I am running Fedora 42, after a power cut and a restart my desktop panels no longer show. The plasma shell is running, I have desktop backgrounds and icons, I have the “start menu” (sorry don’t know what we call it on Linux), everything is sort of normal except for I can’t see my task bar (or any other widget).
When going into edit mode I can see the panel is configured. Only after clicking on “remove”, and then clicking “undo” on the notification, the task bar shows. This configuration doesn’t survive a plasmashell restart, it doesn’t appear again until trying the same trick. I should also mention even though the task bar is shown, windows go behind it instead of snapping to it as if it doesn’t exist, and if I open a pinned app the app will open but it won’t be shown as active on the task bar and I won’t be able to manage the different windows from the task bar.
I tried following the solution from here, basically deleting the config and cache, but after re-logging even though I get the welcome screen like it’s my first time, the task bar is not displayed until removing and undoing.
I am considering maybe trying to run the Fedora 43 upgrade to see if it would fix it somehow but I was avoiding it until now because I’m not sure if it would break something else.
the first step in troubleshooting these kinds of configuration issues is to create a new user for your install and see if the problem persists… that would mean the corruption is system level deep and not just something wrong with your user acct.
if it’s still an issue with a new user acct, and you don’t have a timeshift snapshot of your OS (you should have a timeshift snapshot of your OS, is what i’m saying), then upgrading may be an easy path forward to solve it.
otherwise it’s often easier to just reinstall that try and repair something system level deep.
Ok I’ve created a new test user and it doesn’t have the problem, the panels show fine, I can edit them and the config survives a logout. Also I’ve notices another weird behavior, in the new test user my display configuration shows the full model name of my 3 monitors, my main user just shows them as “HDMAI-A-2, DP-5, DP-4” and I also remember yesterday it called 2 of them “xwayland [something]”, I don’t know if and how it’s related.
So anyway it seems the issue is with my main user, I’d much rather try to fix it and not transfer everything to a new user, so what’s the next step? I don’t have timeshift installed or any other OS backup software (I will after this).
now that you now a default setup is working you can duplicate that in your main user and slowly bring back chunks of the old files until the problem resurfaces, that will eventually help you narrow down the file(s) in your /home that are causing the issue… from my notes:
# brute force troubleshooting...
mv ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
mv ~/.local ~/.localBORKED
# logout and log back in again to force plasma to recreate the folders with default settings
# open split views of the folders for comparison and file copy
dolphin --split ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
dolphin --split ~/.local ~/.localBORKED
# copy back half of the BORKED folder contents at a time and relog to see if issue returns
# if it does, then delete the folder again, relog, and only copy half of that previous half
# repeat until the culprit is found, then finally, copy back everything BUT that culprit bit
and i strongly recommend that you not only install timeshift for restoring the OS but also use the built in backups feature in KDE (or install backintime) so you can recover from these kinds of situations in the future.
put each of these backup repositories onto their own partition (preferably on a separate external drive).
Well that didn’t work, after renaming the local and config file I got the welcome screen and the default wallpaper but the panel configuration is still broken, and after doing the remove and undo trick the design is similar to what I configured before instead of the default fedora style. I wonder if the desktop config is stored somewhere else?
I just looked around and I can see that there was a change in /usr/share/plasma/shells/org.kde.plasma.desktop and also /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/ right when the issue occurred, it feels related but I don’t know how the new user would work normally if those files are corrupted somehow
anything in corrupted in /usr/share/ should also be evident in a new user acct… but maybe there is some triggered conflict.
you could try copying your setup to the new user acct you created and see if it still does it over there or you could just reinstall… at this point i would be temped to just start over, if not even the brute force option works.
I don’t know if it’s worth a look or not but how about opening plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc from both users in a text editor and see if there are any differences.
I created another user and copied the .config and .local folders from my main user to that new new user. The issue didn’t occur in that new new user so it’s definitly not a corruption in the .config or .local folders, nor in the shared system files.
I also tried upgrading to Fedora 43, nothing changed.
I am now considering 2 options, migrating everything to the new user, or more likely formatting and re-installing everything from scratch.
I ended up copying my home folder to a different drive, formatted the fedora installation, and after re-installing copied most of the stuff back to skip most of the config.