Well, a relief of some sort: At least I know this is NOT my beloved openSUSE!
Seems it is happening with other distros, as well.
And, it seems to be somewhat randomly targeting systems, and I even get the sense that the symptoms can slightly vary.
I see this problem popping up on the IRC channels lately, as well as in the mailing lists.
Here are some excerpts from the mailing lists:
From the mailing lists:
While that restarts plasmashell when it’s working properly, it doesn’t
when the problem occurs. I just tried it now and got the following:
$ Calling appendChild() on a null node does nothing.
"Quitting application plasmashell failed. Error reported was:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply : Did not receive a reply. Possible
causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message
bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the
network connection was broken."
=====
That doesn’t work when it locks. I get the error:
$ "Quitting application plasmashell failed. Error reported was:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply : Did not receive a reply. Possible
causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message
bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the
network connection was broken."
Like Patrick’s suggestion, it will restart plasmashell when everything
is normal, but not when the problem occurs.
The only way I can get out of it is to use Ctl-Alt-Backspace to force a
desktop shutdown.
=====
Sorry to be joining this thread late, but been on vacation… James, I too have been plagued by this failure on my laptop but for some mysterious reason, not on my desktop systems. They are all running the same version of OpenSuSE Leap42.2 and KDE/Plasma. I and others have also reported it, not only here on OpenSuSE but in other distros as well. Yes, the kicker bar freezes and nothing but open windows respond to the mouse or keyboard input. Something about Plasmashell appears to be sick…
The best solution I have found so far is to leave a Konsole shell window open on my desktop. That way I can also get to it so as to issue the following two commands -
killall plasmashell
plasmashell &
Do not issue this as root, but just do it under your own user account. Basically kill the plasmashell and restart it without regard to process ids. There are other ways to do this, as already has been pointed out, but like you I found problems and errors when I tried other approaches. This seems to be the more reliable way for me to get my desktop/plasmashell back.
=====
This same problem plagued Manjaro months ago, and was resolved by regular kde updates.
While it lasted I used Marc’s solution keyed into the little command window that popped up after pressing alt-f2.
Any need to do this disappeared months ago as Manjaro is a rolling release and regular kde upgrades came along and the problem went away.
I believe it was traced to invisible remnants of a screen overlay that had crashed but was not completely shut down and was still intercepting mouse and keyboard inputs on some areas of the screen.
There were numerous hits in bugs.kde.org on this issue.
For me it occurred on Intel video chipset desktop fwif.
I wonder something: Are you using SDDM for the Display Manager? If so, can we rule out SDDM? Try installing KDM (I understand it is no longer installed by default) and switching to it, then find out if the freezing problem persists.
I would test that, but I do not have an operating machine with 42.2, Tumbleweed, KDE-Plasma at this time.
But yes, it does seem like Kernel 4.10 would be responsible for this… though it’s just as likely the “radeon” driver itself.