My desktop experiences multiple plasma crashes every day since initial installation from scratch with restored user space from tar file. User space is very old and I have been running KDE a very long time under multiple flavors of Linux including Sabayon and Ubuntu.
Running Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, KDE Plasma Version 5.27.12.
“uname -a” returns “6.14.0-29-generic #29~24.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC”.
Problem occurs regardless of browser in use. Removed all desktop widgets and then replaced all desktop widgets; crashing still occurs. Crashing occurs most often when mouse is near/on taskbar.
Created new user and placed identical widgets in that new user space; crashing does not occur for the new user. I assume there is a problem in the configuration/control files/directories in my user space.
I need to know which configuration/control files/directories in my user space require deletion or repair in order to stop plasma from crashing.
Apologies. It isn’t the plasma “display” that is crashing; I believe it is the plasma shell that is crashing. The taskbar disappears and reappears once the plasma shell auto-restarts.
I’d recommend upgrading your system to Plasma 6, or switching to a product that offers faster OS updates if no upgrades are possible. The reason is that you’re using Plasma 5.27, which was released two and a half years ago, and went out of support from KDE a while ago as well.
So normally I’d ask you to post a backtrace of the crash so it can be debugged, but in this case, even if you did, it’s not likely any Plasma developers would be in a position to debug it, having long since moved to Plasma 6. Probably the best we could do would be to identify it as a known bug that was fixed years ago, in which case the advice would be the same: “please upgrade!”
@ngraham, I greatly appreciate your insightful response. I read an earlier post here where a backtrace was requested, but that involved Plasma 6.x. I now understand why a backtrace would be useless given my OS version.
I cannot directly upgrade my system from KDE Plasma 5.27 on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS to KDE Plasma 6 because Plasma 6 requires a new Qt library set that is not compatible with the base OS, and it was not included in the 24.04 release. To get KDE Plasma 6, I will need to wait for a Kubuntu upgrade to a newer non-LTS release, such as Kubuntu 24.10 or 25.04.
It certainly appears that I must leave LTS in order to solve this issue (unless I want to keep experimenting with moving everything other than the configuration/control files/directories from my old user account to a new user account). Even if upgrading Plasma to 6.x doesn’t fix the issue, at least I can get debug support.
For what it’s worth, at least for KDE software, a faster-updating base distro usually provides a better experience, for a variety of reasons. So I would definitely encourage leaving the LTS product and using the bi-yearly Kubuntu releases instead.
In general, “LTS” as an OS product characteristic is something that’s most useful for servers and IT-administrated environments where controlling complexity and reducing change are useful.