Kwin not starting

[torched-esc]

On Kubuntu 18.04 Kwin has been failing to start on boot and is failing randomly as well. I can get my boarders back by running kwin in krunner but I dont know why its failing to start in the first place. I did a dist upgrade in hopes that all the KDE packages will be reinstalled/updated and fix the issue but no luck. Problem persists. I can probably write a boot script that runs Kwin but this seems excessive..

Any direction to fix this issue would be great.

Thanks!

[jlittle]

if you get the chance, add another user, and see if the problem occurs for that user. If it doesn't there's something in your home directory that is upsetting kwin. You could try renaming various set up files out of way to see if that avoids the problem. It would be best to do that with kwin not running, say from that other user, or logged in to a Linux console (ctrl-alt-f2). On my 19.10 these files have "kwin" in the name, so they'd be the first places to try:

$ cd
$ find . -iname '*kwin*'
./.config/session/kwin_10cee67269000152301444600000012370003_1524825607_348026
./.config/kwinqtcurverc
./.config/kwinrulesrc
./.config/kwinrc
./.cache/kwin

More thoroughly, you might backup and rename your entire home directory, then copy stuff back bit by bit.

Secondly, something like this used to happen to me a lot in the past, for a couple of periods of years, and I stubbornly restarted kwin with various strategies. The first (definitely, and maybe the second) was caused by the combination of kwin, nVidia driver, and the old on-board graphics my old Kubuntu box had. But for both times I would have been far better to have cut my losses, backed up my data, then wiped Kubuntu, and did a clean install.