Since every single fucking time I dare update Kubuntu, some things suddenly break down (sound, various drivers, Bluetooth, whatever) I end re-installing from scratch. Most of the time it works out of the box, but sometimes, things just don’t work, like the application launcher no longer opens when I press the Meta key or whatever.

So here is a checklist of things that can (and will, Linux being Linux) go wrong and how I solved it. It will save me some time googling on some obscure forums trying to figure out how to fix things that should not be broken in the first place.

Application launcher no longer opens on Meta (Windows key)

Edit ~/.config/kwinrc and add the following:

[ModifierOnlyShortcuts]
Alt=
Control=
Meta=org.kde.plasmashell,/PlasmaShell,org.kde.PlasmaShell,activateLauncherMenu
Shift=

After that, reconfigure: qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

Edit: Ooouuh, I just found out that for this to work at all, the application launcher should have a shortcut assigned! Right-click on the application launcher’s icon, then select Configure Application Launcher..., then go to Keyboard Shortcut: if you remove the shortcut there, your windows key magically stops working… And if you put back any shortcut, then it works again… What fucking non-sense is that… (and I found this because always remap the Alt+FN shortcuts to workspace navigation, and by default Alt+F1 is assigned to the application launcher… So as soon as I did that my menu stopped opening -_-

Login screen resolution

If like me you have a laptop with a 15″ screen and a stupidly huge resolution, you will want to customize the resolution. Now, doing this in your KDE session is easy, but for some unfathomable reason the login screen cannot be configured through any UI…

Once again, you’re left opening a terminal and tweak yet another obscure configuration file. The following is the one I use on my laptop. Check xrandr and SDDM to find a ton of varying info on how to customize this.

The file is /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup and yes, you’ll need to be root to edit it… And I add the following to it:

xrandr --output eDP-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 60

Edit: nope, doesn’t work. Need to waste yet another hour to learn some fucking tool that I should not even care about… When did tech stop being about making our life easier, and instead became a pain in this ass making our life this miserable…

Get rid of snap crap…

The new “thing” in mainstream Linux distros nowadays seem to try to become as much of a bloatware as Windows… and thus snap and other flatpak craps were born… sure, it’s easier for devs, but at what cost?? Services running and hogging resources on every single user’s computer for no reason, software which are 10 times as fat as they used to be, slower to launch, etc.

So here we go again:

1. snap list and then from its result, sudo snap remove --purge <package(s)>. The order is kinda important be this piece of crap software is not able to remove things in dependency order, so if you remove everything in one command line call, it’ll tell you “I’m dumb, I can’t do what you’re asking for.” The last 3 things to remove should be bare, core20 and snapd.
2. sudo apt remove --autoremove snapd to remove that crap.
3. To prevent this crap to install itself again and again and again, edit (in sudo mode) /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref and add the following:

Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10

4. Reinstall Mozilla from deb: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa and the usual install (check that the name of the packages contain deb, before accepting)
5. And prevent apt from suggesting the snap updates… edit in sudo `/etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox` and make it:

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001

Note that for the Mozilla thing, the name of the file to edit and the last part of the second line (after the o=) seem to depend on which source you re-installed Mozilla from (step 4)