Howdy, I just did a KDE plasma upgrade to 5.15. I ran into a slight problem that may or may not affect others so I wanted to give a heads up just in case. Everything builds fine. I had no compile or install failures. What I did run into tho was a missing or more likely crashed kicker/panel/thingy that is at the bottom of my screen. It's the thing that has the clock, desktop switcher, clip board and the K menu as well. I never can remember what they call that this week. Anyway, when I logged in, it came up for just a second or two and then disappeared. Obviously, you can't switch desktops in the normal way but if you use the ctrl and functions keys, it doesn't act or look like it normally should since there doesn't appear to be any background at all. Example, I have Kpatience on desktop 6. If I switch to it with the ctrl function keys, I can play the game normally. However, if I switch to what at startup is a empty desktop, #5 for example, the game still shows but doesn't work. If I switch back to desktop 6, it works as it should again. Whatever it is, it doesn't redraw the screen when you switch if you don't have something already running there. Other programs behaved in a similar way. It makes it look like all desktops are on one desktop yet switching still works. It's plenty weird. Also, there is no K menu so you can't start any programs that doesn't open from a saved session on login. Trust me, if you run into this, you won't miss it. Even if you don't notice the panel thingy at the bottom missing, you will notice the rest. It gets in your face and yells loudly that something ain't right. lol
What little bit of error I found mentioned something about a missing input. To be honest tho, I'm not sure it was related to what I saw happening. None of the errors looked like a complete failure but more as a informational type message. Sort of like video drivers that have the "--" or "II". They show something didn't work as expected but it found a way around it or works without it. I don't have enough info to file a bug. The way I fixed it, I did a emerge -e world. It might be that a emerge -ek would fix it but to be sure, I let it recompile everything. It didn't quite finish when I tried to login and it worked normally. If I had a clue what package it was that was causing this, I'd certainly file a bug but it could be any number of packages. I suspect it is a dependency myself. Something needed to be rebuilt but wasn't for some reason. I hope no one runs into this but if you do, make sure you at least have a back up GUI installed, even if it doesn't give you anything but the basics, at least you have a GUI. You may also want to make sure you have time to deal with this just in case you do run into this problem. Having something so you can go back to 5.14 easily may work as well. Best of luck to all. I hope no one else hits this. It was plenty weird. Dale :-) :-)
