I have a very frustrating problem where Plasma freezes completely such that none of the panels are interactive and their are stuck with their state exactly when they froze. The time does not update, etc. Pressing the Meta key which I have mapped to open the task launcher does not work. The only way to switch active windows is Alt-Tab or clicking the window, and the only way to launch new programs is with Alt-Space or typing them into a terminal window. Sometimes, but not always, my Brave browser ceases to allow you to switch between tabs, but this may be its own problem or a common cause, because this browser behavior can occur when plasma is not frozen. Plasma is not considered “crashed” and Dr. Konqui does not launch. Forcing a relaunch of plasmashell or kwin does NOT fix the problem. The problem shows up with both Wayland and X11 sessions. Cross posted in arch forums and KDE discuss and got no hits: https://discuss.kde.org/t/plasma-freezes-everything-else-runs/25848 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2209850#p2209850
When does this happen? Is it literally random, or does there appear to be any kind of pattern to it? Plasma can become frozen in certain circumstances when something you were doing in Plasma spawned a modal dialog window and you haven't dismissed it yet, so also make sure that's not the case.
It seems to be completely random but usually after some interaction with a taskbar. I don't see any modal dialogues and my screen configuration is pretty basic - just one monitor on a desktop that never changes.
How strange. Can you create a new clean user account on the same machine and see if it happens there?
I'm having the same problem after the latest Manajro stable update. It seems to only happen when compositing is enabled and for some reason be more frequent when a mutimedia app (like Smplayer or VLC) is playing a video, and the video playback also freezes crashing the app. On the other hand if Firefox is playing a Youtube video for example, when a Plasma freeze happens Firefox still works perfectly. It doesn't trigger any error on the journal or dmesg or X logs. I'll try creating a new user when I have more time (probably during the weekend) and update you on that.
I do not use VLC or SMplayer but there does seem to be a minor correlation of likelihood with playing video or audio but it can happen without them playing. YouTube videos from Brave and music from Gapless seem to have that minor correlation. I made a troubleshooting profile and will try it out. So far no freezes but it is a long process to configure my profile to be usable.
I'll try to create the new user later today but I have to correct what I said before, it seems much rarer, but I just had a Plasma freeze with compositing disabled.
I'm wondering - do you have the Control Centre widget on a toolbar? I removed this and I haven't seen the freeze on my main profile since. Also, the panel height for my panel I dropped from 42 or 43 pixels to 38 which caused my system monitor widgets to not have constantly resizing fonts based on the values switching to text with different widths (causing it to resize the font to fit). Between these two changes, I have not seen this freeze again.
No I don't have either widgets on my account but I noticed that it seems very random. For the last 2 days I didn't have any single freeze and I just had one again a few hours ago. I really don't get what triggers it. Some things seem to make it happen more often but I can't find a way to make it 100% reproducible.
I just had the freeze appear on my main profile again after changing my widgets so it appears I was just lucky for a little while.
I'm having similar symptoms. For me it turned out to be a kernel regression somewhere between 6.12.1 and 6.12.4. It's not just Plasma panels freezing, but those are certainly the most noticeable. Sometimes the context menu in Dolphin doesn't show up anymore. Or pacman hangs during one of the post transaction tasks. Even `sudo reboot` sometimes hung, not sure if in the `sudo` or in the `reboot` part. We might be seeing different issues, but since nobody else brought up the kernel yet, maybe it's worth checking if a kernel downgrade helps.
If this is a kernel issue, is there a journal entry or log somewhere that you have seen to diagnose what happened?
No, I didn't see anything and have no clue what exactly is happening. Reverting the kernel was a relatively blind guess based on which packages got updated around the time the problems started for me. 6.12.1 is the last known working version, 6.12.4 and 6.12.6 reproduce the problem for me. Didn't try any others.
(In reply to LaughingMan from comment #10) > I'm having similar symptoms. For me it turned out to be a kernel regression > somewhere between 6.12.1 and 6.12.4. It's not just Plasma panels freezing, > but those are certainly the most noticeable. Sometimes the context menu in > Dolphin doesn't show up anymore. Or pacman hangs during one of the post > transaction tasks. > > Even `sudo reboot` sometimes hung, not sure if in the `sudo` or in the > `reboot` part. I don't have these other symptoms. For me only plasmashell is freezing and eventually the video player if I have one running. I might try reverting to a previous kernel though just in case. I haven't had much time lately but I'll try this week.
The other symptoms I am having which may or may not be related are: 1. Brave browser becomes unresponsive to clicks on its interface (like changing tabs) but keyboard shortcuts work. 2. Some brave tabs, especially pinned protonmail tabs will have the body of the website flickering transparent, refreshing does not fix it, but closing the tab and opening a new tab to protonmail fixes it. I will need to look into the kernel as well.
Had and uptime of over two weeks on kernel 6.12.1 and got hit by this bug twice today. Guess it was just pure luck the bug didn't strike for that long. Either the culprit isn't the kernel at all or the cause is already present in 6.12.1.
Yeah, this is why it's hard to troubleshoot. I didn't have that freeze on a fresh account, but I didn't use it enough to be sure since it can work for days on my main account and suddenly freeze for no apparent reason.
🐛🧹 ⚠️ This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 15 days. Please provide the requested information, then set the bug status to REPORTED. If there is no change for at least 30 days, it will be automatically closed as RESOLVED WORKSFORME. For more information about our bug triaging procedures, please read https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging. Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!
In reference to the bug janitor - what info exactly do we need to provide?
They want to know if a clean account freezes or not but it's hard to answer for sure since this bug can't be reliably reproduced. It seems completely random and can disappear for days then happen multiples time within a single day with no change in usage. And I can't use a clean account that long. What I fairly sure about is that it doesn't happen when compositing is disabled.
I made this clean account and I didn't have the problem, but I couldn't stay using it forever. Is there some amount of time we need to use the new account before we report back that the new account fixes it? In other words how can we move forward on this if we need information. Do we need a week of continuous use?
I've fount a new freeze condition, though sadly still too random to reproduce accurately. I was updating PCSX2 on AUR with Pamac, which means heavy CPU usage, and Plsmashell and Pamac both froze. I wasn't doing ANYTHING during the process. I didn't even have my hand on my mouse. As ususal disabling compositing and killing Plsmashell worked, and as usual no log whatsoever. It's on kernel 6.13.0. By the way are we all on X11?
Wayland
I just had a freeze with compositing disabled. So it's not even that safe, but seems to be just less often.
🐛🧹 This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. Closing as RESOLVED WORKSFORME.