Not odd, it's timing related (when does plasma-desktop start and when has kwin finished the compositor initialization)
Matter of miliseconds.

You could copy /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop to ~/.kde/share/autostart and replace
- Exec=plasma-desktop
+Exec=sleep 2; plasma-desktop

No idea whether that works or is sufficient
In doubt you'd have to wrap that into
Exec=bash -c "sleep 2; plasma-desktop"

You could copy /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop to ~/.kde/share/autostart and replace
- Exec=plasma-desktop
+Exec=sleep 2; plasma-desktop

Worked great, thanks!

Good to hear, i fear i'm gonna tell that more often

Please do the board admins a favor and mark the issue as solved (also helps ppl. with similar issues to know where to look)

luebking wrote:Good to hear, i fear i'm gonna tell that more often

Nah that would never happen on the Internet!

Please do the board admins a favor and mark the issue as solved (also helps ppl. with similar issues to know where to look)

Thanks for the reminder, my mind is tired and barley functioning today.

As of the newest kernel update for Kubuntu, this work around stopped functioning. Any ideas how to get it working again?

I don't think a kernel update could have any impact here.
Either compositing is disabled altogether (kernel or mesa broke OpenGL) - do no translucency and window shadows
Or the update overrode the file you edited
Or the update caused some delay - try to rise the sleep timeout to 30 seconds or so (just to be sure)

luebking wrote:I don't think a kernel update could have any impact here.
Either compositing is disabled altogether (kernel or mesa broke OpenGL) - do no translucency and window shadows
Or the update overrode the file you edited
Or the update caused some delay - try to rise the sleep timeout to 30 seconds or so (just to be sure)

I dug around based on your suggestions. Seems OpenGL was indeed disabled. Turned it on, rebooted just to be safe and good to go. Thanks!