Why don't the system settings show correctly?

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

I am trying EOS with Plasma on a VirtualBox machine running on Windows 10. I would like to use Plasma on my other computer, where I already installed EOS (with MATE as DE, for the moment.)

I noticed two problems with System Settings.

Sometimes the mouse settings don’t appear. At first, I thought it was because the used driver is VirtualBox mouse integration, but then, at the fourth time I restarted the virtual machine, I saw the mouse settings. The following screenshot has been taken when I could see the mouse settings.

Mouse settings

Even when the mouse settings weren’t visible, Game Controller was able to detect the mouse and reported its movements correctly.

Game Controller

There are other pages that don’t show any settings, not even disabled: Users, User Feedback, Shortcuts, Display Configuration, Audio, Bluetooth, Login Screen (SDDM), Autostart, Background Services, Desktop Session File Search, Notifications, Language, Formats, General Behavior, and Desktop Effects are just some of them. It seems the pages that don’t show settings increase while I keep System Settings open.

The other issue is that some strings aren’t completely visible. Instead of Input Device, I read I u D v (with a space for each missing letter).

These are issues I only have when I install EOS with Plasma. I created a virtual machine with EOS and MATE, but I didn’t have similar issues. (I deleted that virtual machine and created a new one from scratch to test EOS with Plasma.)

To make it clear: I only have the themes that comes with Plasma.

Global Theme

When I select the dark them from Quick Settings, the theme is changed from Breeze to Breeze Dark, which are the default Plasma themes, without any change from my side.

Before installing Plasma on my computer (on bare metal), I would like to understand why this happens.

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It happens when I select a dark theme either from Quick Settings or from Appearance > Global Theme. When Breeze is the enabled theme, I see all the settings.

Breeze Theme

3
Doh - my glasses needs cleaning - I have no idea why I read this as time settings.

Need to know

  • Windows uses localtime
  • Linux uses UTC

This creates a scenario where your VM takes the time from the Windows system expecting it to be UTC then adding the timezone - totally skewed.

It also tend to happen when you are dual-booting - and may create a totally skewed time setup - it gets worse the longer you are from UTC.

Additionally both systems are configured to update the system RTC and this is when the whole thing really speeds up.

There is only one way to work around it - set Windows to use UTC.

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The problem I have is that some of the settings page don’t show any setting or show, for example, I u D v instead of Input Device. It’s not related with the used timezone.

5

The system uses udev to detect devices and the order is arbitrary.

You cannot deduct from a VM as the VM uses other drivers than on bare metal.

This is likely caused by the graphics driver - after all you are running this on top of a Windows system.

The mouse settings is identical from your images (dark/light).

When you install Plasma using the EOS installer you get a default KDE Plasma which usually behaves as expected - at least it does on my system :slight_smile: .

If you plan to use custom themes you may get weird errors depending on the age of the theme and the maintenance state.

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This was either a temporary issue or an issue that a successive EOS update fixed. (It could also be some files were corrupted when I first created the virtual machine).
I can now see the setting pages on the virtual machine as I should, without changing settings on the virtual machine side nor updating VirtualBox.

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