Can't start my beloved Plasma GUI anymore :(

Help
1

The issue

Hi there, Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM) user here. I had a smashing time on Plasma for a while, until one day I decided plugging the SSD the Pi was booting on to my Android was a neat idea - this is the second time letting Android ‘read’ the SSD caused chaos! It’s a pity really, as tablets are a convenient device for modifying system files - if the Android OS didn’t do it automatically…

Evidence of this is the creation of (mostly empty) directories at the root of the rootfs partition such as “Documents” or “DCIM” - unfortunately, although I can make it to the CLI as usual, it once again messed up the GUI.

I had a look inside the logs, and found 2 main problems:

  1. journalctl.txt told me permissions of / weren’t root for some reason - what could be the right command to fix this? Would chmod … / help, or something different?
  2. startplasmamobile.txt (along with the other 2 startup commands) suggested kdeinit was having some issues, exiting with code 255: I thought reinstalling (sudo apt-get remove / autoremove / reboot / reinstall ) was enough, but soon after the same old issues cropped up.

Thank you for guiding me to an alternative way to the usual ‘hard reset’ (reflash the entire disk) ;0

Logs

[UPDATE]
As well as the creation of unwanted files described below, I also came across this fun little file in the bootfs partition whilst diagnosing the drive from my backup OS on the SD, rightly labelled issue.txt: that might be worth checking out too!

Summary

This text will be hidden

startplasma-wayland.txt

Error: could not determine $DISPLAY.
Error: Can not contact kdeinit5!
org.kde.startup: “kdeinit5_shutdown” () exited with code 255
startplasma-wayland: Shutting down…
startplasmacompositor: Shutting down…
startplasmacompositor: Done.

startplasmamobile.txt

/usr/bin/startplasmamobile: 22: [[: not found
Error: could not determine $DISPLAY.
Error: Can not contact kdeinit5!
org.kde.startup: “kdeinit5_shutdown” () exited with code 255
startplasma-wayland: Shutting down…
startplasmacompositor: Shutting down…
startplasmacompositor: Done.

issue.txt

Raspberry Pi reference 2025-05-13
Generated using pi-gen, GitHub - RPi-Distro/pi-gen: Tool used to create the official Raspberry Pi OS images, 5dabc7dc940059dfbc46af5d97b60a1e812523dd, stage2

3

Never mind, got journalctl.txt to upload in the end, no need for 3rd party pastebin services :+1: