Something weird started to occur a few days ago, as far as I can tell nothing special had happened preceeding it:
My system is Opensuse Leap 15/ KDE with all updates until the recent end of support. Leap 15.1 does not seem to work out of the box on my HP Laptop because of graphics issues.
Starting point is I am logging into my account with no Konsole window to be restored from the previous session. In order to get a terminal session (tcsh shell), I start Konsole. That already takes an unusually long time before I can type at the prompt. If I open a second terminal session in a new tab of the same Konsole window, again it takes quite long, the desktop freezes for a while, the coolding fan goes berserk, and once the desktop is responsive again, switching to the first tab shows that the first session crashed with a warning about the program /bin/tcsh having crashed.
Also, when I open a second terminal session instead in an xterm, there is also negative interference in a different way. For example, to an “ls” command both sessions respond that there are no proccesses anymore.
Bottom line, I can have only one working terminal session at one time.
For a different, new user there are no such problems.
What may be wrong here? How can I fix it?
I would be happy to provide more system information as long as I am told what commands exactly I should apply, possibly as root.
Maybe you should start a separate thread about that.
Starting point is I am logging into my account with no Konsole window to be restored from the previous session. In order to get a terminal session (tcsh shell), I start Konsole. That already takes an unusually long time before I can type at the prompt. If I open a second terminal session in a new tab of the same Konsole window, again it takes quite long, the desktop freezes for a while, the coolding fan goes berserk, and once the desktop is responsive again, switching to the first tab shows that the first session crashed with a warning about the program /bin/tcsh having crashed.
Also, when I open a second terminal session instead in an xterm, there is also negative interference in a different way. For example, to an “ls” command both sessions respond that there are no proccesses anymore.
That all suggests that there is a looping process that is using too many resources.
Just as a test, I opened two konsole windows and two xterm windows. They all seem to be doing fine.
Maybe in the one konsole that you are able to open, you can run the “top” command to look at what is consuming resources. Or try opening “ksysguard” from the menu.
Always when I see this the first thing that comes to mind is to log out of Plasma, delete all of the content in ~/.cache/, then log back into Plasma. When that doesn’t help, usually deleting all of the KDE and Plasma content from ~/.config/ does. Of course, the latter eradicates all KDE/Plasma customizations, but a form of bisecting can be performed on those files. It just takes some time and patience to do unless there are some helpful clues as to which files might be involved. .xsession-errors might indicate where a problem lies.