Miskatonic University Press

Last week I finally got around to upgrading my personal laptop from Ubuntu 22.04 to version 24.04. I’d run the upgrade on two other machines without problems. This time, though, when I rebooted it decrypted the disk (good!) but then only came up in console mode. Instead of a nice GNOME login screen, I saw this:

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS jenkins tty3
jenkins login:

I logged in and it worked. Phew! My files were all there, the internet connection worked, the machine was okay. There was no graphical interface, but that was fixable.

Recovering

Something must have gone wrong with GNOME or X or Wayland or whatever, but I was pretty sure reinstalling would fix it, and it did. I ran these two commands. The first brought back the GUI, and the second did a full reinstall of the GNOME environment and everything it needed.

sudo apt install gdm3
sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-gnome-desktop

That took a while to download and install, but when it was all done I had the default Ubuntu GNOME working. I’d lost all my customizations and configurations, but it was working. Good! A few programs were missing so I installed them:

sudo apt install mpv vlc gimp plocate

I also had to rebuild Emacs and R, but make maintainer-clean and Conforguration made that easy.

I thought, do I want to reconfigure GNOME to be like it had been? I could. But for a while I’d been thinking about moving to KDE. Now’s the time, I thought. I’m going to be configuring a desktop environment, so why not try a new one I’ve been hearing great things about? If I don’t like it, I’ll just go back to GNOME.

sudo apt install kde-full

This downloaded over 1,000 packages that used over three gigs of disk, which also took a while. As part of the install it asked me about switching the display manager from gdm3 (which GNOME use) to sddm (for KDE), which I agreed to. Again I rebooted, the new display manager came up, I chose “KDE Plasma (X11)” … and it worked!

Configuring KDE Plasma

Right away I liked Plasma, KDE’s desktop environment. (I’m running KDE Plasma 5, which goes with Ubuntu 24.04, but version 6 is out.) It looks good. And it’s very easy to configure. You don’t need to, but if you want to, you can. All sorts of options are easily available that aren’t possible in GNOME.

Here are some of the things I did.

• Appearance:
  • Fonts: Changed all to Deja Vu (Sans and Sans Mono)
  • Colours: Installed Solarized Dark and used it.
  • Splash screen: None
• Workspace
  • General Behaviour: Animation speed: Instant; Clicking files or folders: Selects them (double-click to open)
  • Workspace Behaviour: Virtual Desktops: Two rows, three columns; Show on-screen display when switching: set to 300 ms
• Window Management:
  • Window Behavior: Advanced: Enable “Allow apps to remember the positions of their own windows, if they allow it”;
  • Window Rules: Add a new rule: set “Window class (application)” to Regular Expression, with the regex =.*= , use “Add Property” to go under “Appearances and Fixes” and find “No titlebar and frame,” Apply initially, and enable Yes.
• Shortcuts
  • KWin: Add shortcuts to Switch One Desktop Down, Switch One Desktop to the Left, Switch One Desktop to the Right, and Switch One Desktop Up, so that Ctrl-Alt-Down, Ctrl-Alt-Left, etc., all work. To enter them I needed to use the real Ctrl key, not Caps Lock, but Caps Lock works in the key combination when I want to move on the virtual desktop.
• Accessibility: Disable audible bell
• Audio: Mute notification sounds
• Input Devices
  • Keyboard: Advanced: Cap Lock behaviour: Makes Caps Lock an additional Ctrl; Position of Compose key: Right Alt
  • Touchpad: Invert scroll direction
• Removable Storage
  • Removable Devices: Set “All Known Devices” to automount on attach

Konsole (the terminal program):

• Made a “Me” profile and set it as the default profile:
• Appearance:
  • Used Solarized theme
  • Changed font to Deja Vu Sans Mono
  • Open new shells in the same working directory as current
  • Terminal bell mode: Ignore bell events
  • Set as default profile
• Disabled the toolbars at the top, which I don’t care about (in the window configuration, not my profile)

For the task bar, the default panel at bottom (with the Kickoff application launcher and System Tray):

• Moved it to the top of the screen
• Unpinned default applications
• Remove Settings, pager widget (I don’t need to see virtual desktop layout), Discover, Peek at Desktop
• Generally fiddled around with it
• System Tray
  • Configure (Right-click on the “show hidden icons” arrow, choose Configure System Tray): Entries: Set Audio Volume, Battery, and Bluetooth to Always shown
• Clock: Configure Digital Clock: Set time to 24-hour clock; configure date format to custom (dddd dd MMMM yyyy); move all the way to the left of the panel

In the end the desktop looks like this. I embedded a widget on it that shows network activity. Usually this is covered by Emacs or Firefox or whatever, but I see it on empty desktops when I pass by.

Widgets! They can go on the desktop or in a panel.

The background colour there is #002b36, from the Solarized Dark palette. Emacs and Konsole and Firefox use the same theme, and other programs pick it up from the system, so everything looks the same.

Nice!

A few things about Plasma were delightful surprises.

KRunner is a quick application launcher. GNOME’s launcher comes up with Super (the Windows key, which Plasma confusingly calls Meta, but as an Emacs user for me Meta is Alt), but in Plasma that brings up the full Application Launcher, so I use the default Alt-Space keystroke. KRunner has all kinds of nice features built into it, such as a basic calculator and a spellcheck.

But I don’t even need to run KRunner in an empty desktop—I can just start typing! That triggers KRunner. So if I want to run Tor in the virtual desktop window where I keep it, I can just move there and type “tor.” KRunner pops up, grabs the letters, prompts me with Tor in a drop-down list, and I can just hit Enter to run it.

Screenshots with Spectacle are fantastic. The GNOME tool doesn’t have annotation abilities, but this does, and it’s very easy to grab a screenshot and put in circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

Widgets!

There is clipboard management with Super-v. This pops up a window with a searchable clipboard history, and you can scroll to what you want and hit Return to insert. I’m used to good clipboard management with Emacs, and this is great to have elsewhere.

I’m not yet sure about Activities, which allow you to have multiple virtual desktops, each configured differently. How to Be More Productive in Linux With KDE Activities has some examples. I haven’t tried this yet, but I may have a couple of uses.

KDE comes with all sorts of tools, games, utilities, and other applications, such as KGeography, a quiz to help you learn maps, flags and geography. It’s fun.

Notifications went strange on me a while back in GNOME. In Plasma they’re small and crisp on the right-hand side of the screen and work perfectly.

LibreOffice Writer looks nice. All the applications look nice.

There are a couple of things about keystrokes that I’m getting used to, or may change. That’s easily configurable, though. I’m fiddling around with small things like what information is showed in Konsole tab labels, and whether some applications should have toolbars and frames, but it’s easy to fiddle, change, and reset.

The passwords for my VPNs were lost in the network settings—I think that kind of stored password problem is to be expected; I saw warnings of other problems having both GNOME and KDE installed, but so far everything has been fine. Maybe the problems come from switching.

I won’t be switching back. I wish I’d moved to Plasma years ago.