Kubuntu Forums - Help the New Guy

LTS, security, maintenence and some new guys questions

Kabelbaum — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:46:10 GMT

Hello Kubuntu members!
I am quite new to this and installed Kubuntu some weeks ago. I also followed most of the Tips from here. So I am curious about some things I wanted to ask here because I read different things about this.

General *buntu questions:

Are there things in terms of staying safe to do in general? Besides using the firewall and keeping everything as up-to-date as possible? I read a lot of negative feedback about Snap but snap has a strong sandbox and it is controlled by Canonical so Browser/Mail should be very safe as a Snap. Why do people want to remove Snap in general? Is there a different reason? Should you just not use it or not install further Snaps?

In general my concept would be to install my GUI apps as a Flatpak/Snap and only if necessary as a deb to keep the system neat and benefit from newer software than on the *buntu servers. Good idea or is it better the opposite way?

More KDE related:

I am on 26.04 now and it is the LTS. It will get at least 2-3 years of Updates for security (no feature updates for KDE or other software). Is it in general safe to use it for the time until the EOL or is KDE a problem here because vulnerabilities do not get patched (because it is frozen)?

The usability of Kubuntu (KDE) is very good in my opinion and even for somebody with not so much knowledge it is easy to use for basic stuff.

I would like to use my gdrive to mount it in Dolphin. Is rclone the only way to do it? And is it safe to do so and put it on automount when the system starts? It feels kind of weird or insecure for me. Is there maybe another way to use gdrive or would you recommend a different cloud service which is better integrated in KDE and if so which one?

Whenever I try to download widgets or themes directly through the built-in system settings store, it feels very unstable and frequently runs into errors or fails to load. Is the store generally known for having problems, or is this just an issue on my end?
As a workaround, is it completely safe to download the files manually from store.kde.org and move them into the corresponding folders myself, or can this cause security issues?

Thanks for reading and have a good day!

[RESOLVED]Wifi card not recognized, please help..

moldypastaman — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:09:19 GMT

My wifi card, Herald BE Wifi 7 Max, is completely hidden in my system. I tried the lspci grep command and it didn't even show my card, it only showed my ethernet adapter. Please help.

GRUB Problem, can't upgrade to 26.04

clammer — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:27:18 GMT

Kubuntu 25.10
Kubuntu is currently installed
NOT dual-boot
KDE Plasma 6.4.5

I tried to upgrade in konsole with do-release-upgrade and it tells me to install upgrades for the current release first, and sudo apt full-upgrade doesn't finish but gives these errors:

Setting up grub-efi-amd64-signed
Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened.
The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which
could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command.
(dpkg errors removed for space, I apologize in case this isn't proper form)
grub-efi-amd64-signed
shim-signed
Error: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Trying sudo apt-get install grub-efi does the same thing... apparently it's not fully installed. I don't understand what the fuser -l command is supposed to tell me.

So then I tried sudo grub-install and it gave me this:

grub-install: error: /boot/efi doesn't look like an EFI partition.

This is where I'm baffled, because it should definitely be an EFI partition and I've upgraded before, and it definitely exists with /boot/efi/EFI.
Other help topics have suggested a mount command, but it doesn't work because:

Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened.
The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which
could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command.

So I'm completely lost. In case it helps, I got to this point starting from grub not wanting to install because of the NTFS volume exclusively opened part and following at least a dozen help topics to no avail. One of the topics was to try purging grub, but it didn't help and caused extra dpkg errors where I removed it for space, but it was giving a dpkg error even before purging grub. If you help, can you explain the intended effect of the commands as well? Like fuser, I don't really understand what it was supposed to help me with. But the problem seems to be that it's not recognizing /boot/efi for some reason.

[SOLVED] Can't get login script to not prompt for password

knuuser — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:11:07 GMT

Can't get login script to not prompt for password.

The script is run on startup and the effects can be seen before first login, yet after I login I am prompted for a password.

I have a script:
-rwxrwxr-x 1 nick nick 43 Jun 17 20:57 /home/nick/Documents/Scripts/run_on_login.sh

Code:

#!/bin/bash
systemctl enable --now ratbagd

I want it to run on login to enable mouse customization. So I add it to autostart and it creates the file:
-rw------- 1 nick nick 162 Jun 17 20:41 home/nick/.config/autostart/run_on_login.sh.desktop

I then created the file:
-rw-r----- 1 root root 239 Jun 17 20:54 /etc/sudoers.d/my_custom_rules

and have tried all these entries at once

Code:

root ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /home/nick/Documents/Scripts/run_on_login.sh
root ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /home/nick/.config/autostart/run_on_login.sh.desktop
nick ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /home/nick/Documents/Scripts/run_on_login.sh
nick ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /home/nick/.config/autostart/run_on_login.sh.desktop

yet I am still prompted for a password after login.

What am I doing wrong?

How do I run a script without being prompted for password?
Do I have to change the script owner to root, I was hoping to avoid that.

My Kubuntu 26.04 LTS System Keeps Hanging; When it Recovers, I Get a Memory Shortage Avoided message from the kernel

DinoNerd — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:58:31 GMT

I have a kubuntu system currently running 26.04, upgraded from 25.10

On both releases, the system would hang from time to time. Often when it finally recovered I'd see a message like this

Today by the time it recovered I had 3 of these messages.

