Announcement

**claydoh** · Dec 24, 2021, 10:20 AM

Originally posted by simendsjo View Post

Code:

plasmashell

was no longer in autostart. Starting manually works, but no applications are found. I cannot think of anything other than guix interfering somehow. Starting plasmashell from another user (tried root) works. I've deleted .cache without any luck.

There wouldn't be an autostart entry for Plasma to begin with.

Can you better describe what you mean by 'no applications are found'?

What exact command did you use to start Plasma?

Of course modifying your system can have oddball effects, thouggh I imagine Fguix shbouldn't, but you never know.
Enabling root on a *buntu can have oddball effects as well, though those normally would be user-created.Such as running some GUI application as root from a user account, for example.
As can any other system modifications not mentioned

None of the logs you give show anything unusual as far as I can tell, and are missing anything related to "missing desktop-files"

**simendsjo** · Dec 24, 2021, 03:42 PM

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

There wouldn't be an autostart entry for Plasma to begin with.

In that case, plasmashell just stopped loading after a reboot, and I just get an empty screen until I launch plasmashell.

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

Can you better describe what you mean by 'no applications are found'?

No .desktop files is found in KRunner or under "All Applications" after starting plasmashell.

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

What exact command did you use to start Plasma?

Tried both "plasmashell" and "kstart5 plasmashell"

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

Of course modifying your system can have oddball effects, thouggh I imagine Fguix shbouldn't, but you never know.
Enabling root on a *buntu can have oddball effects as well, though those normally would be user-created.Such as running some GUI application as root from a user account, for example.
As can any other system modifications not mentioned

I only started as root to see if that worked, which it did. I haven't done much at all. Installed the system, updated packages, installed guix and some applications through guix. Tweaked a couple of settings (200% zoom and probably other small changes)

**claydoh** · Dec 24, 2021, 10:05 PM

To start a plasma desktop session from the terminal (tty, not from krunner or Konsole), you would use startx, startplasma_x11, or maybe startkde, otherwise iirc you are just starting plasmashell, not the whole desktop session (kwin etc)

But, if you are getting a black desktop with mouse cursor, and are able to try and start plasmashell, something is causing it to crash, maybe.

Since you have enable the root account, lest see if any of your local configs are owned by root:

Code:

$ find $HOME -user root

This can quickly eliminate a common cause of oddities like this

Another would be to create a new user account and see if it happens there. If that new user is fine, then the issue is going to be something specific to your current user account's plasma config files.

**simendsjo** · Dec 25, 2021, 03:16 PM

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

To start a plasma desktop session from the terminal (tty, not from krunner or Konsole), you would use startx, startplasma_x11, or maybe startkde, otherwise iirc you are just starting plasmashell, not the whole desktop session (kwin etc)

Sorry, kwin is started, just not plasmashell. So I can launch KRunner with Alt-F2, and if I know the name of the binary, I can start applications.

But, if you are getting a black desktop with mouse cursor, and are able to try and start plasmashell, something is causing it to crash, maybe.

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

Since you have enable the root account, lest see if any of your local configs are owned by root:

Code:

$ find $HOME -user root

This can quickly eliminate a common cause of oddities like this

Found one file, .config/kde.org/UserFeedback.org.kde.plasmashell.conf, but changing the owner didn't fix the error.

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

Another would be to create a new user account and see if it happens there. If that new user is fine, then the issue is going to be something specific to your current user account's plasma config files.

Thanks, I'll try that next.

**simendsjo** · Dec 26, 2021, 12:25 PM

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

Another would be to create a new user account and see if it happens there. If that new user is fine, then the issue is going to be something specific to your current user account's plasma config files.

Tried creating another user, and that worked. Tried renaming .config and logging in again with my regular user, but I still have the same issues.

**Snowhog** · Dec 26, 2021, 12:43 PM

Originally posted by simendsjo View Post

I only started as root to see if that worked, which it did. I haven't done much at all. Installed the system, updated packages, installed guix and some applications through guix. Tweaked a couple of settings (200% zoom and probably other small changes)

How did you update packages?

**claydoh** · Dec 26, 2021, 12:47 PM

You might need to delete/rename the dir without Plasma being running.
You might try also renaming/deleting ~/.local at the same time, some things hide in there as well.

You might also consider a full nuke of your home dir - rename it, again from outside Plasma - to create a new, clean set of default settings when you log back in. Then, if all is working well, you can copy any data, files, and the like from the original home dir.

**Snowhog** · Dec 26, 2021, 12:57 PM

Or, given this is a 'smoking fresh install', you could simply redo the installation. Might take less time than deducing/fixing what caused the current problem.

**simendsjo** · Dec 27, 2021, 12:11 PM

Originally posted by Snowhog View Post

How did you update packages?

IIRC
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

**Snowhog** · Dec 27, 2021, 12:24 PM

Using 'apt-get upgrade' may partly be your issue. First (but not an issue) is that apt-get, while still useable, is replaced with with simply apt. Second (and important) is that continually using upgrade instead of dist-upgrade (when using apt-get) can result in your system becoming unstable (at best) or unusable (at worst).

man apt-get

upgrade

upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and installed. New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without changing the install status of another package will be left at their current version. An update must be performed first so that apt-get knows that new versions of packages are available.

dist-upgrade

dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary. The dist-upgrade command may therefore remove some packages. The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding the general settings for individual packages.

Continued use of upgrade (apt-get upgrade) can, in some circumstances, leave your system unstable. And as a note, apt-get has been replace with apt. See https://itsfoss.com/apt-vs-apt-get-difference/

Open a konsole and type: sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

**claydoh** · Dec 27, 2021, 01:32 PM

^^^^^^^^This is probably the cause here

Running apt upgrade is 100% correct usage ---in Debian.
In anything Ubuntu based, there are differences in the way things are packageded from it's parent, and running apt full-upgrade is needed to make sure you get all the updates, every time.

KDE Neon actually patched apt so that users attempting to use apt upgrade will get a message about it instead of performing the operation. They see more updates, more often, so this sort of situation used to happen quite often before they did this.

Most of the time, using upgrade is fine, but the whole Ubuntu package infrastructure is based on using full-upgrade
(or the previous dist-upgrade), and has been since the beginning.

Announcement

Plasma not loaded, desktop-files not found (Guix interferes?)

Plasma not loaded, desktop-files not found (Guix interferes?)

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