I have two artix linux systems (openrc, no systemd, xorg not wayland, KDE6) where this has occurred. On an AMD laptop with AMD graphics, it was only a few times, and not recently. On an old Dell Dimension E521 with AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5400+ and NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 8400 GS Rev. 3] (rev a2) it happens frequently. The symptoms are as if plasmashell had crashed: the wallpaper all disappears to a a black screen and the panel fails to respond.
Most of the time, the image of the panel is still present, but it doesn’t react to any click. Alt-Tab still works for any running programs. Usually Alt-space or Alt-F2 allows me to start konsole, but sometimes I need to use Ctl-Alt-F2 and use a different console. I had previously resorted to “killall -9 plasmashell && kstart plasmashell” which did and still does work to restore everthing to working as expected.
However, a few weeks ago, I found a post (of course, I can’t find it now) with a similar report, a hint that it might be related to not using systemd, and a request for a backtrace. I managed to find the process ID and connect using gdb. The BT did not look to me like it had actually crashed, so I figured I’d just restart plasmashell and try again later. However, as soon as I quit gdb and detached from the process, everything came back to life. This process (connect gdb to the plasmashell process and then quit gdb) seems to work reliably.
I’m posting here (without the actual BT or more details) just in case it gives anyone else a hint to what the problem might actually be, or can suggest any other data I should collect and post. I also can’t find any bug that seems quite the same, but I don’t want to file a new one until I have more info ready to provide.
Thanks for any suggestions or links to posts or bugs that might actually be the same issue.