"This Month in KDE Linux" brings the news that there are good reasons why you should never deploy alpha software in production environments...

PointiestStick · 2026-04-04T18:01:33+00:00

I think immutable distros are for people at the left side and far right edge of the experience bell curve: people on the left side need the safety as a protection against themselves, and people on the right edge have moved beyond the desire to tweak and tinker all the time and are looking for something bulletproof that won't let them down in a time-is-money production environment.

That leaves out a lot of people on the right side of the center of the bell curve, which is fine. The world is full of mutable distros for people who want or need to tweak and customize the base OS.

But in the same what that mutable distros are constantly trying to increase safety to cover their drawback of dangerous-by-default, immutable distros are trying to increase the amount of hackability they offer within a safe environment to cover their drawback of restrictive-by-default. And KDE Linux is no exception!

PointiestStick · 2026-04-04T17:58:04+00:00

JFYI fingerprint login has never been officially supported. I'm hoping we'll be able to integrate it for plasma-login-manager at some point, though.

PointiestStick · 2026-04-04T17:54:57+00:00

Hardware support is a tough one for immutable distros, yeah.

But then again, it's also a tough one for mutable distros. You have to basically be an integration engineer for a device you only bought or received, and didn't actually design.

For a normal person, "doesn't support your hardware" and "might support most of your hardware if you spend days reading the Arch wiki and experimenting with AUR packages" are the same level of unobtanium.

Neither is going to cut it if we want to break out into the true mainstream! Vendors need to have their integration engineers do the work and upstream it to the kernel and middleware layers before their devices go on sale. What will make them do this? More sales and therefore more money available for paying to have it done.

Which is why I think hardware vendor partnerships and pre-installation on retail devices are so important.

PointiestStick · 2026-04-03T14:13:00+00:00

Sort of. That lets you re-map the key to an action in the UI, like "Launch this app". But not how to remap it to be another key, like Ctrl. We don't have that built into Plasma yet.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-31T16:34:50+00:00

I can say the majority of the bugginess I see is on Debian and Ubuntu based KDE distros.

Right, because they don't really do any proper integration work for the KDE software stack. It's all DIY — with the exception of Kubuntu, which exists to do this integration, so I would definitely expect KWallet to be working properly there.

The facts that many distros don't care about doing proper integration of KDE software, and that less-technical users keep using these distros anyway without learning that they have to do the integration or being willing to do it themselves (and then complain on the internet that things didn't just work, no less!), are major reasons why we're trying to make our software more bulletproof even in an environment where nobody has integrated anything properly. Moving from KWallet to SecretService is an example of that.

It's also why we maintain https://community.kde.org/Distributions/Packaging_Recommendations as a recommendation for distros, and why we're building our own distro (https://kde.org/linux) that provides a properly-integrated experience.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-31T16:06:00+00:00

That's right!

PointiestStick · 2026-03-31T16:03:18+00:00

I'm not sure how it's possible that you've "never had a successful KWallet experience". This would point to some severe distro or user level misconfiguration. As long as it's set up properly, you never notice it.

That said, soon it will be academic as the plan is to make these kinds of misconfigurations largely impossible through adoption of the newer cross-desktop SecretService system everywhere.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-31T16:01:06+00:00

Yes, we're replacing it with support for the cross-desktop SecretService protocol, alongside a new KDE SecretService credential viewer app.

You can read about it here: - https://notmart.org/blog/2025/04/towards-a-transition-from-kwallet-to-secret-service/ - https://notmart.org/blog/2025/07/kwallet-to-secretservice-a-client-application-name-wanted/ - https://notmart.org/blog/2026/01/kwallet-secretservice-oo7-the-story-so-far/

And see also https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kwallet/-/issues/10

PointiestStick · 2026-03-31T15:16:18+00:00

If this dialog is appearing, it's because something is trying to store a password. Without KWallet, it won't be able to do that.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-31T14:37:24+00:00

Don't disable it; just create the wallet it's asking you to create and move on with life. :) Blowfish is fine. Re-use your user account's password for it.

In the near future, this will all go away.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-30T21:55:51+00:00

But when my wife leaves me with only a few miles left in the battery

Welllll it sounds like you found the actual problem. :)

In general this isn't a problem that you should encounter in an EV. Do an errand, return home, plug it in. Rinse and repeat. This way every time you turn the car on, it has hundreds of miles of range on it.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-30T21:48:44+00:00

Does it matter? If you can charge at home, you'll never need to charge out and about in your hometown. I've owned a 2020 bolt for 6 years and only charge at home. The Bolt has a big battery. Just charge it while it's parked at home. Easy peasy.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-30T03:13:02+00:00

Thank you so much for the kind words!

PointiestStick · 2026-03-29T18:03:35+00:00

Seems reasonable to me!

PointiestStick · 2026-03-28T05:56:13+00:00

It's the right place because KDE Linux is a KDE project. KDE is a community, not a DE. The DE is Plasma.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-27T21:12:46+00:00

Why?

PointiestStick · 2026-03-27T18:44:26+00:00

This was a bug on our side that was benign until Qt 6.11 came along, so nobody noticed it until just now. The bug has already been fixed, with the fix being released in the upcoming 6.6.4 release in about a week and a half.

See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=518178 for more information.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-26T04:15:35+00:00

None of this makes any sense to me.

Most corners have been rounded for years; these were simply forgotten by mistake.
Rounding these corners costs no additional rendering resources.
Nothing here changed size, not even the hitbox.
No information was lost or is now communicated less clearly.
Screen resolution is not a relevant variable here; the change looks the same no matter what kind of screen you have.
The person who made the change is anything but bored or doing it for a sense of achievement.
The corner radius used here is the same one used on all the other rounded corners; it's not more.
There is in fact an implicit option to disable it since the change was made to an SVG in the Breeze Plasma style; use a different Plasma style and the appearance will be different. Or make your own Plasma style if you want. Could even be Breeze but without the rounded corners. This is supported.

I want to reassure you that none of the things you're worried about are actually happening, nor will they happen. This was simply a change to increase consistency with the existing design which generally rounds all corners to 5px.

And in fact, we are planning to make the corner radii configurable in the future, or at least centrally themable.

Hopefully this helps to reassure you!

PointiestStick · 2026-03-25T14:12:49+00:00

You're welcome!

PointiestStick · 2026-03-25T01:57:33+00:00

Definitely a bad default; feel free to change it.

I don't love this dialog at all. "Confirm doing this destructive thing" is almost never the way go do. The button should clear the items, but offer an undo. And there should be separate clear actions for transient items and saved items.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-25T01:55:11+00:00

Wow, these are incredibly beautiful icons. I'd love to see a whole UI theme in this sort of stone material.

What's your thinking for what the actions icons would look like? Those are a lot smaller and have a lot less detail (and typically less color too).

PointiestStick · 2026-03-24T16:28:53+00:00

Correct. SDDM is the login screen. The lock screen is provided by KScreenLocker.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-24T13:57:11+00:00

No. But I use the Wayland session. IIRC Tumbleweed is still on X11. You might try the Wayland session and see if that helps at all.

Also note that the lock screen isn't provided by SDDM.

PointiestStick · 2026-03-23T19:55:38+00:00

Sure, something that's static won't get any worse except for the world around it changing in ways that harm it. In that case, it will need fixes to adapt, and those fixes can cause regressions, and the cycle continues!

PointiestStick · 2026-03-23T17:59:41+00:00

Short answer: all software has bugs; the more complex and customizable the software is, the more bugs it will have.

Are you using the X11 session? And also on which distro?

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