Plasma desktop settings change randomly

Support Graphics & Display
1

Hello, I’m seeing odd behavior on my Plasma desktop: about once every 3-5 boots I get into my desktop & my left-hand monitor displays my usual panel (task manager, pager, clock), but the desktop space is completely black while it usually displays an image from a slideshow. My right-hand monitor displays normally. If I then use the display configuration widget I can reverse my displays via “extend to right”, pause to let the displays re-arrange – and immediately both my desktops show up correctly. I can then click the “extend to left” button, pause again and my desktops are back to normal.

I don’t know why this is happening; I’ve tried to search in my ~/.config/ to see what settings files are getting updated when I do this, but so far no luck. I see similar things with my clock widget; I had temporarily turned on seconds display so I could try to pin any file updates to a specific time – but turned them off once I thought (incorrectly) that I’d figured it out. But on my next boot this morning they’re back.

The only file change I’ve noticed this morning that looks close to the time I last changed my display configuration was dolphinrc – but I think this is a side-effect of my Dolphin window being moved from one monitor to another.

Can someone please point me in the right direction? I’m trying to lock in my monitor & desktop settings, or at least figure out what’s causing them to drift.

Thanks in advance for any insight or pointers you can offer.

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Maybe it’s a race condition for which monitor turns on first and therefore becomes primary monitor?

I don’t know what else it could be.

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Interesting conjecture. I should clarify that my two monitors do not seem to swap logical positions; my 27" monitor continues to be DVI-I-0, while my 23" monitor (on the left) continues to be DVI-I-1 – or at least that’s the intended setup. Both displays came up without issue this morning, & backgrounds on each were displayed as expected (photos from Iceland on the left, photos from Japan on the right).

Whenever this happens next I’ll be sure to open the display configuration to see if the mount points have shifted.

One other data point that might be helpful: this system I’m running dates back to 2012, and the twin Nvidia cards in it are locked on the 390xx driver as they’re ineligible for the latest drivers. I don’t expect there to be any major issues with these cards; is that reasonable to expect?

Thanks again.

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Strit, it appears you were correct! It happened this morning, so I checked: the display configuration module shows them with swapped mount points.

Is there a way I can deliberately force which monitor gets assigned to which mount point? Thanks in advance.