Stability issues with KDE Plasma

[larienna]

I am tired of weird behavior in KDE so I want to write about it before switching to mate,gnome or cinnamon. I recently installed a new computer, and I decided to install KDE because I never had a chance to try it before.

After successfully configuring everything, I have serious issues. Some have been fixed with works around but there is still one that I could not fix. I need to reboot every time to fix it.

1. The first bug is when I returned from sleep, or from a screen lock. If I type my password to login, I get a black screen after successful login. I can see only the mouse. I managed to kill the process

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kscreenlocker_greet

, to remove the black screen. But it sends me back to the login screen, and the loop starts again. If I force shutdown, during the process,

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Plasma-ksmserver.service

takes 2 minutes to shutdown.

Work Around: I disabled the screen locker. So far so good.

2. I was scanning documents, then when the file save dialog box appeared, the screen started to flash. It seems to be trying to shift between night and day colors constantly. The window frames where also changing. If I closed the dialog. Everything went back to normal, if I open it again, it started to flash again.

Work Around: I removed Redshift from startup applications and used KDE's own night mode.

3. Still scanning documents. I am working with Dolphin to move files around. Sometimes looking at the content of a directory can take 10+ seconds even if there is just 2 files in the folder. Eventually Dolphin, the start menu, and the bar at the bottom of the screen freezes. As I speak it is frozen, I cannot launch applications, but I can navigate in Firefox without any problems.

What the hell is going on?

I though KDE was solid and mature. It was among the first desktop environment to exists.

If there a way to fix this? I should just change the environment.

I though that there is maybe a conflict between something I configured. I have written an installation log, so I can trace back most of the step that I did.

Sorry for asking help to debug very weird bugs. I still could not fix my wify and mouse scrolling issues (I made separate threads for this). Maybe changing environment could fix those issues too. I have Mate installed as a fallback environment, I could try it out.

[arzgi]

I have not used KDE since 3.5 version, so I'm not the best person to answer, just some thoughts. Hard to say where your troubles come, might be some config issues, in many case those can be revealed be starting the program from command line. Any DE can be screwed with conflicting settings.

[None1975]

I am tired of weird behavior in KDE

All the problems you listed are specific to the wayland session. I think you should switch to an xorg session and work there.

[larienna]

The last time I checked, I was using X11:

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$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

Still in x11.

[larienna]

I am currently trying to type of the keyboard and I had some issue where the keyboard was lagging behind and typing multiple times the same characters when in Firefox. That is another issue that happened in the past too, which have reoccured.

I tried to switch to KDE (Wayland) same issue. I tried to switch to the tty console, no problem, so it's not the wireless keyboard batteries. I am currently typing in Mate and I have no problem at all.

For some reason KDE is really broken. The diversity of the bugs make it hard to identify what is responsible for it. Is it fixable or I should abandon and start using another desktop environment?

[sunrat]

It would be best to track down the cause of the glitches. Check journalctl, logs in /var/log/ particularly the Xorg log, maybe even ~/.xsession-errors.

[larienna]

I logged back in KDE, my menu bar has frozen again. I tried to look at my session and xorg log, I did not find anything, again, I am not really sure what I am looking for. The end of the log had nothing of interest.

I attached the Xorg log and the xsession_error log.

[larienna]

When I use Mate, I have several error messages in xsession-errors. I am not sure if those errors could impact KDE too. Here is a list of the most recurring errors.

I get this error code constantly, thousands of repetitions

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![1728361261,000,xklavier_evt_xkb.c:xkl_xkb_process_x_event/] 	ATTENTION! Currently cached group 0 is not equal to the current group from the event: 1

Mate seems to have some issues with resume power

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(mate-screensaver:1454): GLib-CRITICAL **: 23:57:25.589: Source ID 155 was not found when attempting to remove it
(mate-screensaver:1454): Gdk-CRITICAL **: 00:02:58.839: gdk_monitor_get_scale_factor: assertion 'GDK_IS_MONITOR (monitor)' failed
(mate-screensaver:1454): Gdk-CRITICAL **: 00:02:59.018: gdk_monitor_get_scale_factor: assertion 'GDK_IS_MONITOR (monitor)' failed
(mate-power-manager:1450): GLib-CRITICAL **: 00:02:59.164: Source ID 584 was not found when attempting to remove it

I get several of those errors when using caja. Not sure if this is what makes folder browsing slow. I am on a M2 SSD, browsing files should not be slow, but it does not lag as much as dolphin.

