Qt5, LXQt0.8+, KDE5 - what to do and when

Havin_it

Hi,

So Qt5 is now in the tree, as are LXQt-0.8.0 (and now 0.9.0) and some parts of KDE Thingies v5. However it seems like there is very little being said about this, especially on the KDE side compared to the climate leading up to the KDE4 launch. There is not much info on the wiki so I'm hoping someone can give some idea what to expect, and what (if any) action users should be taking in the near future.

First thing I'm curious about is the USE=qt5 flag. I'm sure I heard earlier that this would need to be globally enabled for some packages in order for LXQt to work, and perhaps that's correct (not investigated yet) but it didn't prevent me installing it. What's that about? Should I (or must I) globally enable the flag now, or might there be problems elsewhere (especially in KDE, but also Scribus which I'm using heavily right now) if I do so?

Secondly, I currently have KDE4 installed via kdebase-meta. How is the upgrade to KDE5 in its many parts supposed to work for us Gentooers, and what manual action is likely to need to be taken? As the packages seem to be creeping in very incrementally, will there actually be a definitive moment of "you are now on KDE5" and if so what will it be? (Maybe I'm asking this too soon, but I like to be prepared!)

Crucially, is there any risk of taking that step up and finding that any of the K applications are not ready yet, since their release scheduling seems quite independent from the other main parts (Frameworks, whatever that actually means, and Plasma)? This is a worry. Is there anywhere an index of which applications are K5-ready yet or not, or does it actually not matter?

I didn't find KDE4 as much of an upgrade headache as most people seemed to at the time, but I get the feeling this time might be a bit more complex, so any info to put me in the picture (or just calm my paranoia) would be welcome.

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 1:18 pm Post subject:

you may check out the kde overlay or what it was called for the very new kde stuff.

else the qt5 thing gives me a lot of headache because everyday portage complains, so i unmerge old qt5 things and than it goes on... no idea if its useful as of now.

albright · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 1:59 pm Post subject:

A thread dedicated to kde5 is a great idea.

I have replaced my desktop with version 5 on a thinkpad T440S. Some packages have to be
rebuilt with "minimal" useflag. The version 5 apps come from the kde
overlay. Sometimes there are build problems but they've always gone
away very quickly.

I have shied away from using meta packages; they bring in an unholy mix
of version 4-9999 packages and 5-9999 packages.

Right now, the *only* thing that is not working for me is the system tray
(as workaround I use wmsystemtray).

I have not tried an external monitor however, I've heard that isn't working very
well yet (anyone know about this?).

I don't know anything about LXQT
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

Voltago · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 6:05 pm Post subject:

bec · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 9:25 pm Post subject:

Kde developers consider that kde4 desktop (plasma) and kde5 desktop are exclusive. I think Gentoo developers agree.

What I do is to keep a kde4 desktop with kde4/qt4 applications. I also have installed kde-frameworks (without networkmanger-qt for a collision) and lxqt-0.9 just for testing.

To install a kde5 desktop I think you have to add the kde overlay and uninstall many kde4 packages. However, kde4 applications still not ported must run correctly in a kde5 desktop.

Anyway, there is an automatically generated page with the porting status of many kde packages to kf5:

http://developer.kde.org/~cfeck/portingstatus.html
_________________
abe

Superfox_il_Volpone · n00b Joined: 14 Aug 2012 Posts: 47

Hey,
I'm currently trying the new KDE 5. I'm coming from GNOME3, after it stopped working I suspect due to a bad update. I removed it and installed KDE5 from scratch. Everything is working fine till now, though occasional crashes occur.
I followed the notes from http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE/Overlay . It took me two days. Consider I am also a quite ignorant user and it was mostly a try & error process.
That's what I have done:
I set the sym links to the /etc/portange folders from /var/lib/layman/kde/Documentation for package{.use, accept_keywords, .mask, unmask} related to kde-plasma-5.2 and kde-frameworks-5.7
I found it exists a profile for plasma/systemd, and manually set to /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/plasma/systemd . I am not sure it added any benefit though..
I suspect emerge @kde-plasma-5.2 should be the way to go, but it gave so many conflicts between qt5 and qt4 + kdelibs, that I pulled only kde-plasma/plasma-desktop to begin. You can see the other apps that would have been pulled from /var/lib/layman/kde/sets/kde-plasma-5.2 . To solve the conflicts I disabled the flags for qt4, qt3support and kde in make.conf . I think all packages from kde-plasma-5.2 can be pulled without the need for kdelibs/qt4, except for the network manager. That is fine for me as my internet connection is "hardcoded" with the wpa_supplicant in a service.
For this reason I spent a significant amount of time to defuse the dependencies, in particular towards kdelibs, acting on the useflags.

Regarding the dual monitors, initially they only worked as mirrors. In particular kscreen wasn`t able to discriminate the monitors. There are several people in the forums all complaining about this same issue. I know my configuration was fine because when trying with fluxbox, it was correctly extending the screen across the two monitors. When I was about to give up KDE5 for this limitation, I re-installed GNOME3, which still doesn't work, and it probably set some configuration or installed a required package that allowed the dual monitor setup to work also in KDE5. Now I can see in kscreen that both displays are properly recognised.

The biggest issue I did not solve so far is the inability to have both qt4 & qt5 installed at the same time, see http://pastebin.com/J8NkBRcj . This does not allow to install many basic kde programs, such as Dolphin, that still require qt4. For clementine, I installed it manually from the source.

Besides that, the system is very usable.

Kind regards,
s.fox

Havin_it · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 10:16 am Post subject:

Wow, looks like albright is right about appetite for a KDE5 thread

Thanks for the replies, all.

Personally I've no interest in mucking about with overlays (well, not for anything this big). I'm sure there will still be plenty of beta-testing to be done once it gets into the tree :lol:

so I'm content to wait for that. And if something as integral as Dolphin isn't ready yet, then there's no way (I still prefer konqueror as file-manager, but that uses the Dolphin KPart so that'll be waiting too).

What I was more getting at was, how is the upgrade going to be organised at that point? But perhaps that isn't planned out yet.

Re the applications, I particularly wonder how that'll work. Will there still be the kde*-meta ebuilds, or will it just be Frameworks, Plasma and individual applications? Does that mean it'll be necessary to add any individual apps pulled in by kdebase-meta to the world file, to ensure whatever replaces it is blocked until they are all KDE5-ready? Many questions, probably all speculative for the moment, but speculative opinions are welcome from those with any insight.

albright · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 2:10 pm Post subject:

Havin_it · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 3:13 pm Post subject:

yngwin · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:34 am Post subject:

yngwin

Havin_it

yngwin

Havin_it

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

albright · Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 2:26 pm Post subject:

the last few days I've unable to set custom wallpapers on
plasma desktop (neither my own or the ones provided by
kde; only the "pastel triangles" wallpaper shows)

anyone else suffering this?
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

albright · Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:09 pm Post subject:

FWIW, the desktop wallpaper setting issue has now been fixed
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)