KDE Plasma 5.16 Will Let You Reboot Into The UEFI Setup Screen

[skeevy420]

tl;dr: some distros break hard KDE for no apparent reason. Stick to OpenSUSE, Mageia or Neon.

An honorable mention for Manjaro and Antergos.

Tumbleweed and Manjaro have two of the nicest themed Plasma desktops around...provided you're into dark and green...

[M@GOid]

tl;dr: some distros break hard KDE for no apparent reason. Stick to OpenSUSE, Mageia or Neon.

I said on that post I was using Neon...

[buzzrobot]

I always emit a sigh of despair at "bugs" and comments posted like this that imply this happens to every user every single time - if this were really the case then no-one would be able to use KDE at all. When people post his sort of nonsense to justify their choices then Saying "just don't use it" as in "Don't use KDE" is really a good response. Of course KDE is useable.

Baloo has never spiked my CPU. Neither has Gnome’s Tracker. BOTH KDE and Gnome would do well put an explanation of user-adjustable settings in front of users. Not everyone jumps into system settings immediately after an update install or understand every option on offer.

[shmerl]

And for those of us who don't use KDE...

systemctl reboot --firmware-setup

Neat, thanks for the tip! It works now on my Asrock X370 Taichi with latest firmware, including fwsetup option from GRUB. With older UEFI, for some reason the GRUB option didn't work and just triggered a normal reboot.

[kpedersen]

The reboot to UEFI is a nice addition! Once I couldn't trigger it with the keyboard (thank you Asus) and I wasted a lot of time to get into the firmware again.

Wait, what happens if the OS inevitably gets trashed or you need to replace your hard drive? Having KDE as sole access is a hack rather than a fix.

I don't believe a UEFI implementation can be classed as standards compliant if it can be bricked.

How did you originally get around the bug in your ASUS hardware?

[genstorm]

It just gets me mad when I see something added to Gwenview that isn't HiDPI

The urge is understandable but that's not how open source development usually works. I would certainly welcome that patch as well considering my laptop hardware.

[starshipeleven]

I said on that post I was using Neon...

"tl;dr" I used in my post means "in short", so yes I was acknowledging that.

[starshipeleven]

Wait, what happens if the OS inevitably gets trashed or you need to replace your hard drive? Having KDE as sole access is a hack rather than a fix.

I don't believe a UEFI implementation can be classed as standards compliant if it can be bricked.

How did you originally get around the bug in your ASUS hardware?

He can use a USB stick with rEFInd, assuming he set it to at least try to boot from USB at all. But still, that's a very very bad situation and not excusable with a "but it works on windows".

[starshipeleven]

And for those of us who don't use KDE...

systemctl reboot --firmware-setup

Also rEFInd boot manager can do that from the boot screen.

[polarathene]

Wait, what happens if the OS inevitably gets trashed or you need to replace your hard drive? Having KDE as sole access is a hack rather than a fix.

I don't believe a UEFI implementation can be classed as standards compliant if it can be bricked.

How did you originally get around the bug in your ASUS hardware?

It's not a bug, you have fastboot which can do some boot time optimizations/assumptions, and then some boards offer UltraFast boot, or whatever marketing name for it. The latter one takes that a step further and one of those is skipping the bios logo display and accepting input iirc(you cannot interact with bootmanager like grub or systemd-boot, it just goes with whatever was default once the timeout runs out(normally that's something the user sets to 0).

If a boot is noticed to fail multiple times, some boards will disable the feature, otherwise you need to set a UEFI var to toggle booting into UEFI on next restart which is what the terminal command does(and presumably what this GUI addition does as well). Alternatively, you can take the boards battery out for a moment to do a classic reset.

I remember some setting that was meant to disable legacy USB or something, but ended up ignoring USB input completely, even after boot process iirc, bad information of what the feature did... Luckily had a PS/2 keyboard lying around, otherwise battery reset probably would work too.