After the last update which bumped Plasma to 6.7 my desktop doesn’t load anymore - it just shows a black screen.
All apps that are scheduled to autostart appear nevertheless, and I can also open a console using the keyboard shortcuts and open most applications from there.
I noted longer loading time for plasmashell too, but the very first one was super long, rest are not that noticeable…
Unrelated but some animations etc like windows open/close etc were also affected for me, you may wanna check if you’re using something 3rd party that is making Plasmashell to not load, like wallpaper plugin could sometimes do it.
Since you said auto launch apps are launching, without plasmalshell all your keyboard shortcuts etc should function just fine, as I use PC a lot without plasmalshell running during heavy workload (which is unsupported btw when done intentionally)…
You can also use krunner.
Open system settings and check out if anything is wrong.
The output of inxi -zv8 may be more helpful in this case, as the inxi -Fzxx output you have provided lacks some important information such as boot parameters.
Kernel 7.1.x - yes, there seem to be some regression somewhere - my system wouldn’t boot either so I am using 7.0.x which works very well.
The slow load is possibly the rebuild of some content in ~/.cache.
The caches related to GPU may sometimes stall the loading, sometimes it just take a loooong time to rebuild after an update. I have sometimes gotten impatient and use REISUB which then loaded the system superfast.
That lead me to investigate and is why I often suggest the above mentioned manual clearing.
I cannot know - in your specific incidences - what the cause is - so there is that
In your opinion would it be advisable or would it be overkill to clear these caches before reboot after a significant upgrade? I wonder whether it would be helpful to have a pacman hook to do it manually?
It rarely happens so that would be an overkill - at least in my opinion - no need to attempt fixing if there is nothing to fix.
It would be akin of preemptive strike - trying to fix issues even if they don’t happen
Pamac throws a message if certain packages has been updated - packages that could cause interference with the running system if the kernel is not reloaded, that happens on restart.
Okay so… After reboot, I’m also seeing similar issue…
Plasmashell took crazy amount of time to load again.
Something is definitely changed, and I wonder if the OP waited long enough to see if the Plasmashell actually loads or not, maybe they’ve found a solution since they’ve not replied.
In my case it took ~2 mins to load it, which is usually in tens of seconds on this old ThinkPad, also notably, there was no Splashscreen after login rather a completely frozen cursor for like 15 seconds.
Thank you for all the replies, I really appreciated that.
I tried clearing the caches, as suggested by @linux-aarhus, but it didn’t make a difference.
Then I realized that I’ve set a new environment variable (QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_STYLE=org.kde.union) in hope that it fixes some icon problems with the Nextcloud client.
It was probably not the best idea to set this variable in conjunction with the new Manjaro updates, since I didn’t realize that this was the actual reason why Plasma didn’t load.
Especially with the kernel issues it was just too tempting to think that this is just one more regression.
Now that I’ve removed it again, Plasmashell appears as normal.
I noticed that when you clear the caches the loading spinner indeed takes a bit longer after the login has completed.
Again, thanks for your help and I apologize for the noise.
That would be too hard to implement correctly. pacman runs with root privileges, so it has no idea what user account it should clean, plus that as a rule, the package manager must not touch the users’ home directories.
I was thinking the pacman hook would leave a flag that a userspace process checked at each login or logout. If the flag was true it would clear the cache, if it was false it would continue as normal.
Edit: actually no flag would be required. Just a userspace script that ran on logout to check the pacman log and if X packages were updated it clears the cache.
Simpler still, just write yourself a logout script that checks the timestamp on /usr/bin/plasmashell. Then if that’s changed, make the necessary adjustments.
Well, and /opt, and /etc, and /var… But never$HOME.
The only time when an update appears to affect settings in $HOME is when upstream decides to change the syntax or structural organization of configuration files, with as a result that the user-owned equivalents of those files are no longer one-on-one compatible with the upstream defaults.
Plasma’s migration scripts will then, upon starting Plasma, impose the new upstream defaults, whereby some of the user’s customizations may get overwritten. But then this is merely a consequence of the migration, not something the package manager did.
A userspace script that ran on logout wouldn’t be part of the package manager though, and being userspace would be opt-in or set it up yourself. But if it rarely happens it probably doesn’t matter…
My Splashscreen is still not loading, it’s just blackscreen with cursor frozen in middle…
I tried clearing cache for plasma rm -rf ~/.cache/plasma* which didn’t fix it… Is that my custom fork of Splashscreen?
All the Splashscreens are rendering fine in setting preview…
I tried setting to default manjaro one, and then back to my custom one, but that didn’t fix it… I’ll try if the manjaro one loads…
But never 