Shortcuts stop working, application windows aren't showing anymore and the systray seems to freeze

[Duncan]

Nikos Chantziaras posted on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 12:09:13 +0200 as excerpted:

> After a while after logging in to KDE (maybe an hour, maybe two, maybe
> five, depends) all my global shortcuts stop working (including default
> ones, like Ctrl+F11 or PrintScr where "present windows" or Spectacle
> aren't shown, and custom ones, like WinKey+W for starting my web
> browser.)
> 
> Furthermore, the systray gets stuck and contains icons from application
> that are no longer running. Qutting Amarok for example will leave the
> systray icon behind. Which still shows the menus, btw, it isn't really
> frozen. But they do nothing, since the application the systray icon
> belongs to is not longer running.
> 
> Even worse, when starting applications that use a systray icon, their
> window isn't showing. There's no way to see those applications. They run
> in the background and are invisible.
> 
> Any tips? I'm on:
> 
> KDE Plasma 5.5.3 KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 KDE Applications 15.8.3 + 15.12.1
> 
> I have no idea where to report this bug. There's no "I don't know which
> part of KDE this belongs to" choice on the bug tracker.

Assuming you can get either krunner or konsole up, try

kquitapp5 plasmashell; sleep 1; plasmashell &; sleep 1; disown

(The bit after the "&" shouldn't be needed from krunner, and may not be 
needed from konsole if plasmashell correctly daemonizes itself.  But I 
don't remember whether it does or not, and if not, when you quit the 
konsole window, plasmashell will close as well.)

That should restart the plasmashell (duh!), which I've found isn't 
entirely stable here, with parts of it either freezing or crashing from 
time to time, which would explain the frozen systray.  Hey, at least 
plasma5 appears to be multi-threaded, unlike plasma4, which was single-
threaded, so a single misbehaving plasmoid could freeze the whole thing.  
Now freezes don't seem to freeze the whole thing, but it's definitely not 
as stable as late plasma4 was in terms of crashes, which still tend to 
take down the whole thing, and individual components still freeze, as you 
seem to be seeing here.

Other kde/plasma components I seem to have to restart from time to time 
are krunner (mostly because after returning from a screen lock and 
display suspend it seems to still get confused by multi-monitor and 
apparently ends up displaying off-screen somewhere), and kwin (same 
thing, after return from display suspend and screen lock, window rules 
sometimes don't work right until kwin is restarted).

I don't tend to have problems with kde's hotkeys failing, but that's very 
possibly because after having to completely redo things when the upgrade 
to kde4 broke kde3's multi-key sequence hotkeys, which never did get 
fixed in kde4, I moved off of khotkeys for the general case, and only use 
kde hotkeys for kde specific stuff now... and even some of that I'm 
transferring off, finding scriptable dbus calls that do the same thing, 
that I can call from my own sxhkd config and launched scripts, etc.

But based on the processes I see running, I'd guess a restart of the 
kglobalaccel5 process would probably reinit the hotkeys stuff.  That's 
what I'd try first if I needed to here.


-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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