Bug 345227

Summary:	Desktop turns black and plasmoids disappear when docking notebook
Product:	[Plasma] KScreen	Reporter:	Simone Gaiarin <simgunz>
Component:	common	Assignee:	Daniel Vrátil <dvratil>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Severity:	normal	CC:	kde
Priority:	NOR
Version:	1.0.2
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:

Description Simone Gaiarin 2015-03-16 18:02:17 UTC

Sometimes when I dock the notebook to a docking station with two external monitors attached the desktop of the two external monitors turns black and the plasmoid disappear, while the mouse is visible. (If I'm not wrong also the other activities disappear)

Then going to System Settings > Power Managment and clicking on the activity tab the desktops reappear as they were.

It seems that when contacting the Activity dataengine (maybe) something is triggered and everything goes back to normal state.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Dock the notebook to a docking station
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Black desktop on external screens and no plasmoids

Expected Results:  
Screens turn on showing normal desktops

My configuration:
Dell E7440 notebook connected to a docking station where two other monitors are connected

May be related: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345225

Comment 1 Daniel Vrátil 2015-03-18 10:00:11 UTC

Sounds to me like Plasma not correctly detecting screen changes (i.e. we turn the screens on, but Plasma won't create background and panels on those screens).

Can you test this with Plasma 5?

Comment 2 Simone Gaiarin 2015-03-18 21:07:07 UTC

I'll see if I can try a live plasma 5 image to test it in the next days.

Comment 3 Christoph Feck 2015-05-02 19:30:57 UTC

Simone, any update?

Comment 4 Simone Gaiarin 2015-05-03 13:10:36 UTC

I've tried briefly with an image of Plasma 5 and it was not happening, but it's not a conclusive result since the problem appear rarely and I didn't find a pattern to reproduce it yet. I'll update to Plasma 5 soon, so I can carry out more extensive testing.

Comment 5 Nick Cross 2015-09-22 08:57:09 UTC

Is this similar to https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351025 or https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352186

Comment 6 Simone Gaiarin 2016-01-10 10:48:28 UTC

I'm using Plasma 5 since few versions now, and even tough the multimonitor support is still completely broken both from KScreen and Plasma side unfortunately, this specific problem haven't happened anymore.

Comment 7 Simone Gaiarin 2016-07-28 17:44:52 UTC

This problem appeared again in a different form. Sometimes after boot, the external monitor is black without plasmoids, without the right click menu, but the mouse cursor is visible. Moreover the panel that should be in this screen is in the laptop screen.

Restarting plasma solves the problem.

It seems that the external monitor is not detected by plasma and kscreen.

Comment 8 Simone Gaiarin 2018-02-24 21:29:35 UTC

Didn't happen in a long time. I mark it as solved.