After I had upgraded the system (testing) yesterday, I shut down the computer completely. This morning, I restarted it. Initially, everything was fine, until I had to leave the PC for a while. After return, the system had automatically (as required by the settings) gone into standby mode. I woke up the PC and found that the control panel was missing.
I tried all kinds of things, went into the modification mode and added a control panel which resulted in the changing of icon positions (as if the control panel was there), but the control panel did not appear. I tried again to add the control panel, the icons became messed up, because, as I realized later, the space for the new control panel was now taken at the side of the monitor, but no control panel visible. I removed all the control panels which I didnât need and left only the one which I wanted to have, at least in the modification menu, where I can also see it - but as soon as I end the modification, the control panel is invisible, I cannot by any means make it visible. I tried right-clicking on the space where it is supposed to be, but that shows the same context menu that I get when I click on the desktop somewhere else. There is no option to change from âvisibleâ to âinvisibleâ anywhere in those menus. I also checked the system settings and didnât find any section where I could change the setting for the control panel.
I also tried at the console
plasmashell --replace
which didnât change anything. The desktop was being restarted, but the control panel didnât come back.
KDE Plasma does not have a âcontrol panelâ⌠though it does have a taskbar and system tray.
Then again you went into âmodification modeâ which is interesting - you can either bring up âpanel configurationâ or from the desktop select âedit modeâ - but Iâm still confused by your statement that you âadded a control panelâ⌠despite âcontrol panelâ not being an available option from Widgets (or from 'add new widgets).
Anyway, to better start your plasmashell try this:
But do not do this at the console - basically meaning you did something like Ctrl_Alt_F4 to switch to a TTY to enter a command which wouldnât work, because you were no longer in the Plasma session.
Well, actually neither. One can add a âPanelâ which seems to be a container for widgets and âIcons Only Task Managerâ is a widget added to a âPanelâ. So âcontrol panelâ seems to refer to the default panel including the âApplication Launcherâ, âTask Managerâ and some other widgets like the notification area, clock etc.
Not really. I have only one panel and this is on the bottom and set to auto-hide. Once i had a sporadic issue when for some virtual desktops the panel didnât appear. Switching to another desktop the panel re-appeared, switching back the panel didnât appear - but for no reason at all (at least i couldnât see any). Then the panel reappeared again, also for no visible reason
I wouldnât recommend to add panels arbitrarily or change lots of settings to try to fix some issue - usually this only tends to create a mess and makes things worse. To me it seems there is some sort of bug in Plasma not related to your settings. If you can find out more maybe report it to https://bugs.kde.org/
Thanks for your responses. Well, I translated the terms from German into English, that may be the reason for the wrong terminology. Iâm sure that you mean the same that I do.
Restarting the plasmashell.service using systemctl didnât help either.
I had used the konsole program in plasma to enter the command
plasmashell --replace
which was a suggestion I found on the internet. I saw (like with the systemctl attempt) the desktop disappear and reappear after entering the command, but in both cases the panel(?) didnât return. BTW, with control panel I mean the space at the bottom (I know, it can be placed elsewhere) where the button is to start the apps, where the virtual desktop changer is located, where the active apps/open windows are shown and which includes the system tray with system relevant information and tools.
And I do not use and have (almost) never used the autohide function of this panel, because I always want to see whatâs going on, where apps are, have the time available etc. I donât like widgets for that purpose, they are taking valuable space from the desktop. But thatâs certainly a matter of taste and maybe also eye health, which in my case isnât so good, I need all things a little biggerâŚ
After the holidays I am back and still looking at a screen with no control panel (or panel). I still see the control panel when entering edit mode and then âconfigure panelsâŚâ (or similar), but itâs not visible on my monitor when I leave the edit mode.
What I find interesting: Display is wayland, server is X.org. Is that normal? I consider to get back to X11, because I am almost certain that the issue has in some way to do with using wayland. At least I want to try it in order to be proven wrong (or rightâŚ). I donât know, however, how to go about it.
have you tried to go to system settings/colors and themes/global theme and bottom left click on help or restore defaults? (hope my translation can be understoodâŚ)
I did, it made things a little worse (i.e. in color terms, I donât like those colors, they make it harder to read etc., but thatâs easy to fix), and nothing changed for the better.
