I’ve recently started using Debian 12 with KDE on my laptop and after ironing out most of the teething issues I have a couple left.
The one I have made no progress on is random freezes on the taskbar. I only really notice this when the clock is wrong (as it’s frozen) or I go to click an app on the taskbar and nothing happens. If I press the Meta / Windows key the Start menu appears but nothing else seems to work.
There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it. For example it doesn’t always happen resuming from sleep. I can be working away and find it’s frozen. I have three widgets running (CPU, Memory and Network) but it froze before I added them. Other than that there is nothing fancy on there.
The workaround is to edit the Taskbar and then drag the resize sliders and it strings back to life with the correct time.
I’ve done the usual Google Search but haven’t found anything that’s not been fixed, or recent.
Any help appreciated.
Which DE are you talking about? It sounds like KDE/Plasma but you didn’t specify.
Apologies. It’s KDE. I’ve udated the post.
Are you using Wayland with KDE? For me the taskbar freezes if I’m on Wayland and hover over some windows so it shows the preview.
If you’re also using Wayland, try turning off window previews (right-click taskbar->configure->Show small window previews).
Also, as a workaround if this doesn’t fix it for you, you can execute plasmashell --replace and it’ll replace the existing frozen instances instead of starting new ones. If you use krunner (alt+space) it’ll stay in your recent commands as well, so you can easily run it again when it freezes again.
I bound that command to meta+del because it was happening frequently enough to annoy the shit out of me. Bring on plasma6!
Can you confirm that it’s only the taskbar that freezes? Do any other DE components (e.g. app launcher (shortcut meta + f2 by default)) work or do they freeze/not respond as well?
You could check various logs for errors:
- syslog (
/var/log/syslogordmesg) - unit files of Plasma components (
journalctl -xeu $UNITNAME; e.g.journalctl -xeu sddm.service)
- syslog (
Not on Debian, but I got this freezing with KDE Plasma Wayland with Nvidia driver. KDE Plasma Xorg works though.
My Intel iris laptop works fine with KDE Plasma Wayland.
OOT. My phone autocorrect Xorg to corgi 😂 but I cought it before sending.
On my Debian, Wayland crashed (after several hangs and glitches) and a reboot ended in a blinking cursor on black screen.
I literally didn’t do anything except install it with everything on default and change some settings in the GUI.Something is up with Debian KDE right now.
Did you install any non-standard graphics drivers? If your system has an nVidia GPU bumblebee, nouveau and the closed-sourced driver all can cause this issue.
No. Intel integrated graphics on a laptop.
And now on OpenSUSE, KDE works flawlessly, so it isn’t a hardware issue either.According to the debian wiki support is not fully guaranteed. Might just be that you ran into any of those issues:
Wayland support is still not finished yet though. Notably, there are issues with the compositor taking down other applications with it when it crashes, changing the global theme sometimes causes a session crash, “Activities” are unimplemented, there are various papercuts with drag-and-drop functionality, and session restoration only works with XWayland windows. A full and more regularly-updated list of Plasma Wayland issues can be found here: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
Then I find it weird that Debian Stable defaults to Wayland on KDE.
Unfortunately X11 isn’t without issues as well. In my case Wayland runs smoother and is less error prone than X11.
