Enjoy Monitoring Mantic Kubuntu 23.10

[NoWorries]

The Final Release of Mantic Minotaur

It is now time for the release of Mantic. So this pre-release site will just be a historical list of the progress of Mantic development. When the Mantic site is listed as a Currently Supported Release, the next version will be the LTS in 24.04. I have enjoyed experiencing the development of Mantic from its Lunar origins. The table below shows the development over the past Month

	1 Months Ago	Mantic Release
KDE Plasma Version	5.27.7	5.27.8
KDE Frameworks Version	5.110.0	5.110.0
KDE Applications Version	23.08.0	23.08.1
QT Version	5.15.10	5.15.10
Kernel Version	6.3.0-07-generic	6.5.0.-9-generic

From the above list you can see that Plasma, Applications and the Kernel Version have all been advanced in the final month of development. Using Wayland for LibreOffice Impress projections still has a white line on the right and bottom edge of the projection screen for Wayland. Also in Wayland, an embedded video is displayed in a reduced size on the control screen and not on the projection screen. For this system to correctly display LO Impress videos on the projection screen, I had to remove libreoffice-kf5. Another application that I have found not working in Wayland is Kazam. Both LibreOffice and Kazam work perfectly when using X11. At least there is a way for me to solve these problems. I do prefer using Wayland because it is so much faster than X11!

Overall the developers and their supporters have done a great job at bringing Mantic to this level of development.

[NoWorries]

I am pleased to report that after the latest updates LibreOffice Impress on both Wayland and X11 does not crash when using ESC to exit a presentation. On both systems LibreOffice returns to the document for further editing or just normal exit.

The only difference between Wayland and X11 is that, on Impress, a presentation has a white line on the right and bottom edge of the screen for Wayland but no white lines for X11.

Because of these improvements I have been able to do a presentation on X11. I will wait patiently for the white line problem to be fixed on Wayland as it is over twice as fast as X11 using glmark2 to check performance.

[GreyGeek]

I am running Wayland on Debian 12.
I opened Impress and chose the Debian Template. I modified the prompts and save it. Then I closed Impress, opened Dolphin, and migrated to that saved document. I clicked on it and Impress opened, loaded it and displayed it.
Everything is working fine.

Hitting the ESC key did nothing when I had my impress file open. No crashes.

Some KDE menu links stopped working and I had to redo them, and I am assuming it was because of Wayland, but that's just a guess.

Systemd-analyze gives me:

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.776s (firmware) + 3.119s (loader) + 3.799s (kernel) + 3.007s (userspace) = 13.703s
graphical.target reached after 2.997s in userspace.
jerry@GreyGeek:~$ systemd-analyze blame
1.491s exim4.service
658ms man-db.service

I could change exim4 to make it load after the graphic service, which could lower my total boot time to 12.2 seconds but why? All my games and other apps run fine, my Jupyter Notebook & Python code works great, and my system response is very quick.

The only "problem" I have is that I manually switched to the 6.4 kernel so that I could take advantage of the rtl88x2bu kernel module and not have to use a dkms compile to get the wifi working again. I had to put a hold on the 6.1 kernel updates because the update wanted to remove the 6.4 kernel. Sometime in the future that nonsense will get straightened out.

[NoWorries]

LibreOffice Impress and Wayland are not compatible. When I do a projection using Wayland with Impress and have the related LibreOffice Writer document loaded, I find that when I hit the ESC key on the presentation, both documents exit. When I restart, LibreOffice goes into a recovery mode for both Impress and Writer documents.

If I restart in X11, I do not go into recovery mode and both files are loaded and behave normally. That is, a projection using Impress, returns to the Impress document and does not exit as it does when I use the Wayland desktop.

Has anyone else experienced this problem with Wayland and, if so, where should such a "bug" be reported on this eve of the release of Mantic.

[DavidCoe]

This is the third Kubuntu release I've started tracking at late-alpha stage and, once again, been very pleasantly surprised at how usable it is! Yes, there are daily updates (sometimes quite large ones - plasma jumped to 5.27.8 over the weekend and the kernel to 6.5.0-5 last night). By and large, these proceed smoothly. So far, none have 'borked' my machines.

