Heya, so I’m running Garuda and I was messing around the panel customization in kde, and i was trying the system monitor widget in a panel on the side of my desktop. I was thumbing through the different visual styles (pie chart, bar graph, etc.) and one of them completely broke my desktop
I can no longer interact with any panels or widgets, nor can i right click the desktop. I can use the computer through the terminal to launch apps, but the DE is completely unresponsive. It also stacked everything in my taskbar on a different monitor on top of each other.
I have attempted restarting plasmashell using
systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell
as well as restarting the computer itself, to no avail. Upon loading in my panels again, immediate freeze.
I’ve tried searching online through the kde forums, garuda forums, and reddit for if there’s any way to get rid of a panel through a config file or something, but I can’t seem to find anything helpful. If anyone could guide me through what I’m supposed to do when things break this hard that would be great. I am pretty new to linux in general, so if you guys need more information please let me know.
this would be a good time to install an learn how to use timeshift.
when things break this hard, it’s good to be able to just roll back to your last working snapshot and try again.
my notes have the plasma shell restart command as
#to relaunch plasma, rather than logging out
systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell.service
also from my notes
#to find the last 10 recently changed files from a config change or fat fingered file save
find -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -10
if you can’t fix this and need to reinstall, i would suggest a different distro for someone new to linux… kubuntu maybe.
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Hi - it might be worth trying to remove/rename/backup the file ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, as that stores the configuration of the applets, panels and widgets for your desktop. That might be able to get you back to where you can at least interact with the GUI and set your panels back up?
I would also say, as @skyfishgoo alluded to, that Garuda is a heavily “customized” Linux distribution, so you’re more likely to run into edge case situations that wouldn’t really be tested by its upstream projects (KDE, the Linux kernel, etc.) because they’re using those projects in unconventional ways. It’s the power, but also the risk, of a free and open-source desktop 
If you do end up being interested in switching, Kubuntu is a fixed-release that freezes package versions and is pretty close to upstream, Fedora is a fixed release that keeps KDE packages up-to-date, and Tumbleweed and Arch are rolling releases, all of which have pretty high-quality KDE experiences.
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Omg thank you so much; knowing what config file I needed to edit was the missing puzzle piece here. Sifting through it for a couple of minutes, I was able to identify the container holding the problematic widget, deleted every line for said container, and everything else fixed itself after restarting plasmashell
Aside from this one hiccup, Garuda has been working great for me the past few weeks since i installed. I’m not at all opposed to distro-hopping though, and I’ve still got a ton to learn, so if it becomes problematic, I’ll definitely give your recommendations a shot.
I ran a clean arch install a couple of times and did really enjoy it, but I kept breaking it trying to set up certain things so I opted for something more pre-configured, and for the most part Garuda has “just worked” for me.
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Yeah that timeshift advice is gonna save me hours of pain in the future, i completely forgot to set up any kind of restore point.
For whatever reason, the restart command seems to work with or without the “.service” at the end. No clue why
Your other note is going straight into my own though, that’s gonna come in handy at some point.
Probably not gonna be swapping distros again for a little bit, but whenever it comes around I’ll see what kubuntu has to offer
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