[SOLVED] Plasma broke after upgrade

[WildPenguin]

Hi!

After upgrading yesterday evening, a lot of KDE Plasma related packages got upgraded.

Now, the whole Plasma desktop is in a half-broken state. More specifically, desktop is black (I've set up a background picture), right click does not bring up the context menu, the main panel I've setup got reset, the pager (for switching desktop) is a single icon only and crashes if I click on it, and I can not add any plasmoids - trying to add one, the dialog never comes up.

What does work, is the panel menu, any widgets that are there except the pager, I can remove widgets but not add any, changing desktop without the pager, and ALT+F2 to start krunner.

EDIT: Also, there is now a long delay after logging in before Plasma desktop actually finishes loading. Not overly long, something like 30 seconds, but it used to be nearly-instantenous / only a few seconds with an SSD

This is after a reboot, and as a sidenote, updates were done when I was not using a plasma desktop session.

Any idea as to what is the cause, and possible fixes?

I will try with another user account if the desktop is usable.

Thanks!

[WildPenguin]

With a newly created fresh user, the result is exactly the same: the Plasma desktop takes a very long time to load and is exactly similarly half-broken.

The default plasmoids on the default panel, pager and task list applets are broken, and clicking them will crash them.

However, I find the cause ... kind of, and a fix.

For some reason (which I do not know) kubuntu-destkop got deselected during the update yesterday - despite I definitely remember explicitly setting it as installed previously. I can see from /var/log/apt/term.log that it got deselected and uninstalled, along with plasma-desktop. I didn't scrutinize the output while upgrading, just automatically hitting ENTER (maybe I should have...)

I ran

sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop sddm-theme-breeze kubuntu-settings-desktop

, a bit blindly, and in hindsight it would have probably been enough to just re-install kubuntu-desktop again.

Anyways, marking as [SOLVED] though I would appreciate in case anyone can guess why apt chose to do what it did to prevent it from happening again (EDIT: it can be a user error, maybe I should not blame apt so eagerly ... I should investigate my logs when I have the time).

[Snowhog]

(EDIT: it can be a user error, maybe I should not blame apt so eagerly ... I should investigate my logs when I have the time).

As you are the third (?) KFN member who has experienced the removal of those packages very recently, I doubt it was attributed to 'user error'. Something upstream (?) caused this.

[claydoh]

As you are the third (?) KFN member who has experienced the removal of those packages very recently, I doubt it was attributed to 'user error'. Something upstream (?) caused this.

The set of phased updates Kubuntu has/had in the pipeline breaking other deps, and removing stuff.
I believe that they are aware of it, based on the number of people on IRC and reddit seeing this.....

This is one of those situations that slips through testing, as SRU updates are not as common on non-LTS releases, especially for Kubuntu packages (phased updates were introduced/flipped on in 2110), let alone pre-release.
I think this is a stuff-up, where they did not account for the layered dependencies of desktop components and meta-packages. Most of the phased things have been lower, system-level things
The future fix for this is either to not have desktop level items pahse, or (better) include the top level content-less meta-package needed to keep thing from being removed (kubuntu-desktop, kubunut-settings-desktop, etc)

[WildPenguin]

Agreed, I also noticed via reddit after my last reply, what was happening.

(also the other threads - somehow they escaped my searches before)