Arch Linux User Repository

I've installed octopi & octopi-notifier-frameworks from the AUR tonight, back in my Plasma Wayland session now. Though it's years since i last used it, afaict the GUI seems much the same as before, ie, quirky. Nonetheless, i can report that ALL its functionality, via both LMB & RMB, works fine in Wayland... unlike kalu sadly, as i'd posted before. Also, though atm i can't see how to automate it [as per kalu] if new News is available, Octopi does have a tool to manually on-demand fetch & display News in its internal window. I shan't yet actually uninstall it, but i have now removed kalu from Plasma's AutoStart. I'll instead live with Octopi for a couple of weeks, in Wayland, & if it doesn't let me down, then at that stage i think given poor-to-nil Wayland support, i'll need to formally retire kalu from my pc.

@kippie thanks for the summary. I tries octopi and pamac in the past, but didn't love them. I might try the others at some point.

@Thulinma Yes, that's totally understandable!

I would indeed be happy to accept pull requests for such functionality, just to confirm. I'm indeed only fixing broken functionality for now - not because I don't want to do more, but purely because of time constraints. (At some point I'd like to also fix the sorting of downloads so that concurrent downloading doesn't make the screen jump around all crazy like it does now... But it's been on the backburner because it's just "weird", not "broken".)

At some point I'll probably switch to Wayland myself as well, and at that point I will of course be highly motivated to fix exactly this problem... but for now I remain on X11 since there's quite a bit of other things that are broken for me on Wayland right now that prevent me from switching over just yet.

@Rhinoceros I used both Octopi & Pamac years ago when i ran Manjaro KDE, before changing to Arch. Pamac is still installed now, but i never use it for system updates, only as a quick way to look for occasional new apps. Octopi's GUI back in the day always seemed pretty weird, but i haven't used it for years so maybe it's improved? I should possibly try it again now to see if it's better, & especially to see if it works properly in Wayland [otherwise it'd be pointless]. Afaik back then, it had no way to incorporate News, which is another benefit of Kalu ofc. I do have Bauh installed, & try it occasionally, but its SystemTray icon functionality kept malfunctioning for me all the prior times i tested it. I also have tkPacman, but it offers nothing different, & is also less valuable for me than Kalu.

I've looked at that news.conf file before, wondering like you if i could workaround the issue that way. It might indeed be possible, but i suspect i'd need to know the exact words & syntax of the latest News item to type in there --> oh, wait, yes! Checking it again now, that file simply holds the header line from kalu's latest News item, so maybe it's as simple as literally copying that line from kalu's News in future, then pasting into the file, then restarting kalu. I shall try this. Thanks for the idea!

@kippie I think we're all in the same boat more-or-less. We're hanging onto this old software since it was/is still the best around. Have you looked at these alternatives though?

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/octopi https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pamac-aur

Otherwise, is there a way to mark kalu's news as read via the command line? I had a look at /home/lee/.config/kalu/news.conf, but that didn't make much sense to me.

@Rhinoceros Thanks for your fast reply. Sadly that's more or less what i also thought, & actually i've held off asking the question here for at least a year, ha, but today decided to chance it, just in case. Yesterday, in exasperation at being unable to mark two News items as Read [for reasons per my OP], i decided to log out of Wayland & into X11, where for now i remain. I'd much rather be in Wayland... but i also really like having the full functionality of kalu, so it's an impossible Catch22. Sigh.

@kippie The original developer of kalu stopped developing it, and @Thulinma kindly took over some general maintenance. My understanding is that (as per their comment in December last year) they are only fixing broken functionality. Presumably they are open to pull requests, but I expect it would be a massive rewrite unfortunately.

Hello. I'd like to thank all involved in developing & maintaining this lovely little tool. 👍

I've used it for years, & in Plasma X11 sessions it's perfect. Unfortunately though, its functionality is severely restricted in Plasma Wayland sessions, eg, SystemTray icon right-click context menus do not work at all, & even left-clicks fail once updates or news are available & the user tries to click their respective Notifications' OK buttons.

Are there plans to enhance this app for better Wayland compatibility, please?

Thanks for the update @jghodd. Hopefully it stays solid.

@Rhinoceros - apparently, the packagekit + the kalu-kde rebuilds seem to have resolved the crashing issue i was seeing, although i do understand that some other package update may have caused and ultimately resolved it. i've been monitoring the log files for 4 days now (tail -f in an open terminal window) and am seeing no signs that there are any errors related to kalu-kde (other than the plasmashell spam in the logs which i believe is a plasmashell issue - i will open a ticket). do understand that the source i tweaked was local and intended only for testing - the logic actually introduces a bug where other functions, who use the GError** parameter, may fail. i've been running/testing with a version that does not include that source change, just a rebuild (revision 2). so, for now, all is good.