Hi everyone, I ran apt full-upgrade last month and accidentally deleted a couple packages that weren't supposed to be removed, due to me not paying enough attention. I could recover most of the system just fine, since most of the missing features and related packages were obvious to me. However, I still couldn't figure out why transparency is not working on KDE, both in Wayland and X. I suspected it could be a missing compositor, but libwayland and libqt6waylandcompositor6 (and related packages) are all installed (and that wouldn't explain why it isn't also working on X).
I have attached a screenshot to illustrate what I mean.
I would appreciate if anyone could help me figure out what package might be missing that is causing this issue. Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Thank you so much everyone! I finally solved my problem. I just had to replace libqt5quick5-gles by libqt5quick5 (non gles version).
Commandline: apt install libqt5quick5
Install: libqt5quick5:amd64 (5.15.10+dfsg-2+b2)
Remove: libqt5quick5-gles:amd64 (5.15.10+dfsg-2+b2)
Are you on BTRFS? If so maybe you could restore to a snapshot prior to the apt upgrade?
I'm not very familiar with Debian, but perhaps there are official "groups" of packages that comprise a set of softwares, like KDE. Perhaps you could re-install that group, if it exists?
You could also create a new user, log in as that user, and see if the issue persists. If so then you'll know it's a system wide issue. If not, then maybe you could migrate to the new user?
Good luck!
Sadly I am not using BTRFS for my root directory on this specific system. If I end up deciding to reinstall, I will definitely go back to BTRFS to avoid such problems.
Debian actually has a KDE group named kde-full. I reinstalled it but the issue persists, which was honestly surprising to me.
The new user idea was really clever, thanks for the suggestion! I will try that now and see.
Edit: the new user also presents the same problem. Actually, it makes sense, since SDDM is affected as well (I should have mentioned that before).
Debian doesn't have package groups in that sense.
kde-fullis just a package which depends on the other KDE packages.So, if you tell it to install
kde-full, it'll just check that, yes, it does have thekde-fullpackage installed, whether all the dependencies are fulfilled or not.You can try doing
apt --fix-broken install(without specifying a package), maybe that will pull in the missing dependency.Or you can reinstall:
apt reinstall kde-fullThanks for the tip! However, I tried
apt reinstall kde-fullandapt --fix-broken install, but no packages were installed and (unsurprisingly) the problem still persists.Hmm, then I'm guessing, it's not a missing package. It kind of doesn't quite make sense anyways, as KDE Wayland can't be run without a compositor.
Maybe the installed Breeze theme is broken. If you install a different Plasma theme in the System Settings, does that give you transparency?
I agree with that. I suspect you might be right. SDDM (Breeze) is also weird with transparency. However, I just installed
materia-kdebut unfortunately the problem persisted (screenshot attached). Before that, I ranapt purge kde* plasma* libkf*andapt install kde-full. That too didn't solve my problem.I can't believe, I seem to be the first to ask this, but are maybe graphics drivers broken? Are you on Nvidia?
Those black squares for the status bar icons, I think, I've seen before somewhere, so I'm at least guessing that your problem isn't a completely new problem...
You are right, I should have made this clear. I am not on Nvidia, I am using an old Thinkpad on Intel Haswell.
I'm glad to know my problem isn't completely new. I'll look into it further online. If you ever find a link to a report of a similar issue, I would be happy to see!
Edit: I found this link, the issue reported appears to be very similar to what I'm seeing here https://libreddit.tux.pizza/r/kde/comments/jhqbnz/kde_plasma_rendering_problem_black_squares/
Edit 2: I finally solved my problem! It was indeed an old problem already reported somewhere.
Awesome!
You will also need to use snapper before every apt-get upgrade to avoid these issues
Thanks for the recommendation! I will definitely do it when I eventually install some other distro in the future.
you installed it without uninstalling first? have you tried an apt purge to get rid of related conf files, then reinstall kde?
You are absolutely right. I just tried
apt purge kde* plasma* libkf*andapt install kde-fullfollowed by a reboot. But sadly, the problem persists.