Two nice touches on Mantic. The latest clean install has taken debian-testings's shift to google noto as the default set for the extensive 'non-english' fonts and (hurrah) it can be removed/replaced/tuned without scrambling plasma. Secondly, for the first time in years, the kernel update-initramfs no longer produces that long diagnostic list of missing AMD modules. I don't think it's just cosmetic - things appear more stable/understandable for suspended sessions on my relatively-new Ryzen 5900HX.

Well done everyone - brava, bravo! Will keep reporting in if anything of note turns up. I run a modest MPI cluster and the Ryzen mini even has one of those nice Coral Edge TPU's on-board so (for my curiosity) new 'things' do get exercised.

Best regards

David

[NoWorries]

I am now enjoying the final month before the release of Mantic Minotaur.

If you, like me, enjoy updates, you will have been heightened by all the numerous updates and the associated enhancement of Mantic. We are now in the final month of development before Mantic’s released on the 12^th October.. The significant advances over the last month are illustrated in the table below.

	2 Months to go	Penultimate Month
KDE Plasma Version	5.27.6	5.27.7
KDE Frameworks Version	5.109.0	5.110.0
KDE Applications Version	23.04.3	23.08.0
QT Version	5.15.10	5.15.10
Kernel Version	6.3.0-07-generic	6.3.0-07-generic

A month ago I had problems with using staging-frameworks, so I now do not use staging frameworks or staging plasma. From the above list you can see that Plasma, Frameworks and Applications have all been significantly advanced. So my ASUS Laptop, which has an NVIDIA card with nouveau drivers, has the same Info Center. Also, my ASUS Laptop with LO Impress for projections has no white line on the right and bottom edge of the screen. So I use it for any presentations that I am required too do.

My HP Laptop has an AMD video card. For this system to correctly display LO Impress videos on the projection screen, I had to remove LibreOffice-kde5. The only problem being the white line on the bottom and right edge of the projection screen. These white lines are a previously reported LO bug and they claim that it has been fixed. One application that I have found not working in Wayland is Kazam. I have since found that it works very well in X11. Looks like if an application fails in Wayland, I need to check it in X11

All aspects of the Mantic desktop improvements are great and I am so pleased that I now have Grub-Customizer working on Mantic. I look forward to further refinements by the developers in this final month. Looks like we now have KDE Plasma at version 5.27.8.

[NoWorries]

[NoWorries]

How I Installed Grub Customizer on Mantic.

I firstly downloaded the latest build by:

wget https://launchpadlibrarian.net/570407966/grub-customizer_5.1.0-3build1_amd64.deb

I then removed all the characters in the deb image name such as - and _ by preceding then with \

After this change QApt Package Manager would install the package. I then found that Grub Customizer was in the System list and would run. An example of the menu that I have on Mantic is shown in the graphic below.



I much prefer this layout to one with a tiny list of options on a black screen which is what I get with my UHD screen. Having this capability also allows me to try other distributions on my Lunar partition.

[claydoh]

But you don't need to actually run or install the OS to find out what is (or isn't) there. By then, it sort of becomes obvious if you don't have Libreoffice ot thunderbird.......
Simpler to download and open a text file, hit ctrl-f, and type thunder, libreo or something

[NoWorries]

The manifest file, located in the same directory as each iso image also lists all the actual packages that make up the ISO's OS image. For example, this is the current daily ISO's list.

Fun fact: the 'minimal' option in the installer actually is a similar but small list, used to uninstall software from the live image after it has been copied to the drive. So, the minimal option takes longer to install.

The site manifest site lists every nut and bolt installed by Mantic. Post Gnome reference:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/09/...inimal-mistake,

basically referred to application files and the list that I gave was only for the application files. This was to show that Kubuntu 23.10, by comparison, has all the basic applications required for testing the system capabilities by an inquisitive user.