AFAIK, Linux is a demand paged operating system. Given this, it did not run out of *memory*, it ran out of virtual memory. Put another way, it ran out of swap space.

I presume therefore that the initial installation of Kubuntu made a bad decision about the total amount of swap space to configure, and *if* linux has a way to add swap space dynamically (and automatically), that ability was not turned on by the installation.

If this analysis is correct, (1) how can I fix the swap space configuration and (2) how do I report the presumed problem with the installation process?

Can it be fixed at all without reinstalling from scratch. (I don't recall whether I was even given an option to configure how my SSDs/disks would be used.)

Alternatively, my knowledge of the linux kernel is out of date, and the old OOM system I knew and didn't much like a decade ago has been replaced with something even worse, such that the amount of RAM in the system effectively limits the amount of swap space usable. I understand that MacOS and iOS compress user process memory in preference to paging it to disk, though MacOS can then page out the compressed memory; iOS on the other hand cannot page out individual pages - it's whole process or nothing. I don't know the motivation for the MacOS variant, but the iOS variant is intended to protect SSDs with a limited number of write cycles available. (The compression mechanism is also faster than paging, but I don't think any user is going to notice.) Perhaps Linux has implemented something similar, now that SSDs are overwhelmingly popular?

Finally, is it just that linux is no longer good at running on "low end" hardware? I "only" have 32 GB of RAM, which I would have expected to be enough, even with a job lot of firefox tabs trying to call home to get more ads, even though they aren't currently on screen. Maybe linux is even more bloated than MacOS, where a 16 GB system only started misbehaving in a similar way about 2 years ago, after the horrible OS upgrade that caused me to start moving from MacOS to linux. (And it just randomly kills the web browser once or twice a week, without a hang, whereas Kbuntu got 3 processes this time, including both Firefox and my mail client.)

24.4 reinstall. What do I need to note from current install (users, drives, permissions) etc

new666uk — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:09:22 GMT

After continual graphic glitches in my currrent install, I'm going to bite and reinstall.

Currently I have a few physical drives mounted (ex my Windows box) with all my movies and TV episodes.

Is it worth/ possible do save info like the users, permission and the drive structure to ease setup of the reinstall or is it literally a case of starting all over again from scratch? The only additional programmes I need to install will be plex and maybe jellyfin.

I recall setting up plex permissions was a pita so really hoping I can salvage from the old install.

Thanks
paul

Can't Screen Grab or Share Screen after switching to PulseAudio on Kubuntu 26.04

Natsukian — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:22:59 GMT

Hi there,

So I've upgraded from Kubuntu 25 to Kubuntu 26 a month ago.
But when it booted up I noticed it couldn't send 5.1 sound though the Toslink port on my motherboard.
While digging, I found that PulseAudio had been replaced by Pipewire, and that Pipewire didn't support such profile through integrated motherboard ports, only through GPU outputs (like HDMI).
Anyway, I changed it back to PulseAudio cause it worked fine for me and I do enjoy my surround sound. (While changing it I also noticed that PulseAudio now automatically up mixes stereo stream to 5.1 if selected as an output profile, it's excellent !)
But now, if I try to record my screen with OBS or just share it on Discord, I get an error :

Code:

Failed to connect PipeWire context

It's kind of becoming annoying, especially since I don't care about recording the sound, and even if I did, how can I get it to work while still using PulseAudio ?

Here are my specs :

System:
Host: MUTHER Kernel: 7.0.0-22-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.6.4 Distro: Kubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon)
Machine:
Type: Desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING v: Rev 1.xx
serial: Firmware: UEFI vendor: American Megatrends
v: 3103 date: 06/17/2020
CPU:
Info: 8-core model: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X bits: 64 type: MT MCP cache:L2: 4 MiB
Speed (MHz):avg: 3811 min/max: 2200/4549 cores:1: 3811 2: 3811 3: 3811
4: 3811 5: 3811 6: 3811 7: 3811 8: 3811 9: 3811 10: 3811 11: 3811 12: 3811
13: 3811 14: 3811 15: 3811 16: 3811
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] driver: nvidia v: 580.159.03
Device-2: Logitech Webcam C300 driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo type: USB
Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.22 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.10
compositor: kwin_wayland driver:X:loaded: nvidia
unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch
resolution:1: 1024x768~60Hz 2: 1680x1050~60Hz 3: 1920x1080~60Hz
API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: nvidia,swrast
platforms: gbm,wayland,x11,surfaceless,device
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 580.159.03
renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2
API: Vulkan v: 1.4.341 drivers: nvidia,llvmpipe surfaces: N/A
Info:Tools:api: clinfo, eglinfo, glxinfo, vulkaninfo
de: kscreen-console,kscreen-doctor gpu: nvidia-settings,nvidia-smi
wl: wayland-info x11: xdriinfo, xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Audio:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP106 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Starship/Matisse HD Audio
driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-3: Logitech Webcam C300 driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo type: USB
API: ALSA v: k7.0.0-22-generic status: kernel-api
Server-1: PulseAudio v: 17.0 status: active

I've been looking around for a couple of hours, but can't seem to find anyone with a similar issue...
I'm not really new to Kubuntu, but I kinda feel like it's an easy problem, and I'm just not looking at it the right way.

Thanks in advance !

Natsukian