Keeping KDE 5 after system update

[Werameli]

Hi guys! I’m a newbie in Linux, especially on EndeavourOS. I had installed system like 2 hours ago and already have kind of problems… I chose offline installation to get KDE Plasma 5 as my main environment, but after update via welcome program (yay button) I noticed that KDE Plasma 5 was replaced by 6th version, which is very laggy on my PC.

What should I do to keep KDE Plasma 5 on my PC instead of 6th version?

[anon93652015]

Hi. Welcome to the community.

If you would like to keep plasma 5 temporarily, then the main thing you need to do is not update your system for a few weeks.

If it is that you would like to keep plasma 5 for more than a month, or even more, like a year, then you shouldn’t be using an Arch-based Linux distro.

Now, not updating your system has its flaws, mainly security flaws if you use your system to connect to the internet. In addition to this, it requires more care to ensure you don’t update the system while still updating the apps. You can achieve this using any of the methods below, but it is only recommended for users who understand how pacman works, and how to maintain their system in general.

@anon93652015

How can you wait if you are using a bleeding edge distro?

• Don’t update your system for a few weeks. Some users already do this.
• Use Flatpaks, Appimages, .sh files, or even Snaps in the meantime while upstream works out all the kinks.
• If you already had KDE, create a temporary user before updating, install a WM you find easy to use (like OpenBox), and use that for a few weeks

Excerpt from: KDE Users Should've Waited

For info on updating to KDE plasma 6 and avoiding issues, please see: Plasma 6 Update some hints

NOTE: If you are not a techie, you should really avoid not updating your system, as it is more likely to cause a ton of issues down the line.

[TheRaOct]

Short answer: Choose another distribution.

Long answer: You can technically downgrade your system https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages but this will most likely break your system. ArchLinux (and by extension EOS) is not designed to keep ‘old’ versions of packages around. Eventually your system will break due to incompatible packages, dependencies etc.
I’d suggest trying a static release distribution (Kubuntu, OpenSuse etc) that features the KDE Desktop

[Cphusion]

@Werameli

I chose offline installation to get KDE Plasma 5 as my main environment, but after update via welcome program (yay button) I noticed that KDE Plasma 5 was replaced by 6th version, which is very laggy on my PC.

You didn’t share you hardware but you can also just install Xorg and then log into the Xorg session with KDE Plasma 6 to see if your system handles that better.

[Werameli]

Eventually I found out how to fix it. It was such a dumb mistake. I was using integrated graphics…

Now with proprietary Nvidia driver on X11 it works perfectly

[anon93652015]

That’s opposite to my experience, but good. So you’ll keep using the up-to-date plasma 6 then, right?

[Werameli]

Right, but anyways thanks for replying

[anon93652015]

Yeah, sure. Please mark your reply as the solution, that is, switching to dedicated graphics.

[joekamprad]

Welcome here at the purple fun

Plasma 6 Update some hints

For what it’s worth I think I figured it out. Thankfully, it had nothing to do with removing the orphans. Through some searching, I discovered that a custom theme I’d been using was incorrectly ported to Plasma 6 that was searching for outdated libraries, prior to those that I listed above were moved to libplasma. From what I figured out, I made a stupid copy/pasta and created some issues with my Breeze sddm directory. After forcing a reinstall of that, it’s all fine. In the meantime, I found …

Has some hints if you upgraded from 5 to 6 too.