Get Energetic Evaluating Kenitic Kubuntu 22.10

[NoWorries]

I have just found that Kinetic Kudu is now available for download. I have installed it on my "Sacrificial" Laptop. My first action after the installation was to de-snap Firefox followed by installing my main packages which include networking. My edited Info Centre shows the current status of this system.


The developers have done an excellent job for a starting system.

While Laptop that I have this system installed on is not super critical, I have to bear in mind that I have to keep it working as our Grand-Son uses this for Prodigy. This is a mathematical package for developing young minds and this only works on Kubuntu and not on Windows or iPad's. That is Great News to Me.

[NoWorries]

It is now 5 months to go before the release of Kinetic Kudu.

For those who have succeeded with the installation and testing of Kinetic, you may have similar System Information as shown in the table below. This initial status is that which Kinetic had when I first installed it.

	Initial Status	5 Month Status
KDE Plasma Version	5.24.5	5.24.90
KDE Frameworks Version	5.93.0	5.94
QT Version	5.15.4	5.15.3
Kernel Version	5.15.0-27-generic	5.15.0-28-generic

I initially installed Kinetic on what I call is my sacrificial Laptop. It was going so well that I decided to install it on main Laptop which is a HP Spectre x360 15-ch004ng. This Laptop had Windows 10, Kubuntu 22.04 and Kubuntu 21.10. I decided to rearrange my partitions with Kubuntu 21.10 with 22.10.

In doing this I decided to use the btrfs file system for all my Linux partitions This is when all Hell Broke Loose. I could only boot one Kubuntu system and Windows. I found various options to get around this. The bottom line is that Grub does not handle btrfs. So I decided to make the /root partition file system Ext4 and my /home partitions btrfs. In this way, I could use grub-customizer on my LTS to have a respectable startup screen and also fix systems with kernel updates.

I must confess that I use Pre-released and Unsupported updates for Kinetic and I feel safe with this arrangement as if Kinetic gives problems, I can us my LTS. In fact, I have projections responsibilities in a weeks time and I plan to use Kinetic.

In all areas that I use frequently, Kinetic works perfectly. I am very pleased with its performance and I am very grateful to the developers for the excellant progress at this very early stage of development.

[rab0171610]

excellant progress at this very early stage of development

They started with a snapshot of the already released Jammy. So it would be hard to measure the progress at this point. I have it installed and there have been a few updates. No major changes to note. They still have 5 months to make progress. I am sure by release date there will be some major differences between Jammy and Kudu, but for now there have only been some minor updates so the progression is minimal.

[jlittle]

... The bottom line is that Grub does not handle btrfs...

Huh? Works fine on my systems. Indeed, I install grub to its own btrfs subvolume, to keep it independent of any particular install. If I can I install without a bootloader, (for Kubuntu that's ubiquity -b), if not I uninstall the bootloader as soon as possible.

What doesn't work is the "recordfail" mechanism, as that needs write access. The recordfail mechanism is mostly to stop boot loops.

btrfs is great for those who try out different installs, because there's no need to find or shuffle partitions. Leading up to a Kubuntu release I usually have one or two clean installs going, and when I do-release-upgrade I often keep the non-upgraded install going. All that needs is a few renames, snapshots, and tweaks to grub's custom.cfg and to /etc/fstab, and they're all in the same btrfs.

[GreyGeek]

Me too!
-deleted dumb joke---

[oshunluvr]

Not only does GRUB "handle" BTRFS, I too boot from a stand-alone GRUB BTRFS subvolume. My setup is probably 99% the same as yours, John.

Other than the recordfail part, also the "dynamic" boot menu selection doesn't work for the same reason.

There's also a grub-btrfs package out there that lets you boot snapshots directly from the grub boot menu, but I haven't played with it.

[acheron]

Plasm 5.25 beta now included for testing.

https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-25...e-for-testing/

[NoWorries]

Plasm 5.25 beta now included for testing.

https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-25...e-for-testing/

The 5.25 beta was installed today on my system. The main problem that I am having is that "empty panels" do not work. If I install a number of applications in the empty panel, on reboot, only one remains and the others are not there.

If there is some alternative to the empty panel setup, I would love to know. Currently, I just drag my applications onto the desktop.

[NoWorries]

On my LTS I have 12 applications in my empty panel which makes using the desktop much faster and more convenient.

With the latest Beta 5.25 the empty panel will only hold one application. I would like to file a bug report on this oversight but I am not sure whether I should do it on Launchpad or KDE bug reporting. I have found it very difficult on the KDE site to work out the item for filing such a report.

Does anyone know the best site and application to file a bug on Add Panel > Empty Panel?

