Report on ROME isos made today after the major ROME upgrade lastnight 12/05/25. The are iso #'s 4333, 4337, 4338, an 4339. Need to seperate them between X11 and Wayland. This is a far as I could get today as it is late and sleepy time.
Both X11 and Wayland:
Isos boot to sddm login screen instead of to plasma desktop.
Calamares does not start from the desktop icon of from Application Menu. It does not start with the normal pkexec calamares -d. It will start using sudo.
X11 only:
sddm login screen is set to Failsafe X session instead of Plasma X11.
Plasma6 desktop takes to long to load, I did not time this but it is and that usually does indicate some problem somewhere.
During my usual ‘iso quick check’ the system crashes, it crashed before I could get a journal or xorg.0.log.
Wayland only:
sddm login is set to Plasma Wayland, that is a good thing
Based on an ‘iso quick check’ these seem to work OK over all.
But to install user would need to use sudo calamares d instead to the correct pkexec calamares -d I am not sure if that is or is not OK.
This for now is hardware testing and any comparisions to installed systems also regard hardware systems.
Computer is multi-boot with 1 Cooker, 1 ROME, 1 Rock P6, 1 Rock P5 (yes that still is a thing), and partitons for one test install. The 4 installed systems are using znve1.
So next step was to check was to check most recent Cooker X11 isos to be sure they are working as expected. Checked Cooker X11 # 4321 and 4325 and they behave normally. Specifically:
isos boot to Plasma6 desktop
wifi starts from applet in system tray
Calamares installer starts from desktop icon
Go through Calamares up to partition page>Manual partitioning and be sure all partitons on my computer are shown
Check in Erase disk page has the 4 entries for swap and the 4 ‘approved’ file system types in drop down menu
Randomly check that things on desktop, systemtray, menu panel, and favorites list all at least open
That is the basic ‘iso quick check’. From experience we know if it paases all of this there is a high likelihood that the iso will work on most hardware. As far as the ‘random check’ goes we make and test so many isos that everything gets checked as far over a few weeks.
To check if installer works you have to do an install. I do periodic installs of Cooker and ROME in Qemu VM and on hardware partition. And yes Rock gets tested at time of Rock point releases. After that Rock does not change much until next point release.
I personally test Plasma6 isos and installs. I used to include LXQt but that got to be to much. Heck what I do now is to much as far as being time consuming.
The answer is there aren’t any really good isos for ROME at this time. If you see here and here I have been testing and reporting and developers are working on fixing this.
My best guess best on my own testing and memory is that the Wayland isos # 4317 and 4320 are probably OK but not perfect. For X11 the situation seems worse maybe isos # 4172 and maybe # 4271.
Then user would need to follow the upgrade instructions here.
I have put a heck of a lot of work into this and not yet gotten positive results.