SUMMARY I have documented all the problems during and after upgrade from Debian9/KDE to Debian10/KDE which I noticed here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/534587/problems-with-kde-plasma-after-upgrading-to-debian-10-too-bright-and-glowy-fav STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Upgrade from Debian9/KDE to Debian10/KDE OBSERVED RESULT Broken panel icons Favorites missing Display and windows too bright and "glowy" with large, bad-looking shadows (white background) and glowing (on dark background) of windows EXPECTED RESULT Icons in panel shouldn't be broken Favorites shouldn't be missing Display should be as before or better, there shouldn't be these strange shadows and glows and there shouldn't be any monitor-calibrations be required to make it look better (or at least a prompt instructing the user to and how to do so) SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: 5.14.5 KDE Plasma Version: 5.14 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.54.0 Qt Version: 5.11.3 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Severity is at least normal depending on how many users are affected. Maybe this bug report should be split into multiple bugs. I had the same problems with the icons and favorites after upgrading on another machine too.
Lets try and stick to one issue per report. Otherwise tracking is meaningless. I'll make this purely about the "icons in panel" What icons are they? Can I have your ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc please
(In reply to David Edmundson from comment #1) > Lets try and stick to one issue per report. Otherwise tracking is > meaningless. > > I'll make this purely about the "icons in panel" Alright. I put all of it here into one issue because the problems might be interrelated as all of them occurred due to the upgrade and they could still get split into separate issues later. > What icons are they? The third screenshot in the stackexchange question shows the icons. > Can I have your ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc please Please also see the content directly beneath the third screenshot in the SE question. Don't want to send you the entire file, sorry. But the entries look like: [Containments][3][Applets][42][Configuration][General] url=/usr/share/applications/org.kde.ksysguard.desktop [Containments][3][Applets][60][Configuration] PreloadWeight=0 localPath=/home/username/.local/share/plasma_icons/emacs25.desktop [Containments][3][Applets][60][Configuration][General] url=/usr/share/applications/emacs25.desktop
That's weird, both local and url entries should be under the root [Configuration] Can you include both those desktop files please.
/usr/share/applications/org.kde.ksysguard.desktop looks normal and has this set: Icon=utilities-system-monitor /usr/share/applications/emacs25.desktop is empty but has the proper icon in the folder /usr/share/applications/ /home/username/.local/share/plasma_icons/emacs25.desktop has the broken icon that is shown in the panel it has this: [Desktop Entry] Icon=unknown Name=emacs25.desktop Type=Link URL=/usr/share/applications/emacs25.desktop I'll copy what I wrote beneath the third screenshot at the linked question here: These two problems have to do with this file: ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. The fix described at rglinuxtech.com/?p=1626 (deleting [Configuration][General] entries and renaming [Configuration] to [Configuration][General]) didn't help much. The icons show in ~/.local/share/applications/ but not in ~/.local/share/plasma_icons/. I already tried kbuildsycoca5. The file still contains all my favorites but Plasma does not load them. I can still add favorites and add apps to the panel (widget). When I add one of the apps to the panel that are already present on it but whose icons doesn't show and then make the other entry in plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc look exactly the same the newly added app icon shows but the old one doesn't. This is because when I add it anew it adds a new file to ~/.local/share/plasma_icons/ while the other one's icon is broken because in the file it says "Icon=unknown" (the only difference is that the new entry links to the new (1) file):
The entry for emacs might have been a bad example because right now there's no /usr/share/applications/emacs25.desktop but only a /usr/share/applications/emacs.desktop. It has its proper icon in that folder. The shortcut for dolphin has an icon in the favorites list (it's one of the default pinned favorites there) but not in the bottom left panel. Furthermore its label says "org.kde.dolphin.desktop" instead of "File manager" or "Dolphin". Here are all the entries for dolphin within that file: [Containments][3][Applets][23][Configuration] PreloadWeight=0 localPath=/home/username/.local/share/plasma_icons/org.kde.dolphin.desktop [Containments][3][Applets][23][Configuration][General] url=/usr/share/applications/org.kde.dolphin.desktop [Containments][3][Applets][4][Configuration][General] favorites=preferred://[...],org.kde.dolphin.desktop,[...]
> Display and windows too bright and "glowy" with large, bad-looking shadows (white background) and glowing (on dark background) of windows I just tried it with my old graphics card instead of CPU-only and it's not too bright and "glowy" when using the graphics card. Strangely the graphics performance seems to be at least as bad as with CPU-only when using the nouveau driver and does have glitches where it shows green space across the screen which is why I removed it again. However, when using it I could change the HDMI Black Level from Low back to Normal. It could also be a bug in Debian but I only had this after upgrading from Debian9 to 10. Just wanted to add this to the bug report in case it's relevant to finding out what's causing it.
> KDE Plasma Version: 5.14 This is a very old unsupported version of Plasma. We just released 5.20. I'm pretty miffed at Debian for this. So is the problem that your Icon widgets in the panel lost their custom icons? If so, this would seem to be the problem: > Icon=unknown I gather you set a different icon there in the older version, and it was changed to "unknown" after you upgraded to Plasma 5.14? Is that correct?
Yes and this happened on multiple machines, not just on one. I had icons for all my applications in the panel and almost none after the upgrade. So, yes: that's correct. Except that it wasn't "custom" icons: I didn't set a custom icon in all or at least most (at least almost all) cases but simply left the application's default icon as it is (for example firefox and konsole; see the linked StackExchange question for screenshots). I'm a bit surprised that this apparently didn't happen for more users. No idea what caused it but it was a major problem to a smooth upgrade (favorites missing is not too bad and the display issues might be related to resetting some display configs maybe?) The other problem are those "glowy" windows with bad-looking shadows and glows (depending on the background) which I couldn't figure out how to change.
Not sure if it's possible to debug after the fact. :/ Plasma 5.14 is quite old at this point.
Let us know if it happens again.