SUMMARY when launching plasma-discover the page will read no backend application found STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Launch Discover in KDE 2. 3. OBSERVED RESULT FreeBSD doesn't seem to have packagekit-qt5 as an available package,when running list backend an available is kns-backend. EXPECTED RESULT SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: KDE Frameworks Version: Qt Version: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Running into this issue on the following OS/KDE desktop version: Plasma desktop version 5.19.2 FreeBSD 11.3
Adriaan, any ideas?
There's no packagekit backends for discover on FreeBSD. There's no pkg(8) support in discover at all. And as near as I can tell, ports-mgmt/packagekit supports only portupgrade(8), not pkg(8) either. Long story short: "someone should do this" but the KDE-FreeBSD team is, frankly, full up with just keeping-up-with-releases, rather than developing new features or filling up gaps. Speaking personally, I don't think I've ever used discover, since `zypper in` or `pkg install` (depending on what machine I'm on) do the trick for me.
I thought we specifically handled this case in Discover. Adriaan, could it be that you guys are patching out the "your distro didn't package the packagekit backend" message that the user is supposed to see in this case?
Same here, confirmed on FreeBSD installation from packages (versions 12.2p5 and 13rc5). If a run "plasma-discover --listbackends" * kns-backend is available, but doesn't work. KDE Plasma version: 5.20.4 KDE Frameworks version: 5.77.0 Qt version: 5.15.2
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #5) > I thought we specifically handled this case in Discover. Adriaan, could it > be that you guys are patching out the "your distro didn't package the > packagekit backend" message that the user is supposed to see in this case? After starting discover, it briefly shows "unable to load applications. Please verify Internet connectivity" and then switches to an organge warning-triangle "No application back-ends found, please report to your distribution." After clicking on, say, *Application Addons* and then *Back*, the internet connectivity message is shown, rather than the back-end warning. Quitting and then restarting Discover returns to the orange triangle. I suppose the kns-backend is for applications addons and plasma addons (things using GHNS); both of those seem to work. At least, I could install a plasma widget and then add it to my desktop, and I could add a kdiamond theme. Both could be removed as well. Comment #4 applies, still: someone who is not me needs to sit down and write code.
It sounds like this is behaving as expected then: we show that warning so that people blame their distro for not shipping Discover with any app backends, rather than blaming Discover for being broken software. Most people expect Discover to find apps, and the KNS stuff is just a bonus. I guess we can call this a downside of being so flexible: since Discover has interchangeable backends, distros are capable of packaging it with no app backends rather than simply not packaging it at all. This exposes users to a poor experience rather than no experience, which causes them to blame us. :( I can improve the error message a bit, though.
Git commit 221a3fec808b6d0da053902df1dded9aec646212 by Nate Graham. Committed on 05/04/2021 at 15:35. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. Improve grammatical correctness and clarity of distro-specific error messages M +4 -1 discover/DiscoverObject.cpp M +1 -1 libdiscover/backends/PackageKitBackend/PackageKitNotifier.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/commit/221a3fec808b6d0da053902df1dded9aec646212