After years of bouncing between Linux Mint KDE and Kubuntu, I’ve moved to openSUSE (with KDE). Installing Mint on a LUKS/LVM partition has always been a pain, and in the latest release the installer fails on me, taking that distro out of the competition. As far as Kubuntu goes, I made the mistake of upgrading to 15.04 and Plasma 5, which is barely alpha-level software at this point. I picked openSUSE because it’s said to take KDE seriously, and because it seems to offer a good balance between stability and up-to-dateness.
Anyway, things have generally been great – the power management in openSUSE is better than what I got from Mint KDE or Kubuntu, moving from aptitude to zypper/yast2 hasn’t been a big deal, and things seem a bit zippier now.
But I’ve had one recurring problem that’s driving me crazy – when launching certain KDE apps at certain times, the entire Desktop Environment dies instantly and completely. The screen goes black for a second or two, and then I’m at the logon screen, forced to start a new session, with any previous unsaved work lost.
This has happened when pressing CTRL-ESC to open System Activity, when launching Kusers, and when launching the KDE printer config applet. But it doesn’t always happen – I can launch all three of those apps at the moment with no problems at all. So the apps themselves don’t seem to be the problem – or at least, they’re not the entire problem. Some other condition must be met in order to cause the crashing.
The only thing I can think of that I might have “done wrong” was to enable various repositories (openSUSE Build Services KDE:Extra, Packman, etc) that are not standard. Specifically, I set Yast2 to use KDE:Extra as the main repository for KDE stuff and then I updated the system.
Below is system information that might be of use in troubleshooting this. I’d really like to get to the bottom of this, as I’m liking openSUSE a lot, but I simply can’t continue with it if I can’t fix this crashing.
Thanks in advance!
$ sudo inxi -Fxz%System: Host: XXXXX.site Kernel: 3.16.7-21-desktop x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.8.3)
Console tty 1 Distro: openSUSE 13.2 (x86_64) VERSION = 13.2 CODENAME = Harlequin # /etc/SuSE-release is deprecated and will be removed in the future, use /etc/os-release instead
Machine: System: TOSHIBA (portable) product: Satellite XXXXX version: XXXXX
Mobo: TOSHIBA model: VG20SQ Bios: TOSHIBA version: 1.30 date: 08/14/2014
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU (-HT-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 19953.3
Clock Speeds: 1: 2500.683 MHz 2: 3061.328 MHz 3: 2503.906 MHz 4: 2500.00 MHz 5: 2500.00 MHz 6: 2500.00 MHz 7: 2500.00 MHz 8: 2733.203 MHz
Graphics: Card: Intel 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0
X.org: 1.16.1 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) tty size: 176x52 Advanced Data: N/A for root out of X
Audio: Card-1: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:03.0
Card-2: Intel 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.16.7-21-desktop
Network: Card-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
driver: r8169 ver: 2.3LK-NAPI port: d000 bus-ID: 04:00.0
IF: enp4s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Card-2: Intel Wireless 7260 driver: iwlwifi ver: in-tree:d bus-ID: 03:00.0
IF: wlp3s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Drives: HDD Total Size: 2500.5GB (79.1% used) 1: /dev/sda ST2000LM003_HN 2000.4GB
2: /dev/sdb Samsung_SSD_840 500.1GB 0C
Partition: ID: / size: 456G used: 359G (83%) fs: ext4 ID: /boot size: 379M used: 36M (10%) fs: ext4
ID: swap-1 size: 2.15GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 59.0C mobo: N/A gpu: N/A
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 294 Uptime: 8:28 Memory: 5481.0/11949.7MB Runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 4.8.3 Client: Shell inxi: 1.7.24