Hi there!
I'm not sure it is a right place for such a question, so please (mods) move it to right place if it need.
OK, my problem is a wallpaper disappearing. Right now I'm using KDE 4.12.5 (Gentoo). On every boot I'm getting a blank black desktop, regardless which wallpaper was set on previous boot. It occurs with default "stripes" as well as with any other picture that was set as desktop background.
This problem exists for at least last few years, so it seems will not be fixed ever. But, nevertheless, I'd like to ask devs for a reasons of wallpaper disappearing, and may be I might to fix it myself.
I tried a lot of solutions that I found on web - removing ~/.kde directory, kdmsts, switching effects engine and some other - without any success.
If it may help - I noticed a pattern. If I will perform reboot immediately after boot, wallpaper doesn't disappear. But if I had an active session (internet browsing, amarok, a couple of kpat games and so on) wallpaper will be lost on next boot.

Any suggestions on where can I start to deal with this problem?
Thanks in advance.

You might get a new activity with every login

Code: Select all

qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ListActivities

See whether that remains static across logins (or whether there're meanwhile a thousand of them...)

I can restore background much more easy by using feh. It doesn't fix the problem, as well as new activity creation.
I found that this problem caused by OpenGL compositing. If i set effects engine to OpenGL (no matter is it 3.1, 2.0 or 1.2) I'm getting blank desktop on next boot. If I set it to XRender all works fine in terms of wallpaper, but I'm loosing some effects.

I didn't mean that you *should* create a new activity, but that plasma does (because communication w/ the activity manager daemon fails)
The compositing backend could only have pot. influence by
- a bug in the driver that eg. causes plasma-desktop to crash on exit if there's another GL context around
- timing (ie. initializing the GL context may take longer than the xrender context and that additionaly waiting for the session to start somehow times out the activitymanager or sth. like that)

There's certainly no direct relation, kwin (compositor) and plasma-desktop (wallpaper) are different processes.