Hello, I have an auxiliary panel with my favorite programs (firefox, konsole, chrome, libreoffice…) that is set up to hide itself automatically. Sometimes, when I login only the first program is shown on this panel and I must enter edit mode to fix it. You can see my small problem in the pictures below:
Wouldn’t it be better to add them to favourites in the launcher? I have 20 pinned applications there - of which only 8 really qualify as very commonly launched.
The main problem I see is that you do seem to like a lot of icons cluttering the desktop, like the icons on the desktop as well as more icons pinned to the side-panel, like the transparent weather widget that will only be visible if your wallpaper co-operates… but no, from the screenshot it’s hard to understand what the issue is here.
Anyway - I have not had an issue with only the first program being shown on a panel.
I think I saw something about this very recently.
Edit: Yeh I did More trouble with Panels
Try a fixed size.
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Some of us prefer to use the panels and docks for our most used apps. I have my main panel set to dodge, a panel on the left for social media and messaging auto hides, a panel on the right for browsers and email auto hides, and a panel on the bottom for a doz en of my most used apps auto hides.
This id not the first time that someone has asked to have this bug addressed. At least the current fix for the enduser is pretty easy.
The link quoted above was mine and the solution was indeed to switch the panel from “fit content” to fixed “custom size”.
The bug that “may be” causing this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489086
“When system is under heavy load, panel in Fit Content mode is too small at startup until something causes it to re-evaluate its size (e.g. entering edit mode)”
If so, then it should get fixed in Plasma 6.3.
Though I’m not sure about the “heavy load” part as it would always happen to me after a reboot. Maybe enough stuff happens during startup and login that it might amount to “heavy load”?
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This isn’t always the solution cause plenty of times the arrows for manually adjusting the panels do not show up. As for heavy load that’s actually the desktop crashing and restarting giving you the same effect where the panels are concerned as if you had done a reboot. The plasma 6 and up desktop is not as stable as it was under 5 and up.
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I never had the issue with the resizing arrows not showing up, but I had many other issues and yeah Plasma 6 freezes on me too much. I’m looking forward to 6.3 to see if anything gets improved. I’m still mainly on Windows and while I like Plasma most, out of all DEs, its stability leaves something to be desired. I never used Plasma 5, by the way, so I can’t compare.
If you read through the bug report linked, you may notice several of the participants are experts, KDE contributors, the authors of the software, authors of addons… If Plasma had crashed, they would have noticed, and mentioned it. They didn’t, so you can be sure, it didn’t crash.
It’s generally excellent. I make it my business to find bugs in the software I use, and I often do, but general stability is not a problem I’ve seen in KDE for…gee, years. Heck these days not only is plasma super-stable, but when something else crashes it, it still recovers cleanly.
Still, KDE offers a lot of flexibility, so sometimes we can bend it until it breaks. If you’re having problems with stability, maybe take a look at some changes you’ve made and try to return them to stock. It shouldn’t be long before you can find the culprit.
Clean install. No third party additions besides icons. Do you have AMD or NVIDIA GPU? My issues are likely related to Wayland+NVIDIA as the entire UI locks up, never recovers, doesn’t respond to kb input, I have to press reset button on the PC 
Not only am I running wayland on the nvidia drivers, I’m running the super buggy pre-release 565 drivers and plasma still is rock solid (the graphics do freeze, because of the buggy driver, but still plasma will be running when I force the drivers to recover).
Maybe try another distro or something. I don’t want to get into a long troubleshooting conversation, just to re-set your expectations. Plasma is plenty stable.
Other distros are worse in other ways. Debian or Mint with Cinnamon may be more stable but have other usability issues.
No, Plasma is not “plenty stable” and I’m not the only one who says that. Plenty of people have issues, many similar to mine. But there is always that one person who says “it works fine for me” 
Not interested in a stupid back and forth “no, you’re wrong” argument or hijacking OP’s thread.
Feel free to start a new thread with your stability problems, or try another DE, or whatever suits you, but we’re done here.
Hi - the OP’s question about buggy panel appearance when first logging in has been answered up above, with both a link to a workaround and context on an incoming fix for the underlying issue - thanks for providing those!
@Valerio_Passini, does that workaround - of switching the panel’s width from “Fit content” to Fill width or Custom - work on your device?
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Good, since you had nothing to say besides “it works fine for me” and “try something else”. Problems do no get solved by denial.
It’s not a freeze up. It is exactly what I said a quick crash. It last long enough for the desktop blink off for less than a second and comes back with everything you had open. It is far far far far far far from a deal breaker. You Make it sound worst than it is, DON’T.
It was a comment referring to my own experience, in response to you saying that Plasma 5 was more stable. Plasma 6 locks up hard for me, it doesn’t take keyboard input and I have to reset the PC. Still, not entirely a deal breaker either, but annoying enough as it happens every couple of days and it’s not even my main desktop yet.
Though it hasn’t happened in the last few days so maybe it was something that was fixed in one of the recent patches. There were few NVIDIA driver “refreshes” too, whatever they are. I need to use it more but I was distracted with other stuff.
This is not typical - indeed, last week I was involved in a discussion in which we all agreed that Plasma on Wayland has not frozen on any of us, and has proved frighteningly stable (despite a few innocuous bugs here and there).
Plasma 5, on the other hand, was a nightmare - especially (if I remember rightly) around the 5.25 mark.
As usual, however, nearly all of the issues people were having with their particular instance of Plasma were (and mostly still are) due to the USER data - logging in with a fresh user clears MOST issues - and the rest are often caused by people not properly caring for their system.
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Folks - this topic was created to seek help with a specific issue. There are places online to have general discussions and debates about your individual experiences with system stability over time… but focused topics in the Help section are not that place 
I’m placing this topic into “slow mode” instead of closing since it’s only a day old, and it would be nice if the OP could still reply back here if further help on this topic is needed.
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