A way to disable external display popup in KScreen OSD service?

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1

I have a laptop with an HDMI port. When something is plugged into the port, a prompt will pop up asking how to configure the new display. Alternatively, I can hit Fn+F5 to bring up the same prompt:

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More recently, however, I have been having issues with the prompt randomly appearing even when nothing is plugged into the HDMI port. Sometimes I will go days without this happening, other times it will happen many times back to back, reappearing as soon as I close it. My best guess is that this could be a hardware issue, but I am not sure. It is an older laptop, but I feel like it would be a shame to have to replace this laptop over such a small problem.

Regardless of the cause, it is rather annoying, and I am searching for a way to disable it. I have tried disabling kscreen2 in the background applications, but this does not seem to disable the popup. Is there any way to configure this prompt to not pop up on an HDMI plugin? Ideally I would still like it to appear when I hit Fn+F5, but if it is something which I need to manually re-enable when I need to plug things into my HDMI port, that would be okay as well.

I apologize for making a thread about such an incredibly specific issue, but hopefully this thread may be helpful if there is a way to configure the KScreen OSD service more generally, because I have not found much online about it, if this is possible.

2

I stumbled upon this issue too! To prevent this popup from appearing:

  • For current user only:

    systemctl --user mask plasma-kscreen-osd.service

    To reverse this change:

    systemctl --user unmask plasma-kscreen-osd.service

  • For all users:

    sudo systemctl --global mask plasma-kscreen-osd.service

    To reverse this change:

    sudo systemctl --global unmask plasma-kscreen-osd.service

P.S. In my case, this pop-up was appearing every 5 seconds because I left (and want to left) HDMI cable in a disabled GPU slot.

As for your request to use Fn+F5 - you can probably bind script to it which will unmask and start this service.

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3

Oh wow, thanks for the reply!

Actually, I had forgotten to close the loop on this: I believe you are right about it being related to a disabled GPU. It turns out that the issue may have been related to my use of the package envycontrol, which allows me to disable the dGPU in my laptop. Removing and reinstalling that package had fixed it for me, but that is good to know that I can also disable the popup.

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