Plasma freezes

[Fernando]

Yet another unexpected problem...
Plasma completely freezes after running muon updater. By Plasma I mean the desktop and the system tray I'm using. If I open the system manager (or whatever its name is in English) I see that there's a process called kwalletd that goes zombi. If I terminate that process, system finishes my session and goes to login screen.
Have anybody found this behaviour? I'm having a rough time with the updater and the 15.04 version in general...
Thanks!

[SteveRiley]

Plasma 5.3 and KDE Applications 15.04.0 have migrated a number of bits, including the wallet manager, to KDE 5. You can update to these by enabling the Kubuntu Backports repository and updating your system.

[Fernando]

Thanks, SteveRiley. I enabled the Kubuntu Backports repository and a lot of packages updated, but I keep having the same problem, although kwalletd doesn't seem to be the problem anymore.
All the desktop is still locked (I mean I can't even have the context menu or get the taskbar to respond) and there are a lot of packages that, according to the manager, are "suspended, awaiting an event". Luckily Cairo Docking (and all of the programs, in fact) are working OK, otherwise I would be locked in the desktop and would have no way of doing anything...

[SteveRiley]

All the desktop is still locked (I mean I can't even have the context menu or get the taskbar to respond)

That's weird. Do you mean that you can mouse over the taskbar in the panel but nothing occurs when you, for example, right-click anywhere on it?

and there are a lot of packages that, according to the manager, are "suspended, awaiting an event"

I don't use graphical tools for package management, so I'm not sure what that error message really means. What's the output of

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

[Fernando]

That's weird. Do you mean that you can mouse over the taskbar in the panel but nothing occurs when you, for example, right-click anywhere on it?

That's exactly it. Everything works, except for the desktop itself. I can't configure it, or get context menus, or click anything on the taskbar...

I don't use graphical tools for package management, so I'm not sure what that error message really means. What's the output of

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

Well, it's not the update manager, my bad. It's in the system monitor that I see all those processes "suspended..."

[jlittle]

It's in the system monitor that I see all those processes "suspended..."

That's the normal state for processes, if they're not running. Also called "sleeping".

[SteveRiley]

That's exactly it. Everything works, except for the desktop itself. I can't configure it, or get context menus, or click anything on the taskbar...

That's so weird. What happens if you create a new user account and log into that one? Does Plasma behave normally?

[Fernando]

Hey.
I created a new user and everything seems to work fine there. Must then be something related to the user. Now I can't delete that user from system settings; it crashes every time I try. There are other little annoyances I have noted these days, such as having no sound from headphones if they are plugged in when system boots (I have to plug them out and then back in), or icons sets that are installed but don't show up in the list, for example. I'm beginning to seriously consider doing a back up and fresh-installing the whole system. The only thing is the HUGE amount of data I'm storing (I know I should already have back up, but...).
That is, unless there's a way of "restoring" the user profile back to default and try to see if things get better.

[SteveRiley]

Log out of KDE. Switch to a TTY console and log in with the new user ID you created. Run the following:

ls -al /var/tmp

Among various subdirectories, you should see at least two of the format kdeuser-username -- one for the old user and one for the new user. Delete both of these (rm -rfv directory). This might clear up the icon and sound wonkiness.

If you want to rebuild the system, a backup is necessary. Buy an inexpensive USB enclosure and a laptop-size (2.5") hard drive big enough to hold all your data. Even a 1TB drive is < $100 now. Copy everything over to that drive. Then reinstall.

[Fernando]

I just happened to change the desktop theme to default Breeze (I was using Glassified) and it seems that the problem with Plasma is gone. At least I've been working for more than an hour with the taskbar and the desktop fully functional. When I switched back to Glassified, everything froze in like 5 minutes. So, the problem seems to be the desktop theme. Sadly, because I like Glassified so much more than Breeze... I guess I'll try to check for the rest of the themes and see what happens.
Any idea why this is happening?

[SteveRiley]

I presume Glassified is this: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...?content=81388

It's pretty old. I suspect many themes for KDE 4.x won't cooperate well with Plasma 5.