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)
  • kyoji
    141·
    7 months ago

    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!

    • buffyOP
      120·
      7 months ago7 months ago

      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.

      ~$ sudo apt install kde-full
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
kde-full is already the newest version (5:147).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 87 not upgraded.

      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).

      • Ephera
        50·
        7 months ago

        Debian doesn’t have package groups in that sense. kde-full is 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 the kde-full package 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-full

        • buffyOP
          20·
          7 months ago

          Thanks for the tip! However, I tried apt reinstall kde-full and apt --fix-broken install, but no packages were installed and (unsurprisingly) the problem still persists.

          • Ephera
            20·
            7 months ago

            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?

              • Ephera
                30·
                7 months ago

                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…

      • Pantherina
        40·
        7 months ago

        You will also need to use snapper before every apt-get upgrade to avoid these issues

        • buffyOP
          20·
          7 months ago

          Thanks for the recommendation! I will definitely do it when I eventually install some other distro in the future.

      • billgamesh
        20·
        7 months ago

        you installed it without uninstalling first? have you tried an apt purge to get rid of related conf files, then reinstall kde?

        • buffyOP
          10·
          7 months ago

          You are absolutely right. I just tried apt purge kde* plasma* libkf* and apt install kde-full followed by a reboot. But sadly, the problem persists.