Give Discoing a go with Kubuntu 19.04 Disco

[NoWorries]

I have successfully installed Disco Dingo and added all may favourite repositories. I came to grief when I used Muon Pre-release updates. That was a disaster as it removed Muon and other important packages. The easiest step to recover was to install again.

The current status of my system is:



The developers are doing a great job with this distribution and I constantly look forward to all the updates that occur during the development.

[GreyGeek]

Great idea!

Having recently installed qemu-kvm and virt-manager, I installed Disco-Desktop to a VM.
Installed, updated and runs faultlessly. And this for an Alpha release? That's just the way I remember Kubuntu 9.04 Alpha, 10 years ago, which I installed in Feburary of 2009. It, too, ran faultlessly.

That makes 10 years of using Kubuntu!

I've never used another distro as long as I've used Kubuntu. SuSE comes to mind, which I ran for 5 years.

[GreyGeek]

I installed Kubuntu 19.04 as a VM using qemu.
When I attempted to set the power management in "System Settings" it overlaid the panel with a gray box and claimed the power managment daemon was not running. It was, as systemd showed. The mesg also said that the "problem" could be easily fixed in the "Startup and Shutdown" section of System Settings. There is no facility in that section of System Settings for starting or stopping Power Management.

[NoWorries]

Sorry to hear that you are having problems with Power Management in System Settings. My version of System Settings is 5.14.3 and it was installed using the additional repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/staging-plasma

I checked and I do not have any problems at all in this area. I should point out that I am not using a VM but have sufficient disk space to have Disco in a separate partition.

I also set up my Disco's Home partition by copying my Kubuntu 18.04 Home partition into the Home partition that I was going to install Disco into.

[NoWorries]

It is now almost 2 weeks since I reported problems with the Pre-release updates. I have noticed recently that if I use Discover for updates, it advises me when other packages are to be removed. So I decided to use Muon Package Manager to change my options for Software updates. I now have all options in this heading selected including Pre-release updates. So after 254 updates from this change, my system has a Kernel update and a KDE Frameworks update. All is now well and I survived. Now my Info centre now looks like this:



Well done to all developers and I am continuing to appreciate all that is being done to make this a Super Distribution.

[NoWorries]

Well today, I decided to take the plunge and got the kernel 4.20.0-1 by adding:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team/unstable

After doing this and adding the 4.20.0-1 kernel, the system would not load the kernel. To solve this, I edited my BIOS and disable secure boot. After doing this, my system booted into the new kernel and I my current Info Centre now shows:



I am looking forward to further kernel updates so that I can enable secure boot.

As you can see, the developers are doing a great job at steadily advancing Disco.

[jglen490]

Disco, Disco Duck?



Glad it's working for you. I'll just wait for the next LTS, which should be most excellent.

[NoWorries]

While many like to stick with LTS, I prefer to get the most advanced versions. I currently have 2 Laptops, one with 18.04 and the other with 18.10 and 19.04.

The frustrations that I have with 18.04 are that the desktop images have blurred backgrounds and my calendar Kontact always exits with an error on shutdown. Disco has none of these problems plus I have the latest versions of all applications such as Gimp, Kdenlive and others.

I enjoy dealing with the latest and in some very small way help in their development.

[NoWorries]

If you want the latest KDE Plasma and other goodies, they are all now on my version of Disco. Over the past few days I have been getting updates to KDE Plasma 5.14.90 which is the 5.15 beta. Its features can be found at:
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.90.php

For what I do, I find this very stable. Well done Guys,

My only outstanding problem, which is probably a LibreOffice Presentation problem, is that projected videos do not conform to the projector screen size. That is, a 16:9 video is projected at 4:3 aspect ratio.

I am please to show my current Info Centre information:



I hope it is not too long before the above LibreOffice problem is fixed and I can consider using this as a production system.

[acheron]

Plasma beta now in the main archive for 19.04. No PPA required

(also in Kubuntu Beta Backports for 18.10)

[NoWorries]

For some time now I could not use Disco to connect to my HP printer. With this printer I used an Ethernet connection. It is now in re-cycling because it finally developed a fault that I could not fix.

