System instability - I can't work out what's going on

English Install/Boot/Login
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I recently upgraded my whole system because my NVidia GPU drivers needed reinstalling after every kernel upgrade and on Tumbleweed, that was getting too frequent. I’ve now got a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD Radeo RX6650 XT GPU, Intel i9 13th gen CPU, with 16GB ram, M2 solid state drive for the OS and a RAID1 2TB /home drive, various NAS NSF shares. It’s all been very stable over the years. I also have 2 acer 4k screens over DP.
It’s all running OpenSuse Tumbleweed and is mostly peachy, when it’s running, but it’s getting less-and-less stable. (Firefox just started segfaulting and only two restarts stopped that.)

The whole system seems to be getting less and less stable and I don’t know what to do to stabilise it or diagnose the problem.

The symptoms are first & foremost that when I’m away from it, it goes into power-save but I’ve turned off the screensaver, so it’s not that but when it comes back, invariably, the two screens are duplicated (whereas it had been a two monitor side-by-side extended workspace), also, it reverts to what I presume is the default desktop background and defaults to folder view, not the desktop view. More often than not, the plasma panels disappear or freeze. Occasionally apps just freeze and though I can’t recall them now, other silly little symptoms crop up.

Things that crossed my mind are that the Plasma config file location is being corrupted by some other file write, when something happens on screen power-save, or possibly disk corruption but the RAID1 /home directory containing my Plasma .config file is on a pair of quite new WD Blacks, which have a 5yr guarantee.

I’ve tried tailing/following the system journal and a bunch of other enquiries
uname -a
lspci -tv
lshw-short
lscpu
lsblk
journalctl -n1000 -fb --no-page
fdisk
dmidecode
dmesg
df -h
(and probably others)

but nothing stands out as a cause ( I struggle to make any sense of the journals/logs)

Can anyone please recommend where I can go to get answers. I would go to Stack Overflow but they’re an unfriendly bunch over there who only entertain very specific questions and this is not one of those - at least not yet. Happy for answers, questions, suggestions or links to better places to go for answers.

Many thanks

Greg

(ps, those commands I ran were from a while back so I could rerun them and post the responses, if anyone thinks it’ll help unravel this mess)

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Moving this to Install/Boot/Login for now. (Open Chat is not for requesting technical support.)

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Plasma has historically been giving multiple display users lots of problems, and been working lately on solving them. That progress is unofficially making 5.26.x beta software for these users, giving many users more trouble than they’re used to having. In about a month or less, 5.27 will begin its official beta, and when 5.27 is released these problems will suppose to have been solved.

Until then, my suggestion is to go into background startup settings and disable KScreen2. If that’s not enough by itself, install arandr for creating a displays management script using xrandr that can be autostarted by the session, and/or tied to a hotkey for use when necessary. If you’re familiar enough with xrandr, you shouldn’t need arandr.

There are many reports about multiple displays issues in KDE’s bug tracker, where you may find more suggestions.

Something else that sometimes helps with Plasma problems generally is to log out of Plasma, then delete the content of ~/.cache/, so that Plasma, its apps and other apps when next opened will start with a clean, and hopefully bug-free, cache.

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Thanks. I wasn’t sure and ’ Install/Boot/Login’ didn’t, to my untrained eye look like the right place but I’ll know for next time :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:

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