Plasma 5.21 auto-update woes and how to fix them

Unfortunately it appears that the KDE Plasma 5.21 update’s releasing broke the Desktop for some Feren OS users who didn’t manually install the updates.

The worst part? I’m theorising it’s because of a program Feren OS includes from upstream sources that I don’t control (aside from telling it the sources that it should automatically update packages from), and even though I’ve since updated the configuration to prevent this happening in the future it’ll still break Plasma 5.21 before it gets those new configs right after… only because it decides to skip certain packages since they remove packages when updated… those packages being packages that NEED to be updated too.

Anyway, frustrations aside, I’ve done all I can really do here, so here’s how to fix this:

1: You haven’t logged in yet after that breakage

If you haven’t logged in yet after the breakage, you should see a prompt when you log in post-breakage. From there, choose whatever option you want on dialog 1, and then on the second dialog choose No. A Konsole window should now appear to try to fix this issue, followed by rebooting your machine once it is done.

After that is done, your Desktop should be working again.

2: You’ve already went through that dialog or can’t see the dialog at all

If you don’t have the dialog at all or have already went through it and answered Yes to the second dialog by accident, you can still fix this easily:

1. Log into your machine so you’re on the broken Desktop’s black nothingness (so that your internet connection is hopefully activated)
2. Hold CTRL, ALT and press T on your keyboard
3. Wait for Konsole to appear
4. Run sudo apt update
5. Run sudo apt dist-upgrade
6. Answer yes to the prompt shown
7. Once done, run reboot
8. Your Desktop should be working again from here on out

3: You’ve already went through that dialog or can’t see the dialog at all… and Konsole isn’t working

Finally, if Konsole isn’t working, you can still fix this easily:

1. Log into your machine so you’re on the broken Desktop’s black nothingness (so that your internet connection is hopefully activated)
2. Hold CTRL, ALT and press F2 on your keyboard
3. Log in with your lowercase no spaces username and your normal password
4. Run sudo apt update
5. Run sudo apt dist-upgrade
6. Answer yes to the prompt shown
7. Once done, run reboot
8. Your Desktop should be working again from here on out

Other fixes I considered

For transparency purposes, I did consider some other methods of automatically fixing this for people, but they were rejected for reasons specified below:

Forced automatic system update on the next boot

My first idea was to force a system update on the next boot if automatic updates are enabled, as to finish the updates automatically, but I quickly changed my mind for two reasons:

1. It’d require being online for long enough for the packages to be downloaded
2. There’d be no sane way of notifying people that they need to reboot once that is done
3. It might cause network bandwidth issues
4. It’d cause grievances for users that are not affected

Changing the Neon mirror’s label so unattended-upgrades ignores it

My next idea was to change the KDE neon Repository Mirror’s label to be different so that unattended-upgrades would ignore it, but…

1. Doing so would very likely break the repository for everyone until they go into Konsole and manually sudo apt update and answer the prompt about still trusting said repository

So, yeah… this problem is unfortunately practically out of my control for the most part, so I’ve done what I personally can out of the sane ideas I’ve had to fix this issue going on so far.

If you fully update your system manually, you’ll avoid this issue.