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(caja:1419): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 17:00:47.413: gtk_container_foreach: assertion 'GTK_IS_CONTAINER (container)' failed
(caja:1419): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 17:00:47.413: gtk_image_menu_item_set_always_show_image: assertion 'GTK_IS_IMAGE_MENU_ITEM (image_menu_item)' failed
(caja:1419): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: 16:50:40.514: g_file_get_uri: assertion 'G_IS_FILE (file)' failed
(caja:1419): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 16:50:40.514: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
** (caja:1419): CRITICAL **: 16:53:42.896: caja_bookmark_get_location: assertion 'CAJA_IS_BOOKMARK (bookmark)' failed

Still, even with all those errors, the user interface in Mate is functional.

[None1975]

When I use Mate, I have several error messages in xsession-errors. I am not sure if those errors could impact KDE too. Here is a list of the most recurring errors.

I get this error code constantly, thousands of repetitions

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![1728361261,000,xklavier_evt_xkb.c:xkl_xkb_process_x_event/] 	ATTENTION! Currently cached group 0 is not equal to the current group from the event: 1

Do you have multiple keyboard layouts installed? If so, try removing them then re-adding. Then log out and back in to see if that makes any difference

[larienna]

I have multiple layout, I designed a 3rd layout for programming. But for some reason, only the english and french layout are present. Maybe there is a bug with my homemade layout. I did this multiple times in the past. Not sure why it's not working now.

Another weird behavior this morning, Caja memory consumption constantly grow. Making it so slow that it adds 20-30 seconds to each operation. I ended up with a 4.5 Gig process. Good thing I installed 32 gigs. I killed the process, it restarted it by itself, and as I write this, it's 1.8 gig without any window opened.

I know that I put a lot of stuff on ramdisk, but having a lot of ram, the ramdisk are far from full:

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 $ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev            15974656         0  15974656   0% /dev
tmpfs            3202452      1804   3200648   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p1 190655404  65770824 115126988  37% /
tmpfs           16012260         0  16012260   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs               5120        16      5104   1% /run/lock
tmpfs            1048576         4   1048572   1% /tmp
tmpfs             512000     40088    471912   8% /home/ericp/.cache
tmpfs             102400         0    102400   0% /mnt/build
/dev/nvme0n1p2 768062200 102362380 626610976  15% /mnt/data
/dev/nvme0n1p3    486456      5984    480472   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs            3202452        96   3202356   1% /run/user/1000

[larienna]

I tried to find what could cause Caja to consume so much memory and take 70% of my CPU all the time. I found this thread which could point me to the issue:

https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/47

It would have be something related to the thumbnailer requiring a thumbnail folder in the ".cache" folder. I disabled thumbnails in Caja and Dolphin. After a reboot, Caja still uses 4 gig of ram and consume CPU all the time. It does not fix the issue, but the thumbnail folder is not there. So they were disabled.

I did not test with Dolphin and KDE yet.

[None1975]

I did not test with Dolphin and KDE yet.

I would suggest you to solve one problem first and then move on to the next. You shouldn't throw around...did you try the solution i provided for Caja?

[larienna]

Which solution did you provide for Caja?

I am looking at the whole thread and cannot find anything.

[None1975]

Which solution did you provide for Caja?

It doesn't matter, you can ignore it. I can't see in this forum your whole message section anymore...

[larienna]

After disabling thumbnails in dolphin and doubling .cache size, I used KDE for an whole day, and the only issue I got was the lagging keyboard in browsers. I made another thread about it.

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=160671

If I start Caja in KDE, I still get the memory overload bug. My objective was to use KDE anyway, so I can live with it so far. But that makes Mate not a good fallback option if something happens.

I am crossing my finger and hope my issues are resolved.

[None1975]

But that makes Mate not a good fallback option if something happens.

A good alternative as fallback option is lxqt. Why? Because LXQT was built using the same technologies (using qt) as KDE

[larienna]

For your information, I have just upgraded the kernel, we will see if it solves some of the issues, especially the keyboard issue.

[arzgi]

Is it that the bluetooth keyboard? If so, I suspect most of not all problems are related to that. Can you try a wired keyboard?

[larienna]

I originally dismissed any hardware issues because it only happened in KDE, but after further testing, there was other situations. I realized that blue tooth was activated so I tried:

* Plugging the wireless keyboard dongle in the front
* I tried a Bluetooth keyboard: Worked pretty well.
* Deactivated the bluetooth service.

So far, deactivating the bluetooth seems to have worked. I guess that was the problem. I wonder if it could help my wireless issues. My tablet had conflicting wifi and blue tooth in the past, it could be a similar issue with this computer..

[larienna]

Everything so far worked so well. Then I have just resumed from sleep and it completely froze. I had to reboot. I don't know yet if the issue is recurring.

But there is always a problem somewhere.