[oshunluvr]

Unfortunately, I am not convinced about the advantages of rollbacks as it would take up more disk space. I cannot see any advantage in btrfs formatting for the root partition as the partitions for Linux distributions always give access t previous kernels to boot with if problems arise. I am quite happy to have my Home partitions formatted as btrfs.

~~~

As you can see the btrfs on both Root partitions works if you only have one Linux distribution on your system. However if you have more than one, the last installed Linux distribution is only seen and accessible. From the table above, having one with btrfs and the other with ext4 does not work very well. The access to multiple Linux distributions with the old world formatting works only when both Root systems ext4 formatted.

Rolling back would allow a return to any previous snapshot, which one can do at any time, like just before doing "sudo apt full-upgrade". Rolling back takes about 5 seconds and a reboot. I can think of no place more suited for the use of rolling back than when testing a pre-released distro.

Snapshots take ZERO drive data space unless and until changes are made to the source subvolume. For example, if you snapshot a root subvolume prior to an update, then update, the snapshot consumes the amount of the update - but only what was removed during the update and no more. Deleting the snapshot restores the free space. If drive space is of concern, one can simply snapshot prior to updating, update, and reboot. If all is well, the delete the snapshot immediately.

I keep a weeks worth of daily snapshots. To illustrate this point, I measured the drive space each of my 7 snapshots reported as used and subtracted the amount the previous snapshot contained to get an idea of how much space is actually consumed by having 7 snapshots. My full install uses 31.06GB and the additional amount of 7 daily snapshots is 1.79GB. This does include two new programs I installed this week that account for 1.89GB of newly used space and a removal that freed 166MB. So seven snapshots consume an amount roughly equal to 5.7% (assuming my logic and math are correct, of course). On days where no new programs was added or previously installed programs removed, the space used varies from 2 to 30MB.

As to booting multiple installs, last I checked os-prober does not detect BTRFS installs outside the one os-prober is running on. This does make easily booting multiple installs when using BTRFS a problem. My solution is to use 40_custom entries that simply read the grub menu from other installs, whether on the same BTRFS file system or another. This works very well and has the added benefit of not requiring multiple updates of grub to keep up with kernel changes.

However, obviously what you are doing works for you and since you see no need to be able to roll back from a failed upgrade there's no reason for you to change to BTRFS.

[claydoh]

The manifest file, located in the same directory as each iso image also lists all the actual packages that make up the ISO's OS image. For example, this is the current daily ISO's list.

Fun fact: the 'minimal' option in the installer actually is a similar but small list, used to uninstall software from the live image after it has been copied to the drive. So, the minimal option takes longer to install.

[NoWorries]

On my system, I have a Lunar iso file which is 4.6 GiB and a Mantic iso file which is 3.9GiB. To prove what files are to be installed, I got the latest Mantic iso and did a trial desktop and used the console to enter the command

sudo ls /usr/applications | sed s/.desktop// - > installed-apps.txt

. The file from this approach I have divided into two parts because of the number of entries. The first is:

org.fre.impl.portal.desktop.kde.desktop
org.fre.Xwayland.desktop
org.kde.ark
org.kde.bluedevilsendfile
org.kde.bluedevilwizard
org.kde.ConfigurePrinter
org.kde.discover.apt.urlhandler
org.kde.discover
org.kde.discover.notifier
org.kde.discover.snap
org.kde.discover.urlhandler
org.kde.dolphin
org.kde.drkonqi.coredump.gui
org.kde.drkonqi
org.kde.elisa
org.kde.gwenview
org.kde.gwenview_importer
org.kde.haruna
org.kde.kate
org.kde.kcalc
org.kde.kcolorschemeeditor
org.kde.kde-add-printer
org.kde.kdeconnect.app
org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon
org.kde.kdeconnect.handler
org.kde.kdeconnect.nonplasma
org.kde.kdeconnect_open
