Give Discoing a go with Kubuntu 19.04 Disco

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

It seems that Wine is still incomplete. Didn't find wine-gecko, wine-mono.

WineHQ site offers until 18.10, only.

EDITED (2019-02-18) - No, just my head was incomplete.

Missed to install q4wine, and it was enough to work fine.

[NoWorries]

I share your preference for Synaptic for the installation of one or more applications, particularly on a new installation. So I can have hundreds of packages selected and then do the install and go and have a coffee.

What I do not like about Discover is that it installs after an application is chosen and you have to wait for this to complete before choosing your next application.

I accept Discover when it shows packages to install after I reboot in the morning, so I let it do its job. At least is warns you of any packages to be removed.

I use the command line to clean my root directory and check on packages that are no longer required.

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

On Disco, Discover is very good and it also lists what packages are going to be removed and hopefully stops one from system destruction. In the early days of using Disco, I accidentally did this and so I had to rebuild my system.

I have seen old Muon Discover some years ago, but I didn't like it so much, as I was already familiar to Synaptic.

Back then, I found Muon Discover a few simple, as a colorfull "store", better for smartphone screen, but not so useful / powerful as Synaptic.

Then, Muon Discover had no more maintenance, and KDE had to create Plasma Discover to replace it, and I had a very bad experience with it (high CPU usage with slideshow, specially), for a while. I didn't try Plasma Discover again, since then, so I cannot talk about it now.

Plasma Discover is probably nice, as million people use it and like it! And if it was not nice, it wouldn't be a default. Only, I still prefer the old and good Synaptic.

Curiously, originally Synaptic was not a ".deb" application. Synaptic was created by an RPM-based distro "Conectiva", for its APT-RPM tool. (Some time after, Mandrake and Conectiva were mixed in Mandriva). Now, Synaptic is mostly used by ".deb" distros, but also by PCLinuxOS RMP distro, which keeps that RPM-APT tool.

[acheron]

There were some unresolvable dependencies in some non kubuntu specific base packages like util-linux a day or 2 ago. Iso builds for all flavours failed to build due to those. Should be resolved now AFAIK.

[NoWorries]

Glad to know that all is now well with your installation of Disco. I must confess that I sometimes use the command line;

sudo apt update; sudo apt full-upgrade

and the full-upgrade lists what will be done. If there is something wrong you can always try

sudo dpkg --configure -a

.
On Disco, Discover is very good and it also lists what packages are going to be removed and hopefully stops one from system destruction. In the early days of using Disco, I accidentally did this and so I had to rebuild my system.

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

On my system I have separate root and home partitions. I am also on a fibre network, so if I strike problems similar to yours, I download the latest build and reinstall. I find this takes less time than trying to solve a package problem. BTW, I checked my system and I do not have conky installed as I use English.

A few hours later, yesterday, apt update && apt list --upgradable found 64 packages to upgrade, and this time Synaptic installed all of them, ─ including login package, ─ without removing anything.

So, I could work for about 7 hours with Kubuntu Disco Dingo, and it keeps working fine, without any other problem, ─ except that it does not "Restore manually saved session".

This is why I think it is always a good idea, to "see" what would happen, before to apply changes. Running apt update, you can "see" if Repos and network are ok; and Synaptic (or apt upgrade) shows a detailed preview.

What could happen, if I left unattended-upgrades to do things silently?



Conky (left side, above) doesn't come installed by default. You should install it, if you want it.

Then, you can run "conky &" in Konsole, to start it, ─ but it is a nice thing, to start it with Boot & KDE session.

[NoWorries]

On my system I have separate root and home partitions. I am also on a fibre network, so if I strike problems similar to yours, I download the latest build and reinstall. I find this takes less time than trying to solve a package problem. BTW, I checked my system and I do not have conky installed as I use English.

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

My experience for now

I have installed Kubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo (daily-build) last November, 23, for dualboot, and it is working fine.

January, 22, it upgraded to KDE Plasma 5.14.90 (5.15 beta), which is fine, too.

After this, Restart didn't work, and I have run sudo reboot.

Since then, Conky does not start at session startup, ─ using "Restore manually saved session" + manually "Save session". ─ Not a great problem. I could try "Restore previous session", or even "Start an empty session" + a simple Autostart to Conky.

Or, merely open Konsole and start Conky manually, as I prefer to do, for now, until get a time to explore this and try to solve it. And it is probable that such little problem to disappear after some next update.

