Created attachment 178661 [details] Taskbar with blank widgets SUMMARY Note: First time logging a bug here, so apologies for any errors of protocol I set up a number of widgets on the main panel, primarily focusing on performance monitoring (CPU load, disk and network I/O, Temps etc.). Everything looked fine initially, but after the machine went to sleep after an inactivity timeout, on waking i found all the customised widgets are blank, i.e.: * Widgets are still present and running. The space is taken up and hovering with the mouse brings up the widget title * Each in-panel widget is completely blank, except that for "pie chart" display widgets the background circle is displayed * If you left-click on a widget the small popup shows a static background with no foreground data displayed * Right-clicking and selecting the "configure" option brings up the normal configuration menu This has persisted across multiple reboot cycles. Each time i add the widgets, after a reboot or sleep/wake they are blank again. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Add a performance widget (e.g. Total CPU load) to the main panel 2. Reboot and log in again 3. Widget display is blank OBSERVED RESULT Blank widgets EXPECTED RESULT Visible widgets SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: KDE Neon 6.2 KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.10.0 Qt Version: 6.8.2 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Attached screenshots show (1-3) blank widgets. File 4 show the result of adding a second copy of the "Total CPU Use" widget. As shown this will display properly until the next sleep or shutdown. Note: Nots sure how to add multiple screenshots? Hopefully this will become clear
Created attachment 178662 [details] Taskbar with blank widgets
Created attachment 178663 [details] Blank widget showing title
Created attachment 178664 [details] Freshly-added widget showing normal display
Created attachment 178665 [details] Widgets back after a couple of logouts? I did a couple of rapid logout/login cycles to investigate another bug (login styles not sticking) only to realise the missing widgets were now back again! I will try to investigate further to see if this is repeatable.
I have found that restarting plasmashell with the command "systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell" often fixes the problem. It is more convenient than having to log out and back in, and seems to be successful at a similar rate (that is, not 100%, but often). I'm currently trying to bind this command to a keyboard shortcut, with no luck, but I will continue trying.
Two questions: 1. What GPU hardware and drivers are you using? 1a. If it's NVIDIA with the proprietary drivers, is the system set up for suspend properly? See https://community.kde.org/Distributions/Packaging_Recommendations#Proprietary_NVidia_driver_configuration 2. Does the issue reproduce in a new clean user account?
I have an AMD 6700XT running the default AMD open source drivers. Details- Operating System: Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS (Noble Numbat) KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.1 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.11.0 Qt Version: 6.8.2 Kernel Version: 6.11.0-17-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz Memory: 31.3 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Product Name: Z170X-GamingG1 06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Navi 22 [Radeon RX 6700/6700 XT/6750 XT / 6800M/6850M XT] (rev c5) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Navi 22 [Radeon RX 6700/6700 XT/6750 XT / 6800M/6850M XT] Kernel driver in use: amdgpu Kernel modules: amdgpu I will need to try this out on a new user account, I will come back to you with the results. FWIW this whole install of Neon is less than a week old, so there hasn't been much time for cruft to build up.
I tested this out on a new user account (the account itself had been created a few days ago, but nobody had logged into it until my test, so the home directory had not been populated with personal dotfiles. All I can say at this point is that in the test account, over about 1/2hr of observation, I did not see any problems with widget display. That doesn't mean obviously that there would not BE any problems, only that I didn't see any. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. The "blank widget" problem continues to happen regularly on my own account. As before restarting plasmashell mostly fixes it.
🐛🧹 ⚠️ 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!
I can add some more info on this issue now, which I think would count as a cause but not an explanation (!?) It seems I had a quite unusual motherboard fault on the i7-6700K based machine that I initially installed KDE Neon on. What's remarkable is that when I pulled the innards out of that machine and replaced them with a new AM5 motherboard, Ryzen 7700 CPU, and supporting components like RAM, ANOTHER fault of the same type occurred on the new system! The nature of the fault(s) is- 1) A device on the motherboard (in the 2 examples I have, these were USB root hub devices on the motherboard) fails to initialise properly, but fails in a "noisy" way. This causes the USB driver stack to get stuck in a loop continually re-enumerating the device tree. That's my non-expert interpretation. I had help from the kernel USB driver maintainers who looked at usbmon logs from the newer machine and this is their expert analysis- "The usbmon trace shows that port 4 on bus 2 generates a continual stream of link-state-change events, constantly interrupting the system and consuming computational resources. That's why the performance goes way down. I can't tell what's causing those link-state changes. It _looks_ like what you would get if there was an intermittent electrical connection causing random voltage fluctuations. ..." So, it seems the underlying cause is a hardware fault in my case. However it is noteworthy (I think) that the performance impacts seem to particularly affect the desktop environment, including having the strange effect of tending to make the refresh of panel widgets fail. This issue clearly isn't something the desktop environment is responsible for, so this bug needs to be closed. However I suggest it might be worth considering- 1) Filing this info away in the memory banks (bug knowledge base?) in case another issue with strange performance slowdowns comes up 2) Is there any way the DE could detect and highlight a situation like this? I have to wonder if there are machines out there that have been running dog-slow for months or years, or even driven the user to ditch Linux and/or KDE, with the user unaware of the root cause because (like most people?) they don't make a habit of looking at dmesg output.
🐛🧹 This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. Closing as RESOLVED WORKSFORME.