My desktop shows up completely empty after system updates

[php4fan]

DISPLAY=:0 startplasma-x11

caused this popup to show up:

Other than that, had no visible effect.

[Mirdarthos]

HMMMmmm…Welp…

It seems I’m either being cursed by your PC in arabic or something, or it’s possessed and you need an exorcist.

Either way, I don’t know what to do. Sorry.

Edit:

Just thought of this: try running it without the prefix:

startplasma-x11

[php4fan]

@Nachlese

I don’t

I meant these:

@Mirdarthos

Just thought of this: try running it without the prefix:

startplasma-x11

That was the first thing I tried. Just gives me the error:

$DISPLAY is not set or cannot connect to the X server.

@Zesko

Edit /etc/sddm.conf.d/autologin.conf to remove some block code:

[Autologin]
User=YOUR_NAME
Session=plasma

Then try to restart SDDM.

That didn’t help.
I rebooted, entered the password, and the issue persists.

[brahma]

rerun update again:

sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5 && sudo pacman -Syyu

if you are up to date, and there are no errors, check with:
sudo ldconfig
it should return nothing, if it does, create a new test user, reboot, log in with it and see if it has the same issues

[Takakage]

There have been some recent forum posts suggesting that corruption of a KDE configuration file was to blame for some similar issues. You could try renaming the file; plasma will create a fresh one after logging out and back in.

mv ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc.bak

If things work properly afterwards, you could try to restore your original desktop appearance with the relevant lines from the original config file.

[php4fan]

Indeed, that was the issue.

I just found this:

Programs only open with Krunner, desktop icons missing after 2-12-2023 Update

The issue seems to be within the file .config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, specifically within this section: [ScreenMapping] itemsOnDisabledScreens= After deleting the section (best to use vim or something that works on ~20 MB file), and rebooting, everything is back to normal.

I didn’t need to move/remove the file, just deleting the [ScreenMapping] section was enough.

My gosh the KDE people really need to get their s*** together

[Nachlese]

@php4fan

I meant these:

some process(es) after autologin failed to start, from what I can see
(looks like telegram.desktop)
you could try to disable autologin

it (in theory) should not affect the display manager itself

have you tried stopping and then starting the service?

but perhaps what @Takakage said
I don’t run KDE (only in a VM) and have never experienced a problem
but I also never had autologin - too many problems with apps that want or need authentication before they start

[stargazer]

I used KDE5/Plasma for a brief time, and during that time, I routinely backed up:

• $HOME/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
• $HOME/.config/plasmashellrc

to $HOME/kdeSaves.

I restored when the desktop seemed to , “randomly lose the desktop settings”. Never found the root cause, but was leaning towards multiple monitors. Interesting that it is still necessary to backup config files.