Looking into Lunar Kubuntu 23.04

[claydoh]

I have been able to add ppa's for staging-plasma and staging-frameworks

These are for .......staging, so all packages can be fully built and ready before being transferred to a normal repo or PPA. All the dependency 'I's dotted, and and completely-built package-set 'T's crossed. That sort of thing.
Why you are using them in a alpha/pre/dev environment does baffle. It serves no purpose other than to add unneccesarily to the the already expected 'chaos' if you will, with zero actual purpose or benefit of any sort whatsoever.

I am beginning to think that the development phase has now been made unavailable to users

If I didn't know any better, I might be a bit offended, but I know this is not intended at all . 99.9999% of the people enjoying the development processes won't experience this, methinks.

[NoWorries]

It is now 3 months before the release of Lunar Lobster 23.04

Early Monday morning the 16th Jan, I managed to break my HP Laptop when I noticed mega updates without carefully checking what was going to be removed. I had the Kubuntu ppa for staging-plasma and staging-frameworks. So at the end of this process, I had no working system. I then went to my ASUS Laptop and removed the staging-frameworks as I thought that was the main culprit. This time the staging-plasma did not remove so many packages, however after booting this system, I no longer had a workable desktop. As I have a LTS available, I downloaded the latest Lunar iso and reinstalled Lunar on my ASUS Laptop without any staging ppa’s.

I decided not to do reinstall Lunar on my HP Laptop but used the recovery mode to check updates for the staging ppa’s. After four days, I was able to get my HP Laptop working. I now have both my Lunar systems working with the staging-plasma and staging-frameworks. I am very pleased to now show you the remarkable System Info Centre progress that developers have made over the last Month
.

Info Centre Item	4 Month Status	3 Month Status
KDE Plasma Version	5.26.3	5.26.90
KDE Frameworks Version	5.101.0	5.102.0
QT Version	5.15.6	5.15.7
Kernel Version	5.19.0-21-generic	6.1.0-12-generic

All the Info Centre Versions are now updated - including QT Version. The Plasma Version is the beta for 5.27 which is the last in the Plasma 5 series. Next release will be 6.0. The Kernel Version 6 only works on my HP Laptop which has an AMD video card. My ASUS has Kernel Version 5.19.0-21-generic because Nvidia drivers are not supported in Kernel 6 at this stage.

The only main problem, that I now have, is LO Impress presentation screen has once again, for both Wayland and X11, a white line on the right edge and bottom edge for all correctly located text and graphics. Wayland has the extra feature that any video is now incorrectly located on the the LO Impress control screen at reduced size. This is the same problem that I had in Post 12 above which was quickly fixed.

Once again the developers are to be congratulated on the stunning progress of Lunar!!!

[NoWorries]

I decided to find the release date for KDE Plasma 5.27 and it is 14th February. In the interim time I have LO Impress giving a white line on the right and bottom edge of the projection screen as well as the projection of any video being reduced in size and located on the control screen instead of the projection screen with Wayland.

My question is: (a) should I wait for this to be fixed in the 5.27 Beta? or (b) should I install 22.10 and see if this version overcomes my LO Impress problems?

I have not been successful in getting my LTS to boot to Wayland, so I am considering the option (b) above.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
(b) should I install 22.10 and see if this version overcomes my LO Impress problems?

I have not been successful in getting my LTS to boot to Wayland, so I am considering the option (b) above.

Well, why not try it? I guess you will not find out until you try…
You seem to have several computers to your disposal in case something goes wrong.

Btw: Is there a good reason one would already use Wayland on one of their main machines?
There are many things still missing or not working in comparison to X11 in my experience - why not wait for another two years or so until all those things are implemented properly? Except one wants to be an "early adopter" and/or do some testing?
(I really don't want to open up a whole new discussion here, but perhaps there are one or two major reasons I have not been able to see yet?)

[NoWorries]

I have tried LO Impress on Kubuntu 22.04, 22.10 and 23.04. For X11, all systems have the LO Impress presentation monitor, with a white line on the right edge and bottom edge for all text and graphics. Videos are also correctly located on the Presentation monitor.

For Wayland, LO Impress has different behaviour. On Kubuntu 22.04, there is nothing on the presentation monitor and I have not found any way to make it visible. On both Kubuntu 22.10 and 23.04, the control monitor has any projected video incorrectly located on it at a reduced size. For these systems, Wayland LO Impress text and images are correctly located on the projection monitor. However with Wayland and Videos, the video is as shown on the control monitor as in the attached graphic.


So with this type of behaviour, my only option for using LO Impress to do a presentation is to use X11 and hope the above "features" do not annoy the viewers.

[NoWorries]

Many thanks to our Esteemed Member acheron who at:

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/important-information/announcements/kubuntu-announcements/667915-plasma-5-27-beta-available-for-testing

gave the way on how to update Plasma to 5.27-beta. I have now install it by the command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

It is working well on my system, however I still have the unsolved problem with LO Impress on Wayland, when it does a presentation with included videos and also, still has the white lines on the right and bottom edges for text and images.

[NoWorries]

I have tried LO Impress on Kubuntu 22.04, 22.10 and 23.04. For X11, all systems have the LO Impress presentation monitor, with a white line on the right edge and bottom edge for all text and graphics. Videos are also correctly located on the Presentation monitor.

