I am going ever deeper into kicking the tires of CentOS 8.3 I did manage with the help of my buddy to get KDE 5.18.4 installed, but running into some problems I hope someone can help me solve.
The first problem is putting individual wallpaper in to each of my virtual desktops. I know it can be done because I was able to do it in Manjaro Linux (I was kicking tires), and the KDE version was KDE 5.18, yet for reasons unknown I have not been able to do that in CentOS 8.3. I tried every way but loose that I could think of but it went no where. If anyone has solved this problem please let me know what you did.
The next problem should, in theory, be easier to solve, but like the above problem, nothing I did worked. The problem concerns changing the login page. Currently it is a ugly GRAY with a spinning do-dad that looks like a dog chasing its own tail. It keeps spinning and when it blinks out the User sign-in pops up where you select the user, and enter your super-secret password. In THEORY this *should be a piece of cake: (1) You go to over to the far LEFT hand side and hit the APPLICATION LAUNCHER (2) you move RIGHT one space and hit APPLICATIONS (3) you move UP and hit SETTINGS (4) drop DOWN and hit SYSTEM SETTINGS (5) you will now get a large screen that says "Plasma System Settings" , below that it you will see something that says "Frequenting Used" and you will see 5 items one of which says LOGIN SCREEN (SDDM) (6) Hit LOGIN SCREEN (SDDM) Here you can download NEW Login Screens, New Themes, etc. (7) Select your new screen and hit APPLY (8) A box will pop up ask you to enter your PASSWORD FOR ROOT to SAVE SETTINGS IN SDDM (9) Enter your PASSWORD FOR ROOT and hit OK (10) Shutdown and Reboot the System.
Having jumped through all the hoops etc., you would expect that your New Login screen would now greet you WRONG!!!. You might expect it but what you get is the same UGLY GRAY screen with the spinning do-dad that looks like a dog chasing it own tail. No matter what I tried from changing the entire Global theme, some esoteric hacks, nothing I have tried has worked. As in the previous problem, If anyone has solved this problem please let me know what you did.
The final problem was an attempt to get around the previous problem: I decided to simply scrap SDDM and install LightDM. Good plan, but I hit yet another brick wall. Surely, I thought, this would be a piece of cake. WRONG!! I became root and entered the command dnf install lightdm, hit enter and got this:
Last metadata expiration check: 1:37:59 ago on Wed 20 Jan 2021 05:25:10 PM MST.
ERROR:
Problem: problem with installed package xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.20.8-6.1.el8_3.x86_64
-- package lightdm-1.30.0-6.el8.x86_64 requires (lightdm-greeter = 1.2 if xorg-x11-server-Xorg) but none of the providers can be installed.
-- conflicting requests
(try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages or '--nobest' to use not only best candidate packages)
If anybody out there who is a KDE User has faced these exact same problems of:
1) Putting separate wallpapers in each virtual desktop, so each desktop is unique.
2) Changing the UGLY GRAY Login Screen (SDDM) that has the spinning do-dad that looks like a dog chasing its tail with a nice looking Login Screen that I downloaded.
3) Figure out how to install Lightdm
The ONLY nice thing I can say about CentOS 8.3 is that it is a LOT better than CentOS 8.2; that said 8.3 is still REALLY BAD!!
D'Cat