For about two weeks or so, I have been hit with a weird little behavior in KDE. Sometimes while working, if I click on a pinned application in the KDE Panel/Kicker (Ex: firefox or Krusader), the panel disappears for a little while and then comes back.
I still have not been able to identify the exact conditions under which this is triggered. A query of journalctl does not show any errors, but plenty of warnings related to KDE.
This has captured warning messages during two such Panel crashes :
Timestamps 18.28 & 18.35.
There are two things I did around the same time which may or may not be related to this behavior, but I am listing them anyway.
a. I had installed dnf package manager and did a system update with dnf. ( zypper install dnf libdnf-repo-config-zypp in essence, following from SDB:DNF - openSUSE Wiki). I do not see anything major broken- KVM and docker working as expected !
I understand that the warning messages might not be all, but I would be highly grateful if someone could point me what is needed (short of reinstalling KDE suite) to troubleshoot this.
You can try if you can to use wayland for a while to see if the crash still occur here to see if it’s related to X11 only, if the crash happen only when you’re clicking a specific panel you could also try to remove it and recreate it …
It can be tricky to know exactly what is causing such crash, on kde you should have an application named drkonqi, here you can have a full list of all crash you had with useful logs if you want to create or search for an issue on the kde bug tracker
Also by filtering your logs with the word kde you are missing relevant informations like the stack trace shown in DrKonqi, just to compare with a crash I had after updating to plasma 6 while messing around with widgets and panels openSUSE Paste …
On Tumbleweed with X11, I’ve seen this behaviour after the TW odd release, but it disappears after some subsequent release (generally things are quite stable, this is somewhat rare). It may be a KDE/kernel/nvidia mismatch thing, or a bad patch that KDE is going through.
Looking at the logs you posted, I see quite few of the same in my own logs and my system is currently very stable. I can’t see any that out of the ordinary, just the usual KDE noise (I wish KDE was less chatty). Have you filtered anything out? Did dmesg report anything else?
If something has just fallen over with a segfault, it may not get the opportunity to log anything.
Have you used coredumpctl to see if anything has dumped core when it failed - that might point to some particular process.
Sometimes errors wind up in $HOME/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log or /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
On and off, depending on the version, I’ve also seen google-chrome with GPU-acceleration-enabled knock over my desktop, I suspect that is a chrome/Nvidia/X11 problem, it’s another thing that goes away after updates. If never happens if I disable chrome’s GPU acceleration (but the result is awful tearing in Youtube videos).
