Hey Alien Bob! I hope you're reading this. Thanks for all your hard work on the slackware repos you maintain. You're a total bro and a huge help for not just me, but a lot of other people who use slackware.

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Speaking of that, if you didn't know, Eric has a donation link if any one wants to give him a "atta boy" tip for all his KDE5, VLC, Handbrake, and countless other things he's done for Slackware over the years.

https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/

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Well, there's plenty of information: regarding the startup/shutdown needs of the Pipewire daemon as suspected by me, and how it interacts with Plasma5 and other applications.

What I use myself? Here's how.

First, a preamble: Pipewire (just like PulseAudio) from what I read and understand has a daemon supposed to be started by systemd after user login, running as user, and like I said already, this daemon to be stopped before the user logout. In the systemd World they name this "user target" and is about services similar with the ones we run on init runlevels, BUT per user. And we do NOT have available this feature even with elogind.

I did different experiments, but in the end I chosen to start Pipewire daemon with a XDG startup file: /etc/xdg/autostart/pipewire.desktop , like PulseAudio:
This way, the Pipewire daemon is started in early stage of Plasma5 desktop loading.

However, you must stop this daemon when you logout, or bad things will happen from my experience.

For example, you logout into SDDM, but Pipewire (and PulseAudio) daemons continues to run. Logging as user again, those daemon will go nuts.

PulseAudio daemon will "only" eat CPU cores at 100% and/or the audio will stop working sometimes (even with X11), BUT the Pipewire daemon will crash the desktop at a random time and will send the user back into SDDM or console, specially with Wayland.

I found no other consistent solution to kill those Pipewire and PulseAudio daemons other than instructing elogind to kill the user processes.

This changing its config /etc/elogind/logind.conf like:
This way, when the user will logout, all processes running as this particular user will be killed by elogind.

BUT, will have been very nice to have ability to kill particular user processes (those daemons), because configuring elogind this way, also processes like tmux or screen will be killed too.

For me, this is not a problem, as I have no intention to open "screen" in the same user as I run the desktop, but probably is better to have users for remote shell access and for desktop. This way, one could configure
Honestly, I do not found yet a consistent solution at this lack of "user target" services into Slackware other than this described.

Well "KillUserProcesses=yes" is a definite NO GO, for exactly the reasons you already mentioned.
I actually configure elogind to prevent that from being the default.

Try adding a script to your ~/.config/plasma-workspace/shutdown/ that stops pipewire, it will be executed when you logoff from your Plasma5 desktop.

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sddm works now! Thanks for fixing it! I noticed ktown's poppler isn't included in testing. Slackware Current's poppler seems to work fine.

I tried this - I have even a thread about this subject there in LQ.

I have even invented some scripts to start/stop the Pipewire daemon like in init, but working per user.

BUT, this is not consistent, as if the desktop crashes for various reasons (and while playing with Wayland may happen) the daemon(s) will be not stopped.

And as I said, issues have in my opinion also the PulseAudio daemon, and for exactly same reason.

Probably half of "PulseAudio sucks" threads are generated by this particular lack of stopping the PA daemon at the proper time on logout...

How many times you read of someone lamenting that PA eats 100% of CPU? Happens specially as unprivileged user.

poppler is already in Slackware current. Okular works here.

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Eric has said that he'll maintain digikam if it is dropped. You could easily track that with slackpkg+, so no problem.

Thanks! I tested it a moment ago and it does work. ktown had its own version of poppler so that left me confused.

While there is discussion of what software to package by default -
What about Calligra?
Is Calligra required for kde?
I have loaded and upgraded it too many times to mention
but I have used it and Karbon almost never. I never complained, and this is not complaint.
It's great having so many useful tools at my disposal. Empowering it is.
But I would guess that LibreOffice is the defacto standard office suite software
of the Slackware crowd. Indeed TeX has more going for it than its steep learning curve
and its seeming lack of compatibility with .ppt. Some might use OpenOffice and
I suppose there are Emacs enthusiasts (it seems so). Kate is awesome actually.
But does anyone much use Calligra? I have tried it but usually I am needing to write a
report or make some slides or a spreadsheet. I loved PeachCalc and Quattro and WordPerfect.
When I have started Calligra it because it is the default app for .doc files until i go fix that.
Are there hordes of Calligra users out there?

Well, I decided to test sddm - so I changed the inittab value from 3 to 4, and now I just get a black screen.

You know you can test it without a reboot by doing `init 4` / `init 3`? But anyway, the black screen problem has been discussed here, you'll need the proper sddm files in /etc/pam.d/ directory. The latest changelog update has a fixed sddm package in testing:

I've got thousand of photos. I do understand the reasoning. The package is 115.1 MiB and the source chimes in at a whopping 566.0 MiB. I would have been nice as Eric mentioned in a post above if they had made the facial recognition code as an add-in. I have not had a chance to play with this new implementation in digikam. I not that impressed with the previous implementation as it required an lot of time to train it and results were not really that great.

At any rate, I built it before Eric added it to ktown, if it goes, I will do it again. I already build hugin for digikam.

Still getting a black screen

Check that you don't have any ktown packages remaining in your system. Some packages were renamed when moving from ktown to vtown (ex: sddm-qt5 => sddm).