03/02/2016

Three KDE5 quirks bugging me most right now

I recently upgraded to Kubuntu 15.10 (16.04 by now) and Plasma 5.
Plasma 5 is gorgeous, but still a bit experimental in places. Erm, make that six and counting.
  • Baloo desktop search. Once the index is written (takes hours on first run), it's actually usable. However, the config dialog in the system settings is incomplete. You're better off editing ~/.config/baloofilerc, as explained here:
    https://community.kde.org/Baloo/Configuration
    Also, entirely disabling baloo search knocked out Dolphin's nice in-browser file search.
  • Dolphin hangs on startup in the home directory when hidden files are set to visible and Kile is running at the same time. (caused by Kile's  ~/.lyxpipe.in and ~/.lyxpipe.out) Apparently fixed upstream: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352828
  • The device notifier has lost the automount configuration. There's a hack using the kde4
    versions:
    Edit /usr/share/kde4/services/kded/device_automounter.desktop using the following line (value was 1 before): "X-KDE-Kded-phase=0"
    Use kcmshell4 kcmkded and kcmshell4 device_automounter_kcm to enable and configure automounting. Apparently fixed upstream as well.
    Source: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=289&t=126846
  • Dolphin context menu is missing the Ark extraction services. Fixable by sudo ln -s /usr/share/kde4/servicetypes/konqpopupmenuplugin.desktop /usr/share/kservicetypes5/
    Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dolphin/+bug/1499530
  • Dolphin etc. doesn't remember changes in mime type associations. Apparently it reads from one mimeapps.list file and saves to a different one. The solution is to link both to the same file.
    ln -s ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list ~/.config/mimeapps.list
    Source: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=202636
  • Dolphin doesn't display PDF previews, even though they can be enabled in Preferences with kdegraphcis-thumbnailers installed.
    Workaround: sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/plugins/* /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/ Sources: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351913 http://osdir.com/ml/ubuntu-bugs/2016-04/msg19852.html