If you’ve recently updated to KDE Plasma 5.5, you may have noticed that minimizing your applications no longer produces a noticeable effect in the task manager. (In actuality, the status effect of minimized versus non-minimized applications is limited to a thin, gray outline around the application title–hardly something that conveys application state well enough to process visually at first glance.)

The fault of this change lies with this bug report posted almost 3 years ago. After much discussion, it was decided that 1) the “disabled” state of minimized applications was a mistake, 2) the minimized state makes it too difficult for some people to locate the gray scale application icon, and 3) no one wanted to add a configuration option to enable or disable this feature, so the next best thing was to rip it out. Now, I’ll be honest: Maybe I just happen to have better-than-average pattern matching capabilities in my visual cortex (doubtful), but the gray scale icons for minimized applications really don’t bother me. What does bother me is this change: It takes me twice as long to find minimized applications on the task manager. To say nothing of the fact that two or three people complaining incessantly for 3 years can effect such a substantial change on the rest of us who actually liked the feature…

Humorously, I didn’t notice this change during the initial update. Since I spread my work out across multiple desktops, I don’t often minimize my applications. This explains, at least in part, why it took three days for me to discover this problem and make a post about it (and why I blamed it on plasma-shell’s propensity to crash all the time, although that seemed like a reasonable explanation in lieu of anything more substantive).

The good news is that I traced it down to this commit which turned off the minimized gray scale display. As expected, removing this patch returns the task manager’s display of minimized applications to its previous state. The bad news is that, yes, you do need to recompile plasma-desktop from source. If you happen to use Arch Linux, I’ve put together a PKGBUILD containing the fix based off the PKGBUILD in ABS (hence why I haven’t yet changed any of the credits–I should note that this is not an official package). I’ll keep this updated as best as I can until such time that upstream finally settles on a better idea than a 1 pixel gray outline for non-minimized applications.

The rest of you will have to apply the patch and build the sources yourself. Sorry about that.

So, KDE 4.10 just came out last week, the Arch repos sometime thereafter, and I updated today. I really love new versions of KDE–honestly–but this time something really bizarre happened. I updated, rebooted to the new kernel (I was running 3.7.4, the update was to 3.7.6), fired up KDE, and started loading my usual applications.

Then nothing worked quite right. I’d open one window, and the others I had open would disappear. Opening the launcher would also exhibit this problem: Open terminal windows would disappear the instant the launcher was clicked or any other application (including Dolphin) was opened. Infuriating. It seemed that I couldn’t have all my usual windows open at once–everything would disappear!

Fortunately, after some trial and error, I found the culprit. This latest version of KDE has made significant changes to ~/.kde4/share/config/kconf_updaterc. So, there’s two solutions:

Easy Mode

Log out, switch to a virtual terminal (ctrl+alt+F1), log in from there, and delete the file ~/.kde4/share/config/kconf_updaterc. Then switch back to X (usually ctrl+alt+F7 or F8) and log back in to KDE so it regenerates the file. Enjoy!

Hard Mode

Follow the previous steps but retain a backup of your .kde4 directory. Then run a diff on the two versions of kconf_updaterc and figure out what you want to keep, what line caused the problem, and retain as many of your previous settings as possible.

Otherwise, I hope this saves you some difficulty if you run into the same thing I have!

February 13th edit:

It seems that this post by “George” on the Arch Linux forums indicates a potentially easier solution, which is to change the window transparency settings. I changed the title transparency settings, but I’m not entirely sure if this will resolve the disappearing windows.

As you’ve probably guessed from my previous rants, I decided to try out KDE 4 under FreeBSD. It was really quite stunning, elegant, and simultaneously disappointing. I’ll cover the pros and cons here. Be aware that this is just a rough overview and covers my experiences with KDE 4 under FreeBSD; I may add another installment for KDE 4 under Ubuntu, which I have just recently installed as well.

KDE 4 is still in development and should be considered beta software. My comments here are representative of KDE 4.2.0 and, more specifically, the FreeBSD port. It is important to note that many of my complaints will probably be addressed in the coming months as the KDE developers implement missing features, fix bugs, and the KDE port to FreeBSD gains stability. Instead, it would be advisable to take my review as a commentary on the current state of KDE.

Update

I will be posting my thoughts on KDE 4 running under Ubuntu in the coming days. Canonical’s patches and additions to KDE appear to make even the older version (4.1.x) very usable!
Read more…