Hey all,
I just noticed after about a month that my keyboard shortcuts have stopped working. Doing some digging online showed me that the kglobalaccel daemon is responsible for that, so I tried manually enabling it, only for systemctl to say that it doesn’t exist. But the service file does, for sure; it’s in usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kglobalaccel.service on my machine. So I checked my systemd logs to see what the issue was
it seems kglobalaccel stopped working on November 21 around 22:21. I have some suspicions as to why that I’ll get to later:
Nov 21 19:04:12 pnp-pc systemd[581]: plasma-kglobalaccel.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Nov 21 19:04:12 pnp-pc systemd[581]: plasma-kglobalaccel.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Nov 21 22:21:02 pnp-pc kwin_x11[731]: Couldn't start kglobalaccel from org.kde.kglobalaccel.service: QDBusError("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown", "The name is not activatable")
Nov 21 22:21:02 pnp-pc plasmashell[767]: Couldn't start kglobalaccel from org.kde.kglobalaccel.service: QDBusError("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown", "The name is not activatable")
Nov 21 22:21:02 pnp-pc kactivitymanagerd[783]: Couldn't start kglobalaccel from org.kde.kglobalaccel.service: QDBusError("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown", "The name is not activatable")
…and messages like the latter message continue on with several different services trying to start it, to no avail, all the way up to the present day.
Now at first this would be where my question starts, but I also decided to do a search for pacman (my package manager) commands being sent around this time, and…
Nov 21 19:31:15 pnp-pc sudo[1954]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -S Qt6
Nov 21 19:31:20 pnp-pc sudo[1966]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -S qt6
Nov 21 19:34:54 pnp-pc sudo[3154]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -S qt6-graphicaleffects
Nov 21 19:34:58 pnp-pc sudo[3160]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -S qt5-graphicaleffects
Nov 21 19:35:14 pnp-pc sudo[3194]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -S plasma-extras
Nov 21 19:35:20 pnp-pc sudo[3206]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -S plasma-framework5
Nov 21 19:38:13 pnp-pc sudo[4630]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -Rd plasma-extras
Nov 21 19:38:23 pnp-pc sudo[4639]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -Rd plasma-framework5
Nov 21 19:38:31 pnp-pc sudo[4658]: plugnplay : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/plugnplay ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman -Rd plasma-framework5
All of these installs and removals happen just after my last successful kglobalaccel launch at 19:04:12 and before my first failiure at 22:21:02, making me believe they might be responsible somehow…
If I recall correctly I installed and removed these packages after unsuccessfully attempting to patch an incompatible SDDM theme to work with Plasma. The plasma-extras package does not exist and I likely just confused it with plasma-framework5.
After seeing these messages, I tried using systemctl again using the actual kglobalaccel folder directory I mentioned above, and it warned about the empty unit file associated with it, which makes sense considering it is usually started by Plasma anyway. So out of fear that I might cause a conflict somewhere, I disabled it again for now. (BUT while it was working, my keyboard shortcuts returned!)
MY QUESTION(s): how should I go about SAFELY re-enabling kglobalaccel? Will manually enabling it on startup be a valid fix? And what more specifically could have caused this?
