Please keep providing ksysguardd in 22.04

[Sergio Callegari]

KDE is now proposing a new framework (ksystemstats) in parallel to ksysguard. However, ksysguard is still supported and still part of KDE. Not providing it in a KDE distro while upstream still provides it seems a subtraction to the KDE value.

There are in fact two important reasons for keeping ksysguard in ubuntu:

- the new framework is still not on par with ksysguard in a few aspects (which is probably why KDE is not phasing out ksysguard for the time being);

- many widgets make plasma crash and become unworkable, with a not easy recover if ksysguard is not available.

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[Rik Mills (rikmills)]

Ksysguard is not supported and will not receive any updates from KDE past the initial transitional 5.22.0 version. It was removed from Debian and Ubuntu for this reason, and will not be returning for the same reasons.

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

This seems strange: libksysguard already was available with version 5.24.4 in impish (> 5.22) is available as 5.25.4 in the KDE git repos and seems to be actively receiving commits there with a recently tagged 5.24.90 version. Incidentally 5.25.4 is what arch/manjaro/opensuse/fedora distribute.

Apart from that the actual issue is that there are plasma widgets that *need* some ksysguard support, among which "System Load Viewer" is probably the most popular. Apart from the fact that widgets using ksystemstats cannot replace it yet, the major issue is that if you have that installed then without any ksysguard support the 20.04 -> 22.04 upgrade is KO. Plasma crashes on login start with widgets expecting ksysguard support and not finding them.

This is not happening in any of the above mentioned arch/majaro/opensuse/fedora distros.

So, I think it is perfectly OK to retire the ksysguard front end, but the backend support should IMHO be retained as long as there are widgets or application software relying on it. Widgets are particularly critical because of how they are implemented in plasma. If they miss something the whole plasma crashes which is a real showstopper.

[Rik Mills (rikmills)]

> This seems strange: libksysguard already was available with version
> 5.24.4 in impish (> 5.22) is available as 5.25.4 in the KDE git repos
> and seems to be actively receiving commits there with a recently tagged
> 5.24.90 version. Incidentally 5.25.4 is what
> arch/manjaro/opensuse/fedora distribute.

You are confusing the library

libksysguard: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libksysguard

with the front end

ksysguard: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ksysguard

These are 2 very separate things.

no distros can have ksysguard > 5.22.0 because KDE simply have never released a ksysguard source since 5.22.0

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ksysguard/

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/ksysguard

Stays at won'tfix, as debian/ubuntu are not going to bring back an obsoleted and unsupported upstream source.

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

You are right, I missed I "d". I mean ksysguardd, that is the daemon/server, I have no interest in the frontend/client ksysguard. I have fixed the bug title accordingly.

Even if the version number is not updated, it does not seem to be abandoned/unsupported. At https://github.com/KDE/ksysguard there are extremely recent commits (last one 13 hours ago).

As mentioned, the problem is that the widget architecture in plasma is a bit fragile. If a widget hangs, all the desktop shell hangs. If a widget crashes, the whole desktop shell hangs. When a widget expects to be able to talk to ksysguardd and can't, at best it hangs at worst it crashes, in some cases it causes the desktop shell to erratically misbehave in apparently quite unrelated ways.
When the DE becomes unavailable, to most users the machine is gone and recover is extremely hard.

Please, let me advocate again that ubuntu follows a similar migration path away from ksysguard as other distros (including rolling ones, such as arch). Get rid of the front end, keep the backend (libraries + daemon) for some time more, to avoid desktop issues. Other distros seem to carry ksysguardd 5.22.0 together with plasma 5.24.x.