Multiple issues with KDE desktop after upgrading to Fedora 33

[moz59 (Mark Loveridge)]

I am having multiple issues with my KDE desktop since upgrading to F33.

Some background that may be significant. My system (and the existing users on it) was originally installed in September 2013 (i.e. Fedora 19 time frame). The user environments date back to then and the system has been continuously upgraded (not reinstalled) since then. Hence there are potentially lots of legacy configuration files/settings that may be causing issues.

1. When logging in to existing user accounts the task bar doesn’t appear and there is no background menu available. .xsession-errors contained messages about failing to start kwin because there were other window managers running and plasma shell crashing. After a lot of trial and error I finally found that changing:

plugin=org.kde.plasma.kicker
to
plugin=org.kde.plasma.kickoff

in ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc fixed the issue. Hence this problem is solved for me but why did this happen and is the issue documented anywhere? This may be related to the fact that I used the “legacy” menu (or whatever it was called) in the application launcher.

2. The screen locker is broken (and is not fixed by the update to xscreensaver 5.44-9 that has just come out). If I attempt to lock the screen I get the message:

The screen locker is broken and unlocking is not possible anymore.
In order to unlock switch to a virtual terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F2),
login and execute the command:

            loginctl unlock-session <N>

Afterwards switch back to the running session (Ctrl+Alt+F1)

This affects all users - both existing users and newly created accounts.

3. Leaving/shutting down session
   Again this affects all users both existing and newly created.
   a) If I select the leave tab in the application launcher (or even simply hover over it) plasma shell crashes and restarts and nothing else (!) happens
   b) If I use the RMB on the desktop (or Ctrl+Alt+Del) the user gets logged out immediately - no options, no timeout. The same is true if I select the power off button from the Lock/Logout widget on the task bar
   c) If I attempt to switch users using the Lock/Logout widget it fails because it can’t screen lock the existing user - see (2) above

[bkida (Bartlomiej Kida)]

I have identical problems (after the first point).

I was fedora 31, later 32, now 33.

[heliosstyx]

I think the reason for it is that Plasma has gotten huge redesigns in the meantime and so there are many inconsistencies on older plasma systems always getting upgraded. I suppose that every custom settings prevents partially an upgrade over the time. Backup your data and reinstall the whole system, it’s the easiest to get a friction free system. Debugging every issue would cost a lot of time and the success is not guaranteed.

[moz59 (Mark Loveridge)]

Hmmm… I was afraid that a complete reinstall might be the answer. The problems are liveable with for the moment so I might wait until F34 which is supposed to fix the issue with new logins hanging because of systemd not exiting properly.

[ozeszty]

I’ve got a system upgraded since ~F31 beta, “legacy” menu and no issues like that (I remember hitting once screen locker issue on F32). I did not modify any config files manually, so that might be important.
Make sure you have the right packages:

dnf distrosync -v --refresh

There’s a big update in the testing (Plasma 5.20.3 and KDE Applications 20.08.3), it might bring some fixes.
It might be a good time for a clean installation if you want to switch to btrfs, anyway. Next live-respins after Plasma updates go stable will offer a very fresh start.

[moz59 (Mark Loveridge)]

As the issues I see that persist affect both newly created user accounts as well as my existing user accounts the problem is clearly not with any modifications I’ve made to my user environment. I’ve never felt the need to change any system configuration files that I can recall so there has to be some sort of bitrot that’s been left behind during one of the upgrades.

The distrosync refresh made no changes - not that I’d expect it to as I don’t mess much with the list of packages installed (which is way too big - I need to slim things down which is another reason to do a re-install).

[ozeszty]

Nvidia binary driver is known to cause some issues and wayland session still isn’t bug free on all platforms. Anyway, latest updates in testing fix some shutdown issues I reported long time ago. Good luck with the system clean up!

[moz59 (Mark Loveridge)]

The upgrade to Plasma 5.20.3 appears to resolve issues 2 and 3… Just need to wait for F34 to fix the systemd shutdown issues

[ozeszty]

That’s more of a confirmation of a solution I provided a couple of messages ago, than the solution for this topic

On a side note, there was a discussion about backporting systemd startup to 5.20 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/47

For now you can give sddm-0.19 a try, it has some shutdown fixes https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=16682

[moz59 (Mark Loveridge)]

That’s interesting. I’m still running kdm as my display manager so this may be the cause of some of my issues. I don’t even appear to have sddm installed! Once I’ve got sddm installed how do I switch display managers?

[ozeszty]

systemctl disable kdm
systemctl enable sddm
reboot

If all works well, remove kdm.

Run (but don’t apply) that to see what else you’re missing. Note that not all of those packages are part of a fresh KDE spin install.

dnf install @kde-desktop-environment

[moz59 (Mark Loveridge)]

Thanks. sddm running now. I’ll leave any kde-desktop-environment changes for the future. I will have to bite the bullet and do a clean install when F34 comes round.