Rough timeline of what happened:
- I had a Fedora 41 KDE Plasma install with a custom image set as my desktop wallpaper
- I upgraded to Fedora 42, and the custom wallpaper seemed to be retained
- However, on the second reboot after upgrading (not counting the “updating your system…” boot that happens after doing
sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot), my desktop wallpaper had been replaced with the “6x9=42” wallpaper shipped with Fedora 42. - I went into the KDE Plasma settings app, reselected my custom image and clicked “Apply” - nothing happened, the “6x9=42” wallpaper was still there.
- Only after deleting and readding my custom image to the selection of wallpapers in the settings app could I restore it as my wallpaper.
Not the end of the world, but slightly annoying.
Potentially relevant journal entries:
a) At startup:
Jun 11 09:53:34 fedora-myhostname plasmashell[2467]: qml: The backend got an unknown wallpaper provider type. The wallpaper will now fall back to the default. Please check your wallpaper configuration!
b) When I was trying to change the wallpaper in Plasma Settings:
Jun 11 09:54:14 fedora-myhostname systemsettings[3356]: qrc:/kcm/kcm_wallpaper/main.qml:135: TypeError: Cannot call method 'hasOwnProperty' of null
Another potentially relevant factor is that in the boot before the one where the wallpaper changed, I had done sudo dnf autoremove. The actions it performed included:
Remove f41-backgrounds-base-0:41.0.2-1.fc42.noarch User @System
Remove f41-backgrounds-kde-0:41.0.2-1.fc42.noarch User @System
autoremove is supposed to be benign, but perhaps something goes wrong if those “f41-backgrounds” packages are removed?
Does anyone know what the intended behaviour is here, so I can raise a bug for the delta between that and the actual behaviour? I can see two conceivable possibilities:
- The “6x9=42” wallpaper ‘should’ have been applied immediately on upgrading. (Not my preference, but I can see that it might be designed that way.)
- My custom wallpaper should have been retained unchanged in the upgrade.