I'm happy with the apps in KaOS but I do miss these two KDE apps:

  • kalarm (to set clock alarms)

  • spectacle (screen grabber)

I don't see them in KCP either.

They seem to be actively updated by KDE. Is there a reason they are not included in a KaOS install?

Not sure what your issue with spectacle is, but that is part of the default KaOS install.
Both packages you mention are in the repositories anyway:
https://kaosx.us/packages/packages.php?sortby=&sortdir=&flagged=&page=&limit=&repo=&exact=&search=kalarm
https://kaosx.us/packages/packages.php?sortby=&sortdir=&flagged=&page=&limit=&repo=&exact=&search=spectacle

Make sure to either use the web package viewer (see links above) or Octopi to search, or learn a bit about the cli pacman:
https://kaosx.us/pacman/
https://kaosx.us/pacman/#searchesqueries

Thanks, Demm. This helped a lot.

First of all, it got me past my big mistake - I had assumed any KDE apps would come from Discover. Never occurred to me to try pacman!

Now spectacle is working, but I now have a different problem with kalarm. Here's the details on both:

For spectacle, tho you mention it is part of the Kaos install, it did not appear in the menu, nor did krunner find it. The "Prt Scr" key did nothing. I originally installed Kaos back in May and have kept it fully updated snce. I have no clue why it wasn't on my system.
BUT, I've now installed it with pacman, and it's in the menu, found by krunner, and opens with "Prt Scr", so all is good.

For kalarm, I also installed it using pacman, and it's now in the menu and found by krunner. However, when I try to run it, nothing happens, and I find this in journalctl:

Jan 12 18:00:27 F16 systemd[863]: Started KAlarm - Personal Alarm Scheduler.
Jan 12 18:00:27 F16 kalarm[3690]: /usr/bin/kalarm: error while loading shared libraries: libmpv.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Jan 12 18:00:27 F16 systemd[863]: app-org.kde.kalarm@d3f37ad554014ec68683f77b7d36a999.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=127/n/a
Jan 12 18:00:27 F16 systemd[863]: app-org.kde.kalarm@d3f37ad554014ec68683f77b7d36a999.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

pacman does not find any libmpv.so.2, so I'm not sure how to proceed from here.

Assuming the pastebin was for the Discover question, I did NOT put anything on pastebin because I figured out where the Discover came from. Back in June, I wanted to install the betterbird flatpak, and it seems I followed some advice from somewhere that I needed to install Discover to do that.

I have always done updates from the octopi notifier. I didn't really pay any attention to Discover until I went looking for those apps.

I was thinking of uninstalling Discover, but maybe I need it to get betterbird updates ...

As far as the kalarm libmpv problem, I checked the octopi output for any occurrences of libmpv and there were none.

Please do post the asked for SysInfo, it is really needed to understand what is going on with your install.

OK, clear now what is going on πŸ™‚
You selected the minimal install, and as explained in the installer (when you clicked minimal) your install will ONLY include the desktop, a browser, file manager & text editor, so you selected to remove spectacle with that.

MPV missing is because the ISO used was from March, since May phonon-mpv is default, so all installs since then include mpv. Kalarm is now rebuild to explicitly pull in mpv (so the missing libmpv was a packaging error). With your next update, kalarm will be reinstalled and will add mpv. So, when your used mirror is synced, either sudo pacman -Syu, or use octopi to update.

Thanks! In the notes I made when I did the initial KaOS install, I failed to record that I did "minimal", but it seems I made the right choice, as the only app I've missed that would been installed was spectacle.

Sorry for all the trouble, but at least you got finding a packaging error out of it. πŸ™‚

a month later

As I remember things, it seems I used Discover only for the 1-4 Flatpaks I needed that were not available from KaOS. Other than that I never used it, since it’s cleaner to use the terminal anyways.