Manjaro | My Journey to Ditch WINDOWS..

Monitor Plasmashell memory leak and warn with notification

April 23, 2023 - Reading time: 3 minutes

Plasmashell has been acting weirdly since a couple updates for me, and I noticed that it is the Plasmashell process which, after a specific condition that I did not find yet, starts having some kind of memory leak. I made a script to check its memory usage, and added a Cron job to execute the script periodically.

//EDIT from the future, I found the issue, when I disable the secondary monitor in Nvidia Settings, the memory leak starts, issue reported here and should be fixed soon.

April 11, 2022 - Reading time: 9 minutes

Not many manufacturers provide good software for their devices on Linux. Usually tools can be provided to assign different functions or keys to the mouse or keyboard. On Linux, their are great projects like libratbag and its frontend PIPER, but my hardware wasn't properly supported last time I tested. This is where a tool like Input Remapper shines.

March 19, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute

To make Kickoff Legacy application launcher taller, simply edit the file /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickofflegacy/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml and change the minimum height value from 34 to 50 or any other value that suits the monitor resolution.

    Layout.minimumHeight: PlasmaCore.Units.gridUnit * 50

Reboot or logoff/login back to reload the application launcher with the new modified height.

Dark mode for GUI application run with sudo

February 7, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Some application like Timeshift or Nvidia Settings run with sudo have the default distribution light theme. In order to have customized theme, one can run System Settings as root to configure everything with the following command:

pkexec env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY KDE_SESSION_VERSION=5 KDE_FULL_SESSION=true dbus-launch systemsettings5

It is then easy to select the theme for the desktop, the GTK applications, the windows decoration and so on, to match the user desktop customization.

Fixing links from within programs not opening in the web browser

January 15, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Problem was initially found with Teamspeak 3 links that wouldn't open in Firefox but in whatever xdg-open thought was the proper program (web links opening in Gwenview, or Kate, instead of Firefox). I thought it was the TS3 wrapper used to fix a problem on KDE so I modified it to use directly Firefox instead of xdg-open. It fixed TS3 links problem, but then the issue continued from within other programs. The real fix was to set the default web browser from terminal with the following command (the second command wasn't necessary, but it doesn't hurt to add the mime type). I think a KDE update messed that setting, as it was working properly before.

xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox.desktop
xdg-mime default firefox.desktop x-scheme-handler/https x-scheme-handler/http

Fixing the weird desktop effects issue after enabling secondary monitor

May 30, 2021 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Enabling or disabling a secondary monitor on KDE with Nvidia almost always disabled/crashed/reset the desktop effects or compositor. It was simple to get them back with CTRL+MAJ+F12 key combination, but it wasn't ideal.

A simple fix was to enable a desktop effect in KDE called background contrast. It is apparently an old known bug in KDE.

KDE keyboard shortcuts for Spotify, media keys, and other stuffs

January 26, 2021 - Reading time: 3 minutes

My keyboard media keys have no control on players, so let fix that by adding custom shortcuts in KDE (need the KHotKeys package installed on the system).

January 17, 2021 - Reading time: 4 minutes

A .pacnew file may be created during a package upgrade to avoid overwriting a file which already exists.
A .pacsave file may be created during a package removal, or by a package installation of a package that was removed.

These files require manual intervention from the user and it is good practice to handle them regularly.

Here is a Pacman hook to detect and list .pacnew files when found.

July 10, 2020 - Reading time: 7 minutes

I wanted to make an interactive program/menu to launch some commands that I often use in terminal from Simple Bash Menu. I cleaned the old bash menu and directly put some part of the menu into a .desktop file alternative actions.

March 25, 2020 - Reading time: 2 minutes

I needed a Manjaro ISO with an old kernel to be able to run the live environment and install Manjaro on an old computer not compatible with latest kernel.

May 23, 2019 - Reading time: 4 minutes

I changed some default Manjaro settings to have a more pleasant experience, a compromise between my old Win 7 and the new Manjaro interface.

May 19, 2019 - Reading time: 6 minutes

I Installed Manjaro KDE 18 in April 2019. Windows 7 support ends in 2020 and Windows 10 is not installing in my house (//EDIT from the future, January 21st 2022, I formatted my Windows 7 system, and replaced it with Windows 10, I lied * ...). I'm using Linux servers for near ten years now so it was a good time to switch to a Linux desktop.

I'll use this blog to list things I tweaked on this Manjaro installation for a better transition/experience and to fix some stuff.
I'll probably miss some things I did since this day but I will try to keep track of what I do now on this installation, in new blog posts, in case I'll need these information later (like on OS re-installation).

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