Get Energetic Evaluating Kenitic Kubuntu 22.10

[NoWorries]

It is now 3 months to go before the release of Kinetic Kudu.

Kinetic is now at the halfway point in the 6 Month development cycle. I continue to enjoy using this system and I must say that the only problem that I have experienced is with LibreOffice. More of this later

The developers continue to do a superb job at providing a very stable system that is a pleasure to use. I am particularly mindful of the current climate challenges and world unrest that must impact on some involved in the development work.

The status of my system at 3 Months compared with the previous month is currently:

	4 Months to go	3 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.25.0	5.25.3
KDE Frameworks Version	5.95.0	5.96.0
QT Version	5.15.4	5.15.4
Kernel Version	5.15.0-35-generic	5.19.0-9-generic

As you can see significant updates have been made to Plasma, Frameworks and the Kernel. I have not had any trouble with using the Pre-released updates and I hope I don't experience a total system failure in the future.

Because I have an AMD video card, I can use Wayland which is very fast and a pleasure to use. I continue to find that application font settings are a challenge at times.

My problem with LibreOffice was its impress package. A presentation would always have a white line along the bottom of the screen and another one on the right edge of the screen. I use a black background, so this is particularly noticeable and has even drawn a comment from those who see it. I found that it was present with X11 and Wayland on all my desktops. I eventually found a fault report, but no fix has been found at this stage.

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

[NoWorries]

[NoWorries]

Since doing the test in the previous post, I have been having trouble getting consistent results from glmark2-es2-wayland. Sometimes I would get 1462 and other times I would get 5747. I finally found that the problem was in my BIOS settings for the Intel video card. When I changed it to (S/W Controlled), I now get consistent results. I have also done the speed test on Kinetic by logging-in using Plasma (XII).

From the test using the appropriate glmark2 for Plasma (X11) and Plasma (Wayland), I get Wayland 2.23 times faster than X11.

I should also add that to get Wayland to work I had to use Muon to install extra packages. These allowed me to login and benefit from all the progress. In the graphics attached I have all the Muon Wayland packages that are installed

[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.

[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]

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]

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?

[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

[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.

[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.

[GreyGeek]

Me too!
-deleted dumb joke---

[acheron]

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

[acheron]

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

[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?

[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.