Plasma widgets/plasmoids lose all graphical content after...something/-when

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1

Hi again all!

Seems like this is my weekend for posting my frustrations. Yesterday it was the Task Switcher (which is still working beautifully, by the way) and today it is the widgets/plasmoids on my desktop.

I don’t know how to really explain it, but it’s basically described in the title :point_up:. However, I know that probably doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a partial screenshot that might explain it better:

https://i.imgur.com/gOepThh

The bottom two are dynamic graphs. There should be lines, moving. Also the CPU use percentage.

I have tried recreating them. That didn’t help.
I have tried clearing my ~/.cache. That didn’t help.

I have another one that’s just plain text and I have no problems with it.

I am not able to pinpoint what happens or what I do for them to become “empty”, but I suspect it happens when I log off, suspend, or otherwise interrupt the session. But I might be wrong, because the same as with the Task Switcher, it doesn’t happen every time. It’s also stock-standard add-ons that come with Plasma, no downloaded add-ons/plasmoids/extensions, either.

What is also strange is that when this happens, I am unable to use Edit mode. I think it might be related because it’s also “empty”, for lack of a better word:

Imgur

This only happened since I switched to Wayland, so I highly doubt it’s plasma. I also doubt it’s a common occurrence, because if it was there would have been more threads about it here. So I believe it’s something local, I am just unable to track it down.

Any help/guidance with that would be greatly appreciated.

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It might not be Wayland either.

Educated guess: Electrostatic corruption due to atmospheric conditions and/or cosmic rays. It flips bits in RAM and even in the CPU registers and cache.

It happens, and that’s exactly the reason why ECC hardware was created, but unfortunately, that kind of hardware is so expensive that it’s reserved for professional workstations and servers. Commodity PCs and laptops don’t have that.

Solution: Power down the computer and unplug it from the wall power. Let it sit there for about half an hour, and then reconnect the power cable and boot up.

3

Sounds like a conspiracy theory!

But I’ll give it a go.

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It’s not. I’ve had things like that happen to me as well over the years. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon.

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Didn’t say it was, just like it sounded like one. As if I’d have to go dust off the 'ol tinfoil hat.

6

Try with TEST user :wink:

I’m not sure, but I think a few gremlins exist from the crossover… I’ve re-imported my .config folder a couple of times now.

PITA it is - but that’s life with Plasma.

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We are near/around the Solar maximum. We also recently had what could easily have been another “Carrington Event” but we (mostly) got away with it!

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Well, it’s happened a few tmes again. But I almost think I finally found out why.

At so far random times to me, I get a popup message that Plasma is using the Software renderer backend and I have to set it to OpenGL again, because if I set it to Vulkan Plasma crashes and restarts roughly every 5 seconds. But I’ve read Vulkan is still very experimental, so it’s OK.

My question now is, does anybody know how to stop the renderer from crashing the whole time? Or is that what the Automatic is for?

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According to this (fairly old, but still applicable) topic: New plasma renderer notification • KDE Community Forums, you should set it to “automatic”. My AMD system has it set to “Automatic” for the rendering backend & render loop, and “force” is unchecked for GL Core Profile.

The thread mentions that the software rendering message is most likely to appear on Nvidia desktops. When the driver breaks after an upgrade or something, Plasma falls back to software rendering to keep the desktop working.

You can adjust the renderer settings by launching plasma renderer from Krunner.

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Tried that before and just now again, doesn’t work. So I have setup a custom alias for it:

alias kderendback='kcmshell6 kcm_qtquicksettings'

I set it to Automatic yesterday, so I’ll see what today holds in.

Edit:

2025-03-18T12:32:00Z And so far, so good.

Edit:

2025-03-18T15:06:00Z Not one single problem today. I’m marking @scotty65’s