Sometimes, my KDE starts without the “taskbar”

When I boot my Arch Linux machine, about 1/10 times the “taskbar” is missing. (Do you still call it a taskbar?)

All I see it desktop icons, the background and the mouse cursor. I’m using NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

Do you guys have any idea what’s with that? It’s hard to troubleshoot because it only happens sometimes.

@linux #linux #KDE #plasma #ArchLinux #askfedi #NVIDIA #troubleshoot

  • MsDB42 🦘♀🌈🐧
    4•11 months ago

    @fell @linux

    >Taskbar

    It’s the Plasma Panel.

    >NVIDIA proprietary drivers

    It IS possible that this is the core of the problem, as historically NV has been a major PITA for Linux, especially #KDEPlasma #Wayland. Lately, i’ve read many peeps mentioning large improvements, but afaik it might still depend on your specific GPU HW model & driver version. I don’t use NV, so cannot help directly on that, but i have some suggestions:

    1. If your current Plasma session is Wayland, try logging in an X11 session. Or, vice versa.

    2. It might be corruption of a KDE/Plasma config file. A quick easy initial test is to create a 2nd user account in Plasma, then log into that.

    3. If that behaves correctly, it increases the probability of corruption [of your original user]. You can reset to default all those, via the following:

    To backup existing plasma config:

    cd ~/.config
    for j in plasma*; do mv – “$j” “${j%}.bak”; done

    This command will rename all Plasma related configuration files to *.bak (e.g. plasmarc.bak) of your user and when you will relogin into Plasma, you will have the default settings back. To undo that action, remove the .bak file extension. If you already have *.bak files, rename, move, or delete them first.

    To backup existing cache:

    mv ~/.config/Trolltech.conf ~/.config/Trolltech.conf.bak
    mv ~/.cache/ ~/cache.bak
    mkdir ~/.cache
    kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental && kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

    Good luck.

    • @Xirup@lemmy.one
      1•11 months ago

      I confirm that this problem happens in Plasma with Nvidia’s proprietary drivers in X11, and I’m using Neon so I doubt it has anything to do with the relationship between Arch based distributions.

    • Felix UrbasikOP
      1•11 months ago

      @MsDropbear @linux That’s really helpful advice. I’ll try making a second user account and see if it happens again. As I said, it only happens every 10th boot or so, so I’ll have to give it a week. Might be nice to start with a clean home directory. I tested different desktop environments before I settled with plasma. I deleted the old config files, but it’s certainly possible I forgot something.

  • Fred
    3•11 months ago

    @fell
    I’ve had the same issue a few years ago when I was running a Manjaro machine. There seems to be something weird going on with how arch based systems initialise the KDE taskbar and even though I’ve had multiple people confirm that they were facing the same problem (and had to force a reboot and hope for the best for the system to fix itself), no one could ever tell me why this happened. It was a real showstopper for me back then. >
    @linux

    • Fred
      3•11 months ago

      @fell
      I don’t have any strong feelings towards arch systems, so I’ve just moved on to @opensuse #Tumbleweed and have never seen that problem again. I know, this is not really a solution to the problem but as I said, nobody knew where the problem came from, so there was no way I could have ever fixed it or found a less cumbersome workaround instead of rebooting ad infinitum. <<
      @linux

  • @ISOmorph@feddit.de
    1•11 months ago

    That is indeed odd. Maybe try to rebuild your taskbar? Go into /.config and delete plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc and reboot. Be aware that all plasmoids will be deleted though.

  • DragonZlaver
    1•11 months ago

    @fell @linux i never had this problem of taskbar won’t start i only ever had that happen in xfce but in kde plasma under wayland on amd hardware it just works fine under endeavouros

  • @blackbrook@mander.xyz
    1•11 months ago

    I haven’t had the taskbar missing on boot, but I did have the problem, a version or two back (of Plasma), of it going missing when unplugging my external monitor to switch back to the laptop’s built-in in monitor (my config is set up to have the built-in turned off when the external monitor is plugged in).

    I mention this in case you are using an external monitor and this is the same bug triggered by monitor detecting and switching on boot up.