KDE plasmashell freezes (loading aborted) after latest stable update - only mouse and yakuake working

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Hi everyone,

I still owe you an update. The problem is solved and my Manjaro instance is running again - with some quirks, but at least I am finally able to do the urgent work again, which I actually had to do on Friday.

But boy, what a painful journey.

Due to a birthday party and visitors staying with me from Friday till Sunday, I was only able to work on this problem when everybody already went to bed and with the hours the restore, cleanup, preparation, new update attempt and additional cleanup took, I only got 2 to 4 hours sleep these days. Yesterday I was such a wreck that I couldn’t write this message as originally intended. But here it is finally.

Before I mentioned the steps, which were very likely the key for the successful update, I must explain, that my restored backup brought me back to May 14, the day before I ran the big stable update to Plasma 6. This backup already included my preparation steps of that day which I have done especially for that update. And this was:

  • set the theme, cursors and most settings back to default
  • remove all widgets from the taskbar and desktop

But now due to the restore I had an even bigger update, from Plasma 5.27 directly to Plasma 6.1.
To avoid any more failures and a second run of restore and another update attempt, I wanted to be as thorough as possible and took my time to do even more preparation and so I did:

  • set all settings back to default
  • checked all .pacnew files via pacdiff and merged them (but only obtained useful additions and did not overwrite correct and useful settings in my configs)
  • checked and double-checked orphaned packages and removed these packages were I felt removing them would not break anything, but I still left a few installed, which might break something when removed (for pamac to list them as orphans seems like a mistake to me)
  • uninstalled most programs from AUR, which I could live without, but left simpler packages like a password manager or picture viewer
  • double checked there are no widgets active and cleaned up my taskbar even more as I don’t recall which widget was default and what not
  • I read all known issues and solutions from the past stable update posts double checked, that I didn’t miss anything or that I’m not affected by one of these issues (especially checked the “Python interpreter upgrade” and “DKMS fails for v4l2loopback on 6.8 kernel” because I didn’t pay much attention to these before, but these issues were not relevant for me)
  • followed the steps from prepare for Plasma 6 once more
  • changed all locales (date, currency, numbers, …) to english (because display language is already english)
  • rebooted
  • login and create a new backup
  • rebooted
  • without login via sddm switched to a tty
  • ran the update in the tty via pamac update --aur --force-refresh (boy that update ran for a looong time)
  • ran sudo pacman -Ru kf5 directly after the update and before the reboot

Interestingly I ran the sudo mkinitcpio -P for the May 29 update, which bricked my system, but I forgot to do that before or after my now successful update attempt. Hence it did not seem relevant at least for me.

What I believe actually solved the problem for me, were these steps and probably doing this all together:

  • reset all settings to default (for you probably at least all plasma related settings, likely especially the setting to start into a new session and not restore programs from the last session)
  • check every pacnew file before the update and merge it where it seems useful
  • double-check orphaned packages and remove packages which appear to be real orphans which can really be removed
  • (for new attempts of the update after a restore: double check there are no widgets active on the desktop and clean up the taskbar as good as possible from all the widgets)
  • double check all known issues and solutions from the past stable update posts
  • change all locales (date, currency, numbers, …) to english (because display language is already english)
  • reboot
  • without login via sddm switch to a tty
  • run the update in the tty via pamac update --aur --force-refresh
  • run sudo pacman -Ru kf5 directly after the update and before the reboot
  • reboot

I didn’t need to move the .local/share/kactivitymanagerd directory, but it was noted as a backup plan, in case I could again only boot into a hanging plasmashell or tty session.

But yeah, that was it, I was finally able to load into a running plasmashell again.
The background of the rotating dots (in a circle) from sddm I think, which appear after the login, when the desktop loads, is now a rotating black square :open_mouth: and I cannot copy and paste into a few apps, which definitely worked before. Not sure what is caused by the new versions and what got broken by my cleanup.
I didn’t have the time to use my system to the full extent and see if everything else works fine. I fear I will discover more problems in the coming days.

Anyway, I want to thank everybody here for their support and input. All ideas, tips and steps helped me. I read them all in the last days, but was just to busy and exhausted to respond earlier.

Special thanks to @Kobold I believe removing the kf5 packages was very important and you helped me a lot with restoring my backup with the GUI tip from the live USB boot.
Because the restore alone was a struggle. First creating a new (don’t ask) live usb stick failed couple of times with etcher and I switched to some other program mentioned in this forum. Then I chrooted into my system and thought I restore the backup in chroot env via command line, but whatever I tried, timeshift could not find the backup disk although I was pointing it directly to the snapshot directory, where I already changed directory into. I was going mad! When I read your hint not to chroot and just use the GUI, it was such a relief.
Thanks!!

So yeah, this is my new book “The Manjaro update which broke my computer and me”.
Thanks for reading :smiley:

Edit:
I forgot one step and just added it above, which is changing all locales to English. Because I had the error message LC_ALL cannot be set to default locale: No such file or directory caused by the update which automatically changed my locales in ~/.config/plasma-localerc from de_DE.UTF-8 to en_DE.UTF-8 (which does not exist) I also wanted to avoid this issue this time. I already used English as display language in Manjaro and it seems there should be no mix of language (EN) and locales (DE).
This is actually the second or even third time in the last 6 years, that my locales where automatically changed to en_DE.UTF-8 and I had to fix that afterwards.

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