion (if it's possible) concerning this sensitive plasma update which requires preventing the screen from standing during the update.

                      In Budgie Control Center, it's possible to modify the "Energy" settings to prevent this.
                      Is there a similar way in Plasma Desktop?

                          penny-farthing Of course there's a way to inhibit it or disable the lock screen. But the thing is that any mechanism that Solus developers could use to make sure the system automatically does that during the update would also have to be deployed as an update. And updating to that fixed version of eopkg would also bring in the Plasma 6 updates. We can make it so that future updates don't lock the screen, but we can't make it so that this update doesn't lock the screen. Does that make sense?