Since upgrading to 4.5, I have had many problems with freezes, screen going black with no option other than to restart the laptop. It mostly happens when I am trying to change options though System Settings.
One reproducible crash is trying to change the colour scheme. As soon as I press Apply, the screen freezes although the mouse still moves around. I have to force a shut down to recover. I have seen a bug report on the same problem. The dev could not do anything as he seemed to think it was an ATI problem. I have an Intel video card though.
I’m not getting any crash reports, I’m not sure where to go from here other than revert back to 4.4.5.
You are not alone in this friend. Check out the application fora 1st 10 pages and you will see many complaining this. I have Intel card too, i had faced these too until i did find some of these options to get rid of it temporary.
If your desktop effects are enabled, disable that and then try.
Next you can upgrade the driver from X11 repo(i am away from my laptop now), will try to find for you, and that will have bring some minor improvements for this while desktop effects can be enabled.
If desktop effects are enabled, and you got that freeze, you can disable it by using these keys without any restart. Shift+Alt+F12 and then enable it by that keys.
Try the desktop effects thing 1st without any X11 repo, if that works for you then stick to that until they release official fix for it. But if you want to update the driver, you can.
Tried a fresh user profile, but it still crashed when trying to change any colours. Obviously not related to prior settings and is a proper bug.
I am going to delete my plasma settings on my own account to see if KDE settles down a little.
So far, not that impressed with 4.5. I like some of the new effects, not seen the big speed increases that is supposed to come with it. If I am still getting regular crashes, i’m going back to 4.4.5 and wait for the 4.5.1 to come out.
“Playground” is not recommended if you prefer a stable system (actually Factory isn’t either, but…). Just to be sure, could you post the URLs of your KDE-repos, please?
I understand about stability and risks with using factory, but 4.5 is only available in factory at the moment. As for playground I only have a few installations from that repro, the only one being used is crystal window decorations.
Since deleting the plasma rc files, things have settled down a bit, perhaps it was config file problems.
The Crystal-windeco is also available via the Factory KDE:/Extra-repo, so ‘playground’ is not needed. Also I am not sure that using a contrib-repo is such a good idea, since it is somewhat of an extension to Factory.
I do not know if anything of this has to do with your problems (but honestly: I don’t see the need for you to use such repos). I suggest looking into the usual logfiles.
When the screen freezes, it’s just a workaround and not a fix, but it’s not actually frozen. If you move your mouse pointer to the top of a window you’ll see the mouse changes. I had this happen to me when I was using 4.5 every time I changed a system setting from Configure Desktop (systemsettings). So all you have to do when this happens, is press alt+f2 to initialize krunner (since the screen is not refreshing you won’t see the krunner box come up), then type
kwin --replace
And it should refresh your screen within a few seconds.