I've been using Kleopatra for over a year and though the PGP concept and practice seemed so difficult in the beginning it grew clearer and with practice I came to understand and use it pretty capably.
More recently, in the last couple weeks, Kleopatra has been glitchy--that's the best word I can think of. If you do something beyond the small number of basic operations required to encrypt and decrypt, and sometimes even then, the app will appear to stop working. For example, if you're viewing the Notepad and click on Certificates, the view within the app frame doesn't change, or the reverse, from Certificates to Notepad. You may try to scroll through your list of certificates, but it won't scroll, with the view appearing frozen.
There are a number of other problems, all or most similar in that one or another views will appear frozen, and by the fact that sometimes you can work around the problem by, for example, double-clicking on random spots within the app frame, in order to force a response from it. If you're in the Certificates view (or if you're suposed to be looking at the Certificates after clicking Certificates in the toolbar) and the app doesn't appear to respond, you can double-click anywhere within the area where the Certificates list should be and it will open the details for the Certificate that would and should appear where you clicked. In this way you can continue to get some, but limited, function from it. Quitting and re-launching the app doesn't help.
Additionally, unrelated to the aforementioned problems, I noticed that Kleopatra has been creating new public keys for my certificates which already have a public key. I think it happens when I've made some kind of change to that certificate, but I'm not sure, and searching for information about this issue hasn't yet turned anything up. I don't think it's a glitch, but some feature of Kleopatra and maybe other OpenGPG platforms.
I discovered that Thunderbird works as a PGP platform, and it may be more stable. But I'd have to import a few necessities, and I've read a bit about exporting keys for installation on other apps or devices. Does anyone have experience with rebuilding your OpenPGP operation in a different app or on another device? I've found a number of Kleopatra-related files but I'm not sure which ones I'd need or want to include.
Thanks so much to anyone who can help!
/u/johnshade · N/A votes · 18th April, 2024 - 22:50 · Link
Well I confirmed what I suspected about Kleopatra creating a new public key for a user's own certificate whenever they make a change to that certificate--in my case when I've had to add and/or remove a certificate's user ID in order to make the identity of the key clearer and more explicit to counterparties while avoiding having to create of a completely new key pair. It became necessary a few times because when I was creating one or another key pairs, and before I knew better, I used a name that was too broad and vague, like, hypothetically, "Archetyp" or "dread" for the certs I intended to use with that market or this site. But people found it frustrating to locate my certificate whenever they wanted to encrypt a message to me, because they surely have dozens of certificates with "Archetyp" or "dread" in their names. So I added a new, more specific user ID to any certificate in need, and that apparently causes Kleopatra to produce a new public key, though I didn't know that of course. The new keys are still associated with the same, original fingerprint as any previous key(s), including the original, so I don't know if the change actually affects anything in the use of the key/cert. I'm pretty sure I've decrpyted messages from people who encrypted using a public key that had been replaced. But I'm not 100% certain yet and I'm not sure if I need to or should update my public keys wherever they are different now. The Kleopatra Handbook does not mention this feature, btw. That would have been helpful. It's a bit disconcerting to find that one of your certs has a totally different public key than the one you thought it had and which you've publicly posted here and there. It's not necessarily a good look to be having the wrong key with no explanation.
/u/DigitalShaman · N/A votes · 19th April, 2024 - 02:46 · Link
FWIW I haven't had any issues with mine. Not very helpful, but just wanted you to know that mine seems to be functioning as expected as it always has.