A very little problem, and I cannot blame no one else for it, since I have done some experiences, such as to install (and remove) old 4.4 Kernel, and remove packagekit, plasma-discover, muon, unattended-upgrades, plasma-vault, kubuntu-driver-manager, kubuntu-notification-helper, and many of their orphaned dependencies.

Note that I use to do these same things in other distros, too, including Kubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. I don't like silent or unclear upgrades.

I use to run apt update to "see" if all Repos are fine; then apt list --upgradable to see how many (and what) packages will be upgraded / installed / removed; and finally open Synaptic to see a few more details and apply updates.

Yesterday, I did it in a different way, as recommended:

sudo apt update -o Acquire::http::AllowRedirect=false
sudo apt upgrade -o Acquire::http::AllowRedirect=false

Back to old routine, today I have seen that there were 43 upgradable packages, ─ but Synaptic would install just 42 and keep unchanged the login package.

If I try to force upgrade of login package, apt / Synaptic would remove most of KDE Plasma.

So, I will not upgrade anything, by now, and delay it for tomorrow or any other day.

Kubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo (development branch) keeps working fine, and I think there is no reason to risk it.

It is not the first time that I install and use regularly a "development branch", or a Beta release, or a rolling distro. Usually, there can be some problems, and it is not the end of the world.

Operating System: Kubuntu 19.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.14.90
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.54.0
Qt Version: 5.11.3
Kernel Version: 4.18.0-11-generic
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 2 × Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E7300 @ 2.66GHz
Memory: 3,8 GiB

[NoWorries]

For some time now I could not use Disco to connect to my HP printer. With this printer I used an Ethernet connection. It is now in re-cycling because it finally developed a fault that I could not fix.

I now have a HP OfficeJet All-in-One 6950 and, like all modern printers, it uses a wireless connection. With the latest HPLIP software, I was able to connect Disco and all options are available and working.

So my only outstanding problem with Disco is with LibreOffice Presentation with inserted videos ignoring page size and occupying full screen on both the control screen and the projected image. The problem is recognized on Launchpad bug #1789029 but no one has been assigned. So I wait patently.

[acheron]

Plasma beta now in the main archive for 19.04. No PPA required

(also in Kubuntu Beta Backports for 18.10)

[NoWorries]

If you want the latest KDE Plasma and other goodies, they are all now on my version of Disco. Over the past few days I have been getting updates to KDE Plasma 5.14.90 which is the 5.15 beta. Its features can be found at:
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.90.php

For what I do, I find this very stable. Well done Guys,

My only outstanding problem, which is probably a LibreOffice Presentation problem, is that projected videos do not conform to the projector screen size. That is, a 16:9 video is projected at 4:3 aspect ratio.

I am please to show my current Info Centre information:



I hope it is not too long before the above LibreOffice problem is fixed and I can consider using this as a production system.

[NoWorries]

While many like to stick with LTS, I prefer to get the most advanced versions. I currently have 2 Laptops, one with 18.04 and the other with 18.10 and 19.04.

The frustrations that I have with 18.04 are that the desktop images have blurred backgrounds and my calendar Kontact always exits with an error on shutdown. Disco has none of these problems plus I have the latest versions of all applications such as Gimp, Kdenlive and others.

I enjoy dealing with the latest and in some very small way help in their development.

[jglen490]

Disco, Disco Duck?



Glad it's working for you. I'll just wait for the next LTS, which should be most excellent.

[NoWorries]

Well today, I decided to take the plunge and got the kernel 4.20.0-1 by adding:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team/unstable

After doing this and adding the 4.20.0-1 kernel, the system would not load the kernel. To solve this, I edited my BIOS and disable secure boot. After doing this, my system booted into the new kernel and I my current Info Centre now shows:



I am looking forward to further kernel updates so that I can enable secure boot.

As you can see, the developers are doing a great job at steadily advancing Disco.

[NoWorries]

It is now almost 2 weeks since I reported problems with the Pre-release updates. I have noticed recently that if I use Discover for updates, it advises me when other packages are to be removed. So I decided to use Muon Package Manager to change my options for Software updates. I now have all options in this heading selected including Pre-release updates. So after 254 updates from this change, my system has a Kernel update and a KDE Frameworks update. All is now well and I survived. Now my Info centre now looks like this:



Well done to all developers and I am continuing to appreciate all that is being done to make this a Super Distribution.