For Wayland, LO Impress has different behaviour. On Kubuntu 22.04, there is nothing on the presentation monitor and I have not found any way to make it visible. On both Kubuntu 22.10 and 23.04, the control monitor has any projected video incorrectly located on it at a reduced size. For these systems, Wayland LO Impress text and images are correctly located on the projection monitor.
. . . . . . . .

So with this type of behaviour, my only option for using LO Impress to do a presentation is to use X11 and hope the above "features" do not annoy the viewers.

I purged LO from my system and then installed the pre-release version of LO using

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases

The new version 7.5 also had the same presentation problem. So I then purged it from my system and installed the original version.

To my great surprise, LO Impress now works perfectly for presentations. Zero white lines on the right and bottom edges and videos correctly located on the presentation screen. Many thanks to acheron and his associates for fixing this problem.

[NoWorries]

I have a Laptop which has a UHD screen and with Wayland working successfully. I have been having trouble when I play embedded videos in LO Impress as they are jerky and sound is not synchronized with the speaker.

I finally found the source of my problem which was that my Display and Monitor settings were Scaled by 125%. By reverting the Scale to 100%, all worked perfectly. I also found that menus now worked as they should. I found that with Scale at 125%, menus on LO Writer or Calc could only be accessed by clicking on File and then sliding my cursor to the menu I want to access. By Reverting Scale to 100%, menus also worked as they should. Note that X11 works well with Scale above 100%.

I hope the source of this Unwanted feature on Wayland can be found - this is not a X11 problem. At least there is a simple way around it, ie For Wayland, don't use Scale in Display and Monitor settings.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I saw in some Youtube-video (from Brodie Robertson?) that they are working on scaling for Wayland, but I think this will take some more time as other uncomplete features in Wayland still will…

But great that you found the culprit!!!

Btw, I don't know if you know (you probably do…): There are currently two different main version of LibreOffice for (K)Ubuntu 22.04 : 7.3.7 in jammy-updates and 7.4.4 in jammy-backports.
The latter one should be same version as in (K)Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster if I am not mistaken…

[Snowhog]

Upgraded (sudo do-release-upgrade -d) to 23.04 this morning (from 22.10). Went smoothly. No issues.

The first thing I noticed after the upgrade completed and I was on the Desktop, is that KRunner comes up almost instantaneously when I start typing on the Desktop. In all other release I've had on the laptop, it didn't load with the first keypress. Does now.

[NoWorries]

Only 2 months to go before the release of Lunar Lobster 23.04



This last month has been a very pleasant experience with Lunar and all the updates. For me it has been very stable and a pleasure to enjoy the updates that made the system better. I continue to have my system with staging-plasma and staging-frameworks. As I have an AMD video card I can use Wayland 100% of the time. I am still patiently waiting for the NVIDIA drivers to be updated so that they work with Wayland. Now for the many updates over the last month that are summarized by the System Info Centre.
.

Info Centre Item	3 Month Status	2 Month Status
KDE Plasma Version	5.26.90	5.27.0
KDE Frameworks Version	5.102.0	5.103.0
QT Version	5.15.7	5.15.8
Kernel Version	6.1.0-12-generic	6.1.0-12-generic

All the Info Centre Versions are now updated, with the exception of the Kernel, and I am now greeted with a new background for the login screen.

I have successfully used Lunar's LO Impress for presentations and have never admitted that I am using a pre-release version - far more stable than a MS Windows pre-release.

Well done developers on the fantastic progress on Lunar development.

[NoWorries]

I find Kazam a very easy to use desktop recording program. Unfortunately any Kazam recording using Wayland gives a black screen. On X11 it works very well. So for the time being I have to use X11 with Kazam.

Is there any Wayland package that needs to be added or is there further Kazam/Wayland development required?

[claydoh]

Is there any Wayland package that needs to be added or is there further Kazam/Wayland development required?

Kazam's last actual version release was in 2014, so I doubt there will ever be any Wayland support here. It has been patched to compile and run on Debian today, so it still seems to work

For Wayland, the tool needs to support it explicitly, usually via pipewire and/or working directly with the specific desktop's compositor (Kwin in Plasma). Right now, only OBS works with Wayland for screen recording in KDE, last I checked. It uses Pipewire.
Spectacle will have support for this VERY soon, in the next KDE Gear release.
The timing makes me think that Lunar will miss out on this at release, as *buntu will have reached feature freeze before then, unless they Kubuntu have asked for a freeze exemption for the next KDE Gear (which uses the same version scheme as *buntu , so also called 23.04)

[NoWorries]

I did try OBS and it worked on Wayland but I found it considerably more complex than Kazam to use. I find it far easier to logout and login using X11 if I want to use Kazam.

Regarding Kazam, I did find that launchpad is dong work on it and you can see this at: https://code.launchpad.net/~kazam-team/kazam/unstable. I have no idea as to what area of Kazam they are working on, but I do hope it is to get it to work with Wayland. I have found many cases of Kazam recording on Wayland giving a black screen.

[claydoh]

Those are all automated translation updates. No new code
Which is here
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kazam-...unstable/files

And the package changelog shows minor patching and package edits by Debian since 2014. Note that this is directly imported from Debian, not packaged by Ubuntu directly.

Yes OBS is a bit overkill for the purpose, but is the only choice atm. Pipewire and xdg-portals should allow this to change though. Eventually