org.kde.kdeconnect-settings
org.kde.kdeconnect.sms
org.kde.kded5
org.kde.kdialog
org.kde.keditbookmarks
org.kde.keditfiletype
org.kde.kfontview
org.kde.khelpcenter
org.kde.kinfocenter
org.kde.klipper
org.kde.kmahjongg
org.kde.kmenuedit
org.kde.kmines
org.kde.knetattach
org.kde.knewstuff-dialog
org.kde.konsole
org.kde.konversation
org.kde.kpat
org.kde.krdc
org.kde.ksudoku
org.kde.ksystemlog
org.kde.ktorrent
org.kde.kwalletd5
org.kde.kwalletmanager5
org.kde.kwin_rules_dialog
org.kde.mobile.okular_chm
org.kde.mobile.okular_djvu
org.kde.mobile.okular_epub
org.kde.mobile.okular_md
org.kde.mobile.okular_tiff
org.kde.okular
org.kde.partitionmanager
org.kde.plasma.browser_integration.host
org.kde.plasma.emojier
org.kde.plasma.settings.open
org.kde.plasmashell
org.kde.plasma-systemmonitor
org.kde.plasmawindowed
org.kde.polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
org.kde.PrintQueue
org.kde.skanlite
org.kde.spectacle
org.kde.systemmonitor
pavucontrol-qt
python3.11
qapt-deb-installer
qwant-maps-geo-handler
signon-ui
snap-handle-link
software-properties-drivers-lxqt
software-properties-lxqt
software-properties-qt
systemsettings
thunderbird
usb-creator-kde
vim
wheelmap-geo-handler
xdg-portal-gtk.desktop

and the second part is:

apport-kde
apport-kde-mime
breezestyleconfig
defaults.list
geoclue-demo-agent
google-maps-geo-handler
hplj1020
im-config
info
io.snapcraft.SessionAgent
kcm_about-distro
kcm_access
kcm_activities
kcm_audiocd
kcm_autostart
kcm_baloofile
kcm_bluetooth
kcm_bolt
kcm_breezedecoration
kcm_clock
kcm_colors
kcm_componentchooser
kcm_cursortheme
kcmpaths.desktop
kcm_feedback
kcm_filetypes
kcm_firewall
kcm_fontinst
kcm_fonts
kcm_icons
kcm_joystick
kcm_kaccounts
kcm_kamera
kcm_kdeconnect
kcm_kded
kcm_keyboard
kcm_keys
kcm_krunnersettings
kcm_kscreen
kcm_kwindecoration
kcm_kwin_effects
kcm_kwinoptions
kcm_kwinrules
kcm_kwin_scripts
kcm_kwintabbox
kcm_kwin_virtuas.desktop
kcm_kwinxwayland
kcm_landingpage
kcm_lookandfeel
kcm_mouse
kcm_networkmanagement
kcm_nightcolor
kcm_notifications
kcm_plasmasearch
kcm_powerdevilactivitiesconfig
kcm_powerdevilglobalconfig
kcm_powerdevilprofilesconfig
kcm_printer_manager
kcm_pulseaudio
kcm_qtquicksettings
kcm_recentFiles
kcm_regionandlang
kcm_screenlocker
kcm_sddm
kcm_smserver
kcm_solid_actions
kcmspellchecking
kcm_splashscreen
kcm_style
kcm_tablet
kcm_touchpad
kcm_touchscreen
kcm_trash
kcm_updates
kcm_users
kcm_virtualkeyboard
kcm_workspace
kde4
kde-mimeapps.list
kdesystemsettings
kde_wacom_tabletfinder
ktelnetservice5
kwalletmanager5-kwalletd
kwincompositing
libreoffice-calc
libreoffice-draw
libreoffice-impress
libreoffice-math
libreoffice-startcenter
libreoffice-writer
libreoffice-xsltfilter
mimeinfo.cache
okularApplication_chm
okularApplication_comicbook
okularApplication_djvu
okularApplication_dvi
okularApplication_epub
okularApplication_fax
okularApplication_fb
okularApplication_ghostview
okularApplication_kimgio
okularApplication_md
okularApplication_mobi
okularApplication_pdf
okularApplication_plucker
okularApplication_tiff
okularApplication_txt
okularApplication_xps
openstreetmap-geo-handler

So with this list, a new user gets a very good idea of Mantic's capabilities.

[notabug]

Thanks claydoh. I've only tried Ubuntu a few times, but I've never really liked Gnome.

[claydoh]

No one has talked about this from Kubuntu, as far as I have seen.

Ubuntu's set of software included on a default install has no real effect on what Kubuntu chooses, other than trying to keep to a specific ISO image size.
Kubuntu isn't using the new installer. so there is no need to modify things anyway.

Fun fact: Libreoffice uses 1Gb of space on the OS image, for example
(This is how much it uses when installed, not the size of the compressed packages used to install it)

$ sudo apt install libreoffice libreoffice-kf5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
.
.
.
0 upgraded, 117 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 258 MB of archives.
After this operation, 983 MB of additional disk space will be used.

But, for Ubuntu as I read it, they are still revamping their default list, and have open discussion on it.

Of course being non-LTS, things are in a sense 'experimental' in prep for ther next LTS. The new install is/was to potentially add a section for selecting additional software to download and install.
Again, no bearing on Kubuntu here at all, not until they create new installer for the "Flavours".