I've just upgraded to Plasma 5, and I'm finding it quite unstable. If KDE 4 ever bugged out, I could just run

Code: Select all

kbuildsycoca4 ; kquitapp plasma-desktop ; sleep 2 ; kstart plasma-desktop


and it would almost would almost always restart fine, leaving my applications and windows in their previous state. Now with Plasma 5, I'm trying

Code: Select all

kbuildsycoca5 ; kquitapp5 plasmashell && plasmashell


but this doesn't seem to work most of the time. Firstly, kquitapp5 doesn't seem to work if plasmashell has locked up, so I often have to escalate to `pkill -9 plasmashell`. Then, restarting plasmashell just fails. Sometimes I get information on the command line, but there's often so many warnings it's hard to pick what is wrong. If I restart the computer, Plasma 5 almost always works fine. However, I'm needing to replace hourly, so restarting the computer isn't a great option. Is there a more "foolproof" way to restart Plasma 5 while the bugs are ironed out?

a) if a process is in a life or dead lock, it won't process events, thus not respond to dbus, thus not quit. If it doesn't even terminate on SIGTERM (kill default) it's really f***** up and you got to have the kernel kill it (SIGKILL, "-9")
b) I assume the cause for (a) being the cause for (b), being the Qt/KDE bug around stale lockfiles - "rm -r ~/.cache/" will usually do.

See here https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/110346/
here https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/122549/
and here where KWin get blamed for everything
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338999

Thanks luebking. I did read about some issues with ~/.cache/, so I did delete it, but are you saying that this is an ongoing problem, and it might get corrupted regularly? Worth trying before a full reboot anyway, I guess.

This morning I also needed to do `kwin_x11 --replace` to fix my system, so there is some merit to that argument!

Unless you've a KF5 or Qt5 version that fixes either side of the problem (I don't think the Qt fix is already released): yes, unfortunately. KF5 should be fixed in 5.3, after updating maybe run a global find for *.lock - and wipe them out.

Great. Looking forward to the fix. In terms of *.lock files, I assume you are referring to the kde- or plasma-related files? At the moment, there are only two that look relevant.

Code: Select all

/home/sparhawk/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/main/soprano-virtuoso.lock
/home/sparhawk/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/main/data/virtuosobackend/soprano-virtuoso.lock