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
>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:
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If your current Plasma session is Wayland, try logging in an X11 session. Or, vice versa.
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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.
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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.
@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.
@MsDropbear @linux I am running X11. Wayland is incompatible with the NVIDIA drivers. Last time I ran Wayland I only saw half the screen.
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.
