[PLASMA 5] How to revert to KDE4?

[Plasmating]

I upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04 from 14.10 using the upgrade-manager and I am truly sorry I did. Plasma 2 is in a completely unusable state:

· Editing global hotkeys cannot be saved or take any effect. Such as trying to bind a key to invoke clipboard actions with the klipper replacement.
· Icons missing all over the place. Notably icons such as Firefox and such, or anything that provides its own icon basically.
· Autostart scripts are ignored, can't save changes or add back existing scripts that worked perfectly before.
· Icon-only task manager lost Unity integration, hence custom launchers don't work anymore.
· Cannot chance clock to 24 hour format.
· Icon-only task manager cannot minimize when clicking the active grouped task, showing a slow, clumsy spread that is useless in practice.
· Breeze-dark plasma theme becomes white after a random amount of time, with icons still white, making it unusable.
· kwin window-specific options don't get saved, including hotkeys.
· Titlebar tabs are gone. Autogroup by ID/Autogroup with similar does nothing.
· Frequent crashes when trying to change settings.
· Theme is inconsistent, showing square monochrome checkboxes that don't match any selected theme when hovering over them.
· Theme is ugly with a dark color theme, where it looked fine before updating.
· Every superuser task brings a prompt now, when it didn't before. My user is properly set on sudoers to not bother me.
· Pastebin and weather plasmoids are gone. No network activity monitor plasmoid either. At least the "ring" system monitor is pretty, but I need a network monitor of some sort and there's none.
· Config migration from KDE4 to whatever it is now is partial and seemingly random. My custom color scheme was imported, but none of the hotkeys, startup scripts, custom window settings and such were imported with it.


Plasma 2 is not ready for prime-time. How can I downgrade to KDE4 where things work? I don't care if I have to build it from source as long as I have a usable desktop. I can't downgrade to 14.10 because I need the other upgrades not related to KDE for work. But I can't work with a broken shell. Even if I managed to fix the most visual bugs like the missing icons, all my custom Unity-API launchers are gone forever because now Icon-Only task manager is useless and has no settings, my whole desktop arrangement is not possible without window tabbing in place which is now gone, several plasmoids are gone as well, and clicking on a window group is extremely slow and clumsy, gets in the way of doing any work. While I can probably make replacements for some of those, it's a massive downgrade and it's going to eat my whole free time just to get a similar level of functionality without having to wait 1-2 years for the features to be implemented back. So, I want to go back to Plasma "1" until it cannot be used any longer. The question is how?

[claydoh]

You would have to probably take an Ubuntu Core, (or any *buntu version, probably) and rebuild every piece from source, including not only KDE, but kdelibs, qt, and other pieces since all the Qt stuff that kde is built on is newer in 15.04, and some parts of the old may not build using the new libraries.

Which bits of 15.04 would you be missing? It very likely would be much much easier to add those to 14.10 than to rebuild everything you would need, as there is so much of it to do.

[Plasmating]

Well, systemd fixed a very exotic bug with my setup, and I need the updated gcc toolchain and libraries for work, also solving some critical bugs. It'd be too messy and time-consuming to fix those manually. This update fixed everything wrong with my system, but completely broke the interface to that system.
I tried Unity and it refuses to cooperate, and can't bring klipper into it like before since it's now a plasmoid.
Most of the problem is the disruption in workflow, I'll pretty much need to manually code replacements for all the missing features (hence having to learn QML, which while not a hard task, I don't like learning programming languages for such limited use), and spend weeks getting things back from the default configs... it's a huge workload just to restore the status quo and only partially.
While having the possibility to fix it myself is one of the wonders of open source, that's too much work to put on the users who also have their own workloads.

Edit: I managed to fix the icons issue, but still cannot add scripts to startup, save window settings or set hotkeys for windows.