[Post-Install] Best practice for BLOCKING KDE 6.8 and borqing X11 setups and fixing Synaptic????

[rec9140]

First, lets just get the ground rules everyone here is already familiar with my hatred and disdain of wayturkey. So Thanks, lets just leave that out of this and how its the glorious future of the Linux desktop, it is not. Full Stop. Additionally as it appears that 26.10 will give me one last update to some things v. the ESR 26.04, and my plan that 26.04 will be the end of the road.. unless some of the X11 forks appear in 28 to fix things... None of the various forks of X11 support the CORE FUNCTIONS I use, X'ng in aka X11 Forwarding & XDMCP. SonicDE and XLibre both are not going to support that, and/or have some issue with *buntus..

Soo.. leave the security drama theatre and wayturkey cheerleading behind.. Thanks!

So I decided to a test of 26.10 just to see what last hurray will be there since KDE 6.7 is the default... which led to the idea that hmmmm... any updates to KDE 6.8 via backports etc. would need to be BLOCKED. Probably a good idea for the 26.04 ESR's too!

So whats the best method of this, I do NOT WISH to hammer this with disabling backports repo, but just nuking KDE being updated beyond 6.7.x

I don't do auto upgrades and updating, period. But since I need to reeducate my brain to not just do this and then get a KDE 6.8 which will break X11....when I do the normal updates in the CLI...

I am looking at something along the lines of:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...-not-available

But I am not an apt pinning guru, and I want to be sure I being granular enough that the 6.7 branch of KDE is fine to update, but anything beyond that is NOT acceptable. Now possibly others have figured this out and if kde-session-x11 is installed, that blocks things? Don't know... but I don't want to rely on that as in most cases people make choices which are opposite of my choices/desires in this space ala auto updates, upgrades and notifications of updates/upgrades available.. don't care thanks.

Basically which package(s) do I need to pin to the 6.7 KDE branch to prevent any changes to KDE desktop and thus X11.

So thoughts, ideas? Suggestions? on blocking KDE updates that would break X11

Next would be still synaptic is not allowing the search/filter bar as per the link as I've always done.. again, I though this was fixed in Debian and thus should filter down Ummm?? Bueller??

https://askubuntu.com/questions/7638...6-04-and-later

Or things are going to need to be hard purged, and reinstall a proper synaptic from:
https://launchpad.net/~nrbrtx/+archive/ubuntu/synaptic , at lest for 26.04 ESR...

This thing too is falling to one of those areas of people should leave things alone! I don't care what issue there is with libept or whatever.. urrhghghghghhhhhh. Just YOU don't use something, or use your system remotely etc.. doesn't meant there are not others doing so who have done so for longer than most of you likely have been alive too! urghghghghghg... ommmmmmmmmm....

Just for edification for other X11 refugees X11 was SUCCESSFULLY RESTORED in 26.10 for my KVM testing setup, and LightDM was installed to permit XDMCP along with Xephyr for that setup.

Well I am off to get some drinks, as this just pushed my buttons too much... ommmmmmmmm... clink... sllooosh..

[claydoh]

You would not get 6.8 in 26.10 period, unless you yourself manually added a Kubuntu-run PPA . You would only get a newer Plasma version when you upgrade to the next release, 27.04.

There is absolutely nothing to pin.

The ubuntu-backports section of the standard Ubuntu repos would never have Plasma version upgrades in it. The confusion here is that Kubuntu's PPA that can offer this is called Kubuntu Backports. These are two totally separate and unrelated things altogether. So you won't need to worry about getting any major version upgrades "accidentally" here.

Of course the sane option is to stick to Plasma 6.6, which is now an official LTS version of Plasma, and Kubuntu 26.04. A number of years of updates/support for Plasma before the sky falls on your head


As for Synaptic, that will depend on when Ubuntu takes a snapshot of Debian Testing, for 27.04, assuming both the updated Synaptic *and* the needed apt-xapian-index are available. This update is not anywhere near to being in Debian proper yet, it will be in the net Debian release. Apt-xapian-index is nowhere to be seen yet.

But as the new synaptic version was only released this past month, I will assume other PPAs with this version, and the needed xapian-index may follow, instead of forcing a downgrade. (the packaging is probably a bit easier than using versioning tricks used to get the old Synaptic)

This thing too is falling to one of those areas of people should leave things alone! I don't care what issue there is with libept or whatever.

The problem is exactly because people left it alone: no one was maintaining this, along with the apt-xapian-index. So they either were causing problems no one could fix, or stopped being buildable, also with no one wanting to fix it.
Apt-xapian index could be a hot mess at times. Hopefully it does get maintained and back into Debian et al.