Upgrading from Debian 8 "Jessie" to Debian 9 "Stretch" brings in the new Plasma Workspaces 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 applications.
The upgrade is far from painless; new libraries with different configuration tools are used and most configuration moves from ~/.kde to ~/.config or ~/.local. Many applications make no attempt to import their old settings.
This page seeks to document what works and what does not. As a general rule, start off with the expectation that Plasma 4 and 5 are completely different pieces of software and that nothing from your existing settings will be carried across. That way, you will only be pleasantly surprised when the occasional setting actually does carry across.
Contents
Workspace
Plasma workspace
Most configuration including number of desktops, names, shortcut keys, background images is lost during upgrade
Font selection and font sizes are lost
(Some) panel configuration is preserved
Keyboard hardware and keyboard layout settings are completely lost (and a mapping with dead keys is installed which you probably don't want if you're not used to it)
Locale customisations are lost
Mouse settings such as single-click to select vs click to open are lost
All keyboard shortcuts to start programs are lost. Start kmenuedit and add them again.
Previous saved session is not restored on first login
Klipper
All configured actions are lost. It's possible to copy the contents of ~/.kde/share/config/klipperrc into ~/.config/plasmashellrc, edit the Number of Actions key and restart plasmashell to get them back.
For some reason the plasma widget and /usr/bin/klipper do not share the configuration (the latter uses ~/.config/klipperrc instead). Pick one or the other or spend time configuring both independently. Weird.
keyboard shortcuts are lost
Kwallet
There is an automatic migration agent to copy across the data from kwallet 4 to kwallet 5. It didn't do anything the first time but then miraculously did later on.
- If the migration does not happen automatically (or fails), it is possible to trigger it manually.
How to Migrate from Kwallet 4 to Kwallet 5 Manually
NOTE: The following tutorial assumes the user has basic knowledge of the command line, process control and filesystem navigation.
- Kill all instances of kwalletd and kwalletd5
- Open your editor of choice and navigate to the file:
~/.config/kwalletrc
Find the value alreadyMigrated=true
Change it to alreadyMigrated=false
- Save changes and exit
- Restart kwalletd and kwalletd5
- You will be prompted to enter the password for your old wallet and for your new wallet
- Wait until the migration completes
- Kwallet is now integrated with PAM, so it shouldn't be nessescary to enter your password at login any more.
Applications
Dolphin
'Places' configuration is preserved
Size, view icons/lists etc settings are lost
Kate
Sessions are not copied across; do this manually: cp ~/.kde/share/apps/kate/sessions/* ~/.local/share/kate/sessions/
Konsole
Keyboard shortcuts are preserved
Profile settings are preserved
Font settings in each profile are lost
Kontact
Some applications are no longer part of Kontact as they have not been ported to KF5. They are available in standalone mode only.
Your selection of applications that are activated within Kontact is preserved
IMAP accounts and local folders appear just fine
"Google Contacts" and "Google Calender and Tasks" resources may need to be deleted in akonadiconsole and recreated to have any data appear in Akonadi.
Running akonadictl fsck seems to be necessary after the upgrade and this can take a very very long time to run. (Make sure akonadi is running before running akonadictl fsck otherwise it will just sit there forever with no errors and no progress.)
Custom tags on messages are ported across (they are only stored in Akonadi but seem to be preserved)
All custom templates for mails (sending/replying/forwarding) are lost in the migration. Manually recreate them based on the old data in ~/.kde/share/config/kmail2rc.
KMail composer snippets are preserved
All custom shortcut keys are lost with the exception of shortcut keys for custom message tags
All settings for customised views of folders in kmail are lost, reverting back to the default
Address completion is problematic: doesn't always work, doesn't include lots of data... not obvious if that's just a bug in the new version or a migration problem.
IMAP Folders can remain unindexed following migration. Indexer claims it is done. Bug or migration problem?
Feeds in Akregator are preserved
Read-state of articles in Akregator is preserved
Akregator keyboard shortcuts are lost.
Konversation
All settings including keyboard shortcuts appear to be imported for this application
Custom scripts need to be migrated from the old location to the new location:
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/konversation/scripts; cp ~/.kde/share/apps/konversation/scripts/* ~/.local/share/konversation/scripts (Note that the on-line help incorrectly tells you to use kde4-config --localprefix to find out the location for scripts)
Telepathy IM
Existing accounts are copied across but changes to google chat authentication mean they don't work and need to be deleted and recreated.
kde-telepathy-text-ui seems to be non-functional in any case 858905
Yakuake
All settings are lost
Other unported applications
Examples: Okular, Kile
Keyboard shortcuts and other settings are preserved
Clean up
Following the migration there is presumably a pile of stuff left in ~/.kde that can be cleaned up.
FIXME: enumerate what can (and can't) be deleted.