I now have a HP OfficeJet All-in-One 6950 and, like all modern printers, it uses a wireless connection. With the latest HPLIP software, I was able to connect Disco and all options are available and working.

So my only outstanding problem with Disco is with LibreOffice Presentation with inserted videos ignoring page size and occupying full screen on both the control screen and the projected image. The problem is recognized on Launchpad bug #1789029 but no one has been assigned. So I wait patently.

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

My experience for now

I have installed Kubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo (daily-build) last November, 23, for dualboot, and it is working fine.

January, 22, it upgraded to KDE Plasma 5.14.90 (5.15 beta), which is fine, too.

After this, Restart didn't work, and I have run sudo reboot.

Since then, Conky does not start at session startup, ─ using "Restore manually saved session" + manually "Save session". ─ Not a great problem. I could try "Restore previous session", or even "Start an empty session" + a simple Autostart to Conky.

Or, merely open Konsole and start Conky manually, as I prefer to do, for now, until get a time to explore this and try to solve it. And it is probable that such little problem to disappear after some next update.

A very little problem, and I cannot blame no one else for it, since I have done some experiences, such as to install (and remove) old 4.4 Kernel, and remove packagekit, plasma-discover, muon, unattended-upgrades, plasma-vault, kubuntu-driver-manager, kubuntu-notification-helper, and many of their orphaned dependencies.

Note that I use to do these same things in other distros, too, including Kubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. I don't like silent or unclear upgrades.

I use to run apt update to "see" if all Repos are fine; then apt list --upgradable to see how many (and what) packages will be upgraded / installed / removed; and finally open Synaptic to see a few more details and apply updates.

Yesterday, I did it in a different way, as recommended:

sudo apt update -o Acquire::http::AllowRedirect=false
sudo apt upgrade -o Acquire::http::AllowRedirect=false

Back to old routine, today I have seen that there were 43 upgradable packages, ─ but Synaptic would install just 42 and keep unchanged the login package.

If I try to force upgrade of login package, apt / Synaptic would remove most of KDE Plasma.

So, I will not upgrade anything, by now, and delay it for tomorrow or any other day.

Kubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo (development branch) keeps working fine, and I think there is no reason to risk it.

It is not the first time that I install and use regularly a "development branch", or a Beta release, or a rolling distro. Usually, there can be some problems, and it is not the end of the world.

Operating System: Kubuntu 19.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.14.90
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.54.0
Qt Version: 5.11.3
Kernel Version: 4.18.0-11-generic
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 2 × Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E7300 @ 2.66GHz
Memory: 3,8 GiB

[NoWorries]

On my system I have separate root and home partitions. I am also on a fibre network, so if I strike problems similar to yours, I download the latest build and reinstall. I find this takes less time than trying to solve a package problem. BTW, I checked my system and I do not have conky installed as I use English.

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

On my system I have separate root and home partitions. I am also on a fibre network, so if I strike problems similar to yours, I download the latest build and reinstall. I find this takes less time than trying to solve a package problem. BTW, I checked my system and I do not have conky installed as I use English.

A few hours later, yesterday, apt update && apt list --upgradable found 64 packages to upgrade, and this time Synaptic installed all of them, ─ including login package, ─ without removing anything.

So, I could work for about 7 hours with Kubuntu Disco Dingo, and it keeps working fine, without any other problem, ─ except that it does not "Restore manually saved session".

This is why I think it is always a good idea, to "see" what would happen, before to apply changes. Running apt update, you can "see" if Repos and network are ok; and Synaptic (or apt upgrade) shows a detailed preview.

What could happen, if I left unattended-upgrades to do things silently?



Conky (left side, above) doesn't come installed by default. You should install it, if you want it.

Then, you can run "conky &" in Konsole, to start it, ─ but it is a nice thing, to start it with Boot & KDE session.

[NoWorries]

Glad to know that all is now well with your installation of Disco. I must confess that I sometimes use the command line;

sudo apt update; sudo apt full-upgrade

and the full-upgrade lists what will be done. If there is something wrong you can always try

sudo dpkg --configure -a

.
On Disco, Discover is very good and it also lists what packages are going to be removed and hopefully stops one from system destruction. In the early days of using Disco, I accidentally did this and so I had to rebuild my system.