I have now tried going back to X11. For that, I had to install
plasma-x11-session
in order to have that choice available on the login screen. And of course the control panel was back. The only drawback is: now are all my icons gone, and the background image that I always had (a slide show with some nice images, set to fit the screen while maintaining the proportions) is now placed on the upper right corner of the screen and shows maybe 1/18th of the image, but I cannot say which part of it. The missing icons are the worse part, of course, I could live and work with no background image at all, but the screen is, besides the now available and fully functional control panel, black and unresponsive, i.e. a right click or left click on that area doesnât yield anything. Only a click on the small section of the background image opens a context menu. Which makes me believe I can drop icons only there. The option to create an icon from the app launcher doesnât work, i.e. I can click it, but no icon is being created.
And another note: going back to wayland (following a restart) brings back all icons and the background image slide show, but makes me lose the control panel.
One more observation: the settings for the displays had, before the last upgrade, the option included that apps can either scale their appearance by themselves, or let it be done by the system. This option is gone now. Is that normal? Or maybe a hint that something in the global settings has changed?
Iâm on Stable, but we have the same Plasma version â 6.5.4 â and itâs still there on my system. However, itâll only show up if you are indeed on Wayland, because there is no such option on X11.
That might be a result of switching back and forth between Wayland and X11. The scripts should normally handle the back-and-forth switching without any problems, but itâs always possible that theyâve messed up your local configuration.
A good way of seeing whether that is the case would be to create a test account, and log in there with Wayland as the choice of display protocol. If you then do see the options, then thereâs something wrong with the Plasma configuration files in your main user account â which would probably explain the problem with the panel.
Well, I tried, I added a new user, rebooted (just to be sure), logged in as the new user (Plasma wayland was selected, I checked that specifically), and there the control panel doesnât appear as well. What is worth: I cannot change the position of screens in the monitor configuration menu. I have them physically one over the other (say â1â is on top and â2â is at the bottom). My test user shows them side by side. I tried to change that by moving â1â over â2â in the specific area, applied the change and still cannot move the cursor up into the monitor â1â, but I have to move the cursor to the left of monitor â2â and beyond in order to get to monitor â1â.
Also, the scaling by system or by the apps option is not available.
I conclude that itâs a system wide problem with my wayland installation. Is there a place where I can check if any necessary packages are missing? Or where I can find config files for these things in order to have a look if something is obviously wrong in there?
Well, I had that already when kwin was needed (someone pointed me to it), it was not a requirement, but an optional package (it seems) which offers functions which I needed.There the person said that usually that should have been installed automatically. I am not the person who says ânoâ when being asked if I want to include this or that package, and I do not remember having it removed at any point. Hence my question.
Right. I browsed through that folder already, looking at files which might have to do with plasma, but didnât find anything that might relate to the control panel or other display issues.
The only thing I can think of â forgive me if Iâve missed the details â would be that your monitor is actually smaller (in pixels) than what your system thinks it is, which is something that may happen (under certain conditions that Iâm not too savvy about) if you have two monitors with a different resolution.
In that case, Iâve known it to happen that the monitor with the lower resolution is interpreted by your graphics driver as having the same resolution as the bigger monitor. As a result, your panel would indeed be there, but outside of the visible (lower-resolution) window to the (virtual) higher resolution that the system thinks your monitor has.
Again, this may not be applicable to your case at all, and the only times Iâve known that to happen to people was on X11. Wayland is supposed] to handle tsuch setups more gracefully. But thatâs in a perfect world, and somehow, a perfect world is not the world we live in.
If possible, then you could try âzooming outâ â i.e. scale down â to see whether the panel reappears.
I have thought of that, too. When I try to edit the desktop and particularly the control panel, I can see it at the bottom of the monitor with the higher resolution. The icons are placed thus that they keep the areay of the control panel free, so it should be sitting there. I then tried also adding a control panel which was automatically placed at the side of the monitor, but except for a juggling around of all the icons in order to make place for the panel, nothing changed. But the space for the panel was freed of all icons.
Maybe you should stop calling it a control panel â itâs only generating confusion. It is simply a panel, which is itself a widget that can contain other widgets, like a task manager, an application launcher, a system tray, application icons, a calendar/clock, and so on.
Yes, that does indeed sound like the resolution mismatch issue I spoke of.
Well, I translate from German and there in the desktop editor it is called âcontrol panelâ. I try to keep it simple by using only âpanelâ.
I just checked the monitor settings once again, and this is really disturbing, but proves the thought that the panel is out of sight: the monitor with the higher resolution can only be set to â2560x1440â, while the monitor is capable of â3840x2160â. The monitor is correctly identified, though (itâs a Samsung LU28R55). Wayland offers only the resolution of â2560x1440â. I have set the scaling to 150%, but setting it to 100% doesnât change anything. It doesnât offer a higher resolution, and the panel doesnât appear.