[acheron]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454105

[acheron]

In other news, Qt 5.15.4 has landed in Kinetic, with qtwayland KDE patches

[NoWorries]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454105

To avoid making my desktop look like a Windows 10 desktop which is full of icons to launch applications, I decided to adopt a partial compromise by creating 3 blank empty panels at the top of the screen, one centre, one left and the other right. Each contained one of my most frequently used applications. This approach I also be used on the left and right edges of the screen to make a total of 9 applications that can be launched easily.

This morning I received news that looks like a fix to this problem has been made:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454105 Fushan Wen <qydwhotmail@gmail.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Resolution|FIXED |--- Status|RESOLVED |REOPENED -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.

So I look forward to the update of KDE Plasma 5.25 beta with this bug fixed.

Update: Just received a message that the fix has been found and will be in the Plasma 5.25 release on the 14th June.

[acheron]

pipewire by default should be landing soon

Once the meta packages install pipewire-pulse and wireplumber, you should likely do 'apt-get purge pulseaudio pipewire-media-session' otherwise you may have no sound or still be useing pulseaudio. Fixing that switch to be automatic is obviously something ubuntu will be sorting later in testing

[NoWorries]

In my initial haste to start this post I misspelt "Kinetic" as "Kenitic".

I cannot change this spelling and for a long time I have been frustrated by this. Is there any way to fix this spelling in the Post Title?

[NoWorries]

For some time now I have been frustrated with LibreOffice Impress not being able to display embedded videos in a presentation and because I needed this capability I had installed Version 7.2.5.2 and was therefore reminded that a new version was available every time I started LibreOffice.

I have now found that a new version 7.3.5 is in the daily stage and is available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/d...6-17_05.56.04/. This version was available about one month ago and the build that is available now is the 17-June-22. I have tested it on my "Sacrificial Laptop" and LibreOffice 7.3.5 works extremely well and solves all the problems that I have had with previous versions of LibreOffice since 7.2.5.2.

Update:

I decided to remove LibreOffice 7.3.5 from my "Sacrificial Laptop" and install the currently distributed LibreOffice version so that I would know when updates to LibreOffice would be made. To my surprise, this version was 7.3.4.2 and it successfully played embedded videos without a problem. So while the version 7.3.5 will eventually arrive, I hope it works with Wayland.

My next step was to remove LibreOffice 7.2.5.2 and install Version 7.3.4.2 on my main Laptop. I have noticed lately some updates to Wayland and previously I have used LibreOffice Impress to test its status. For the first time I now found that LibreOffice Impress worked acceptably with Wayland with embedded videos. This only works because I have an AMD card. My "Sacrificial Laptop" has an Nvidia card which cannot drive an external monitor in Wayland.

So today I have been getting Wayland System Settings fonts to work with applications and I now have it acceptable, so that I can use it 100% of the time.


I don't know how to get Canonical to prepare this new version for users, but I hope there is someone who reads this post can start this process.

[NoWorries]

It is now 4 months to go before the release of Kinetic Kudu.

This last month I have had a truckload of updates which have been great to see. The developers are doing a superb job at providing a very stable system that is a pleasure to use. The current status of my system which uses staging ppa's for KDE Plasma and Frameworks is shown below.

	5 Month Status	4 Month Status
KDE Plasma Version	5.24.90	5.25.0
KDE Frameworks Version	5.94	5.95.0
QT Version	5.15.3	5.15.4
Kernel Version	5.15.0-28-generic	5.15.0-35-generic

I must confess that I am still using Pre-released updates and with the KDE staging updates, I now have my Empty Panel populated with my frequently used applications.

Because I have an AMD video card, I can use Wayland. I did find that I had to change font settings in Thunderbird and Firefox to get acceptable text size as well as the font settings in System Settings.

I was actually wondering last week if Wayland was responsible for Kdenlive poor performance in rendering a video. I eventually found out that there is a More Options button that I failed to select. It has extra options that include a Custom Quality which was set to 3%. I set it to 90% and that gave excellent rendered video quality. I was pleased to see that the rendering process used all CPU threads and was very fast, particularly on my "Sacrificial Laptop".

I am extremely pleased with the current progress and I keenly look forward to the progress in the next four months. Once again may thanks to the developers for a truly great system.

[NoWorries]

Since my last post above, I have been using Wayland all the time. I noticed that the desktop and application response times seemed faster than what I remember I had with X11. So I decided to test the Wayland speed using

glmark2-es2-wayland

and the X11 speed using

glmark2-es2

I did the X11 test on the 22.04 LTS partition on my laptop.

As a percentage the Wayland performance was 82% faster than the X11 performance. So, from my experience, you can definitely look forward to a more responsive desktop with Wayland.