As of the 2025.07.18 update, kwalletmanager no longer stores any passwords, and has mysteriously also forgotten about the ones that were already stored.
It is also not possible to authorize any applications that may use the wallet. This was already the case since the previous update to kf6, but at least it did still remember the stored passwords then. Right now it’s useless, and I have to manually authenticate every time I start kmail. I even had to manually log into the forum — it’s a good thing I still remembered the password.
Creating a new wallet is no good either. The wallet remains empty. Temporarily renaming the old wallet (and even the kwalletmanager’s configuration files) also has no result. It recreates the configuration, but there is no salt file.
Well, I don’t know whether everyone is really having a problem with it. There have been a few threads related to kwallet in the past month or so, but it didn’t seem to affect everyone — possibily also because not many are using kwallet, and even fewer will be using kmail.
Furthermore, as long as there is no solution to this issue, adding it to the “know issues” would be pointless. We need to know how to fix this first before we can tell people how to fix it.
No, it also impacts chromium, and who knows whatever else stores passwords — e.g. knights, but I haven’t played chess against a human at freechess.org anymore in ages, so I haven’t verified that yet.
I’ve also found that, since the previous Stable Update, kwalletmanager opens when I start kmail, and it even says that it has opened the wallet, but when I click on it, the wallet is still closed and I have to manually open it. It also does not allow me to explicitly authorize any applications for accessing the wallet. It’s an empty field and one cannot type in it or right-click on it.
This behavior is still the same today, except that now it doesn’t even authenticate me anymore because all my password fields are empty, and even chromium, which stores its passwords internally but uses kwallet to open its own internal wallet, had lost all of its passwords.
I can manually enter passwords into the password fields of the wallet, but when I click on Save, it throws an error.
Somebody — it might have been you — also suggested a systemd user service on one of the other threads about kwallet, but trying to start that user service throws an error.
[nx-74205:/dev/pts/3][/home/aragorn]
[aragorn] > cat .local/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.secrets.service
[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.secrets
Exec=/usr/bin/kwalletd6
[nx-74205:/dev/pts/3][/home/aragorn]
[aragorn] > systemctl start --user .local/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.secrets.service
Invalid unit name ".local/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.secrets.service" escaped as ".local-share-dbus-1-services-org.freedesktop.secrets.service" (maybe you should use systemd-escape?).
Failed to start .local-share-dbus-1-services-org.freedesktop.secrets.service: Unit .local-share-dbus-1-services-org.freedesktop.secrets.service not found.
[nx-74205:/dev/pts/3][/home/aragorn]
[aragorn] >
P.S.: I’ll move these posts over to my own thread.
is it a user invokable service, named a D-Bus service?
“Most applications use org.freedesktop.secrets.service D-Bus service. KWallet does not provide a service file for it out of the box.”
in my case it was specifically required for ssh-key-agent to retrieve keys from kwallet. after putting it just started working, even from iceWM. it looks like kwallet is working fine in mine. I think what is due,is a walk-through the chain of unlocking that leads to kwallet (that is from SDDM → PAM modules and thereafter).
addendum;
To unlock KWallet protected by the login password, it is necessary to start /usr/lib/pam_kwallet_init in the autostart portion of your window manager’s configuration file in addition to configuring PAM"
/usr/lib/pam_kwallet_init is triggered through, user level service plasma-kwallet-pam.service
just do a sanity check from configuring PAM to see if anything is amiss KDE Wallet - ArchWiki
Yes, it is. Or rather, it was. I’ve deleted it, since it wouldn’t work anyway.
The Arch Wiki section on kwallet is outdated. It still references kwallet5 from kf5, while the kwallet we have in Manjaro is the kf6 version. It should be backwards compatible, but they are two different things.
I have only closed the thread because the fact that the situation has corrected itself without my doing anything makes it into a non-issue, and there is no solution mark to be ticked on any post.
I did not close the thread so as to cut off the discussion. Quite obviously, there was a problem, even though it has now remedied itself — albeit without that the lost passwords could be salvaged — and so it’s not so unusual that people are wondering about the cause, especially given that it has happened to other people as well in recent times.
