Since the latest update, every time plasmashell crashes (which happens very frequently), my entire center monitor (2K 144 Hz connected via HDMI) instantly turns completely black and freezes. I can still see the mouse cursor frozen in the middle of that screen, but my actual cursor continues to work normally on the other two monitors:
- Left monitor: laptop’s built-in 1080p 144 Hz panel (eDP, Intel iGPU) → works fine
- Right monitor: external 1080p 60 Hz connected via HDMI → USB-C dock/adapter (display output from NVIDIA dGPU) → works fine
I can move the cursor freely across the left and right monitors and use the desktop normally there, but the center monitor stays black and unresponsive.
Restarting plasmashell (via kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart5 plasmashell or similar) does nothing – the center screen remains black. The only way to recover is to log out completely (back to SDDM) and log in again, or reboot the system.
Before this update, plasmashell was already crashing quite often (unfortunately a known thing on my setup), but recovery was easy and never disruptive:
- Most of the time it restarted itself automatically within a couple of seconds.
- In the worst case, I just had to run
kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart5 plasmashell(or Alt+F3 → “Restart plasmashell”) and everything came back instantly.
I could keep working without any real interruption to my workflow.
Now, every single time plasmashell crashes, it happens.
Here is my kinfo:
- Operating System: KDE neon User Edition
- KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3
- KDE Frameworks Version: 6.20.0
- Qt Version: 6.10.1
- Kernel Version: 6.14.0-36-generic (64-bit)
- Graphics Platform: Wayland
- Processors: 20 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-13700H
- Memory: 32 Gio of RAM (31.0 Gio usable)
- Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
- Graphics Processor 2: Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
This feels like a serious regression in KDE/Wayland multi-monitor handling with hybrid NVIDIA laptops. Has anyone else seen this exact behavior after the Plasma 6.5 update? Any known workarounds? Would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!