[Discussion] Not a rant but a cry for help...

[pierrick]

Hi all.
Returning to Debian after erring into the jungle of various distros (Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, KUbuntu) for a decade or so. I say erring because I really had no reason whatsoever to leave Debian in the first place: it worked well, it did what I wanted it to do, it was stable. I guess one of the reasons was that I wanted to experiment? Anyway, back I am, and Debian has now reached version 12, and I now have a few more white hair...
And sadly I can't say I'm very impressed.

My system is a Dell OptiPlex 7070:

• 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz

• 31.1 GiB of RAM

• Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (driving 2 HDMI ports, both in use)

• SSD: Micron 2200S NVMe 1024GB

Debian:

• GNU/Linux 12

• Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 12

• KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.5

• KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103.0

• Qt Version: 5.15.8

• Kernel Version: 6.1.0-25-amd64 (64-bit)

• Graphics Platform: Wayland

Problems.

It all started at install time... I should've known then that I was heading for trouble.

• When installing, at some stage one is asked to choose between installing software from the installation media or from internet. I tried both (yes, that's two installs right there!) and in both instances I ended up with Discovery giving me an error message as it opened (https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=155958) OK so I solved it, but the point here is that unless one is ready to go into the console and mess around with system files, one is pretty much stuck.

• The software that's installed automatically include strange choices: a Thai language console, a multitude of KDE Plasma Desktop applets, that sort of thing. I understand that KDE Plasma applets will be offered as a result of my choice of desktop manager (KDE Plasma) but surely there must be a way of preventing all this to install as default. Or, at the very least, offer a list and let people pick what they want.

• Three apps (that I found so far) don't behave as expected.
  • Anydesk, the tray icon is mostly unresponsive (it worked in KUbuntu).
  • Pragha no longer minimises as a tray icon, and refuses to save its preferences (it did in KUbuntu).
  • Dolphin will intermittantly lose drag and drop facility when copying/moving files. Also, again intermittantly, Dolphin will take up to several minutes to eject an external storage device. I realise the latter may not be directly Dolphin's problem.

• Generally, I find that my machine has got sluggish, doesn't respond as quickly as it did with KUbuntu to mouse clicks and to keyboard input.

OK, I'll concede that Anydesk isn't in the default Debian repo so any problem with it is Anydesk's, not Debian's. Pragha however has been installed from the Debian repo, and as such I would expect it to work according to specs. As for Dolphin, I didn't even install it as it came out of the box in the Debian install. And as I said earlier, all these apps behaved very well in KUbuntu.

It's getting to the point where I am losing faith in this install. What else is going to fail?
I am thinking of throwing the towel on this install and reinstall Debian 12 one last time. However I would pick another desktop as I am starting to suspect that the errors I'm getting are related to KDE Plasma rather that Debian. Is there anyway to confirm this? Perhaps a log somewhere in /var/log/?
I would appreciate if someone could help me to a path of resolution.
Kind regards to y' all.

[mrmazda]

It seems you may need to exit Plasma, login as root on a vtty, then run apt update && apt upgrade && apt full-upgrade.

Discover reputedly has dependency flaws. I never use it, and rarely synaptic or any other GUI package manager.

I avoid such trouble by doing only minimal NET installations and setting APT::Install-Recommends "false"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ prior to installing software.

[pierrick]

@mrmazda
Thank you for the suggestion. I'll try and do that today and let you know.

[pierrick]

@mrmazda
Sorry for the delay: away for work... Gotta pay the bills...
As per your suggestion, unfortunately I can't login as root. I didn't specify a root password at install time. The best I can do is sudo in a console inside the Plasma GUI.
I ran the 3 commands in a vtty (logged in as myself and as sudo)

1. apt update -> 2 packages can be upgraded
2. apt upgrade -> the 2 packages were upgraded
3. apt full-upgrade -> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded

Shutdown, then started the machine.

... same erratic behaviours.
I also noticed Geany is behaving badly.

I mean even this editor is not working well: can't get a simple ordered list using the editor button!

[juribel]

You can do "sudo bash" in a terminal. Enter your password. Then execute "passwd" and thus assign a password to root. Then you should be able to login as root in a regular way.

[pierrick]

@juribel
Thank you for jumping in. That worked.

@mrmazda
I ran the three commands in a terminal, logged in as root (as per juribel's tips). Let's see. I'll give it a few days.

FYI
Had an afternoon to kill so I got my Lenovo X250 thinkpad laptop and installed Debian 12 (dual boot with Windows 10.)
I tried two desktops: Gnome, Cinnamon. I remembered why I'd moved away from Gnome and family, and embraced KDE!
And I suspect the Debian peeps are closet KDE users considering the inordinate amount of games that got installed by default when I opted for the Gnome desktop! I ended up with a real kiddies environment!
So gave up and installed a 3rd time with KDE. Yay!
Discovery again gave me an error message as it opened (https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=155958) After applying the fix, it took some time (and several restarts) before I could see apps... Not impressed but let's move on... I'll see if Debian behaves better on the laptop.

Thanks for your help so far. Work in progress here.

[bin]

If you like KDE then I would strongly recommend you take a look a t Q4OS Plasma edition https://www.q4os.org
The live system/installer is quite small, the installation routine is absurdly simple and you have the options of installing a Pure = minimal KDE desktop, Live = the same system as on the live media ( I always use this one) or 2 other more comprehensive installers. The Live media allows you to ensure your net connection is OK and thus gets round the cdrom error messages you've had. The 2 basic installers do not even install Discover or Synaptic which are amongst the many apps that can be installed via the Q4OS Software Centre (or command line if you fee like it.)
It just works.

[bbbhltz]

When installing Debian (and many other distros) you will get a selection of software chosen by the packagers.

task-kde-desktop is what is installed by default, and that gives you loads of software.

A good idea would be to do what is mentioned above and start minimal and build it up.

During install do not choose a desktop, just standard system utilities.

After reboot

Code: Select all

sudo apt install kde-standard plasma-nm

to get a good minimal base and install what you need from there.

Good luck.

[pierrick]

@bin
Thank you for suggesting another Debian offspring.

However I'd like to continue with Debian 12 and solve whatever issue is arising. That way perhaps we can all learn something.

[pierrick]

@bbbhitz
Thank you you the install guidance. This looks like what I've been missing.
Would you please have any tips on how to check for all the erratic behaviours I'm experiencing? Is there any particular log I should be looking into, and what message?

Thank you.

[bbbhltz]

@pierrick I usually post my questions here and wait for help. The key would be to break it down into separate questions and put one question per post with descriptive titles.

[sunrat]

Code: Select all

sudo apt install kde-standard plasma-nm

to get a good minimal base and install what you need from there.

kde-plasma-desktop package is more minimal than kde-standard.
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/kde-standard
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/kde-plasma-desktop

[pierrick]

Hi all.
Back behind the keyboard again!
@bbbhltz and @sunrat
So starting from an installation media I would opt for the character (non-graphical) install, and at the end (after reboot):

Code: Select all

sudo apt update
sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop

Thanks

[pierrick]

OK. At this point I need to hear one good reason I'd want to proceed down this seemingly hopeless path.
I have downloaded (again) the Debian 12 ISO (debian-12.7.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso), verified the checksum. No errors.
I have performed a non-graphical install. Installed basic system (144 files). No errors.
The machine booted to a terminal. I logged in. No errors.
I then tried

Code: Select all

sudo apt update

and again got an error about a cdrom b******s message (https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=155958) and had to update the source.list file. This does not bode well!
Still, persevering I carried on with the nth install (I've lost count by now...)
With the source.list file updated I managed to execute an update.
Next I tried:

Code: Select all

sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop

And promptly got:

Code: Select all

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package kde-plasma-desktop

What now? The package seems to exist (see: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/kde-plasma-desktop)
I looked around the web and couldn't locate any solution. Do I need to add something in the source.list? Do I have to add a repository?

Or do I call it quits. I have spent several days now on installing erratic Debian desktops. And now I'm left with an over powered terminal!

[mrmazda]

Leave out the kde- part and try apt install again.
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ ... a-desktop/

[pierrick]

As an epilogue.
Since I couldn't install kde-plasma-desktop, I tried

Code: Select all

sudo apt install kde-standard

I got an error "E: Unable to locate package kde-standard."
Why am I not surprised.

[pierrick]

Post epilogue... Just because I can't quit this easy!
It looks like installing kde-plasma-desktop (and presumably kde-standard) demands logging in as root. Even sudo <user> doesn't work.
So as soon as I did a sudo bash, I could install kde-plasma-desktop

Will let you know how it all goes.
Since the original problem (see first post) was erratic behaviour from some apps, I'll run some tests with Dolphin, then if it's ok, I'll move on to Geany, etc.

[pierrick]

@mrmazda
Thanks for the suggestion. I don't think it would have worked without first loging in as root.

[pierrick]

OK. Kde-plasma-desktop intalled.
Dolphin test:

• File/folder drag and drop works immediately when only working with internal file system. As expected.

• Plug in an external USB device and drag and drop stops functioning period. Wait for a minute or so (yes, more than 60 seconds) and drag and drop becomes functional again.

So basically this unexpected behaviour, which never happened in my KUbuntu install, is still present.
To be fair, a web search reveals that this behaviour is more a Dolphin bug than anything to do with Debian: occurs in SuSe, KUbuntu, etc. Will it be fixed I wonder?

So let's move on to FireFox Esr...
More later.

[mrmazda]

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't think it would have worked without first loging in as root.

I thought it or working sudo was a given on a minimalist text only system. Could be you hadn't installed enough to have working sudo.