The only time I've had any kind of crash was when I did a major KDE update while in KDE, but even then it consisted of the shell crashing and reloading itself. Which I took as a sign that I should restart KDE.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Welp, in that case a crash in a session without any updates shouldn't happen. I will be looking into logs later. But first I need to get some good sleep and find out where the relevant logs are.
I never had KDE crash. Iusearchbtw with Wayland. AMD hardware. Bunch of widgets and customizations.
It's not something I have encountered in my last 4 years of using Plasma. Maybe some logs will tell you what happened?
Will check them once I'm home. Glad to hear that it's uncommon.
Been rock solid for years for me. Daily driving Wayland for over a year, butter smooth experience apart from minor Plasma 6.0 woes with complex multimonitor setups. AMD graphics.
If you're on NVIDIA you probably want the latest beta proprietary drivers which fixes a bunch of Wayland issues (which Plasma 6 defaults to), or switch to an Xorg session for now.
Cinnamon doesn't support Wayland at all, so you must have been using an Xorg session on Mint, that should work well for you on Arch as well with Plasma.
The option should be on the login screen.
Wayland's still a bit hit or miss unfortunately, but when it works it's really nice and NVIDIA's drivers are finally catching up. It's a radical new approach to graphics on Linux compared to Xorg, so it's got some growing pains but also does solve real problems as well like VRR and HDR and vsync on multimonitor setups. Pick whichever works best for you.
The bleeding edge can have some sharp edges. Stable distros mostly hold those changes until it's more ready to their standards, whereas on rolling distros you get shiny new things, for better or for worse.
The funny thing is I'm already on X11 because when it launched on wayland I couldn't do anything because of messed up resolution. It was very low and most of the interface was outside the screen and while trying to troubleshoot what's going on I found this switch on login page and was using X11 ever since. I have 4 monitors connected to my pc and my main one is a FullHDUW monitor and second one like that on top of it. For some reason the second monitor is always visible to the system even though it's turned off but I didn't knew at the time so I haven't tried disconnecting it to see if it was the fault.
Huh, pretty weird one then. What card model and driver version? Does nvidia-settings work? Is 3D performance about where it should?
This is what I got from: "inxi -Fza"
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA TU106 [GeForce RTX 2060 Rev. A] vendor: Gigabyte
driver: nvidia v: 550.78 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm non-free: 550.xx+
status: current (as of 2024-04; EOL~2026-12-xx) arch: Turing code: TUxxx
process: TSMC 12nm FF built: 2018-2022 pcie: gen: 1 speed: 2.5 GT/s
lanes: 16 link-max: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s bus-ID: 0b:00.0
chip-ID: *REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED*
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.13 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.0
compositor: kwin_x11 driver: X: loaded: N/A unloaded: modesetting
failed: nvidia alternate: fbdev,nouveau,nv,vesa gpu: nvidia display-ID: :0
screens: 1
Screen-1: 0 s-res: 2560x2160 s-dpi: 80 s-size: 813x686mm (32.01x27.01")
s-diag: 1064mm (41.88")
Monitor-1: DP-3 pos: top res: 2560x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 81
size: 798x334mm (31.42x13.15") diag: 865mm (34.06") modes: N/A
Monitor-2: HDMI-0 pos: primary,bottom res: 2560x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 81
size: 798x334mm (31.42x13.15") diag: 865mm (34.06") modes: N/A
API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: nvidia platforms: device: 0 drv: nvidia device: 2
drv: swrast gbm: drv: kms_swrast surfaceless: drv: nvidia x11: drv: nvidia
inactive: wayland,device-1
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 550.78
glx-v: 1.4 direct-render: yes renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060/PCIe/SSE2
memory: 5.86 GiB
API: Vulkan v: 1.3.279 layers: 1 device: 0 type: discrete-gpu
name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 driver: nvidia v: 550.78 device-ID: *REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED*
surfaces: xcb,xlib
RTX 2060, will check drivers after getting home.
Few years back I had to fiddle with the kwin rendering backend and select egl for nvidia.
ELI5? What does that mean and how did you do it?
It's pretty uncommon. I've been using prerelease KDE for quite a while and rarely see any issues.
If it's any consolation, Plasma 6 will recover from crashes like that.
Plenty of folks in their honeymoon phase with KDE, it seems.
... it's been less than a year when you could find a bug in the wild that would crash the shell if the mouse hovered for too long on the panel.
Not generally, however you might want to avoid any early dot-zero releases (e.g. 6.0.x). These tend to be a bit buggy with KDE Plasma, but the bugs get fixed soon. NVidia drivers should be better with the very latest updates, they are supposed to work well on Wayland now. But I don't buy Nvidia, just AMD, so I'm not following this stuff closely.
Thank you for info. Since making the post I got distracted with other stuff and didn't get into troubleshooting too much. Last crash was today so any help is still appreciated. <3