Yohan Beugin - September 2025
Recently, I upgraded my laptop from bookworm to
trixie; the latest stable version of the Debian
distribution. The following are some notes about the process and
some fixes I had to do for future reference for myself but also in
case this can help anyone else out there.
After backing up my files and configurations, I went ahead with
the upgrade process that went relatively fine, although I had to
increase the size of my /boot partition that was not
big enough anymore, as recommended by the official Debian
instructions.
Debian, starting with trixie, now uses the
deb822 file format for its apt sources files. So,
let’s switch our sources files to this new format and place them
under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, for this we can use
sudo apt modernize-sources, and audit/edit manually
the output as needed.
For my desktop environment, I use Plasma by KDE and tile my
applications windows thanks to the Kröhnkite dynamic tiling
extension. Debian trixie ships with a major change in
this domain, as it contains Plasma 6 and not Plasma 5 anymore like
in bookworm.
The first issues you may notice is that some of the custom widgets that were available on Plasma 5 have not been ported or are not compatible with Plasma 6. This is quickly fixed by replacing them with alternatives or just removing them altogether from my desktop.
The Kröhnkite Kwin script is no exception here, and browsing through the documentation and online issues, I shortly find that a new fork of the project has been made and is maintained, requiring you to delete the old version, and replacing it with this new one, which I do.
Then, while using my machine for work I started noticing that
sometimes at reboots the Konsole shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+T)
would not be working anymore. This was quite annoying, so I
started looking into my config files and how they were altered by
modifications to the Plasma settings. I narrowed it down that some
configs in ~/.local were responsible for the problem
with my shortcuts (issues related to the deprecation of
khotkeys for kglobalaccel). I made a
backup of my ~/.local and recreated an empty one
copying over from my backup only what I needed (cleaning this
folder by the same occasion).
Similarly, my power management settings were not getting
honored when the lid was closed because of residual Plasma 5
settings in some of my config files in ~/.config.
Fixing it required to log out (to make Plasma flush to disk the
current configs), connect through a virtual terminal (i.e., no
graphical session) to delete these config files (after making a
backup of them in case), and log back through a graphical session
to regenerate these files with only Plasma 6 compatible
settings:
mv ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc.bakmv ~/.config/kwinoutputconfig.json ~/.config/kwinoutputconfig.json.bakmv ~/.config/kwinrc ~/.config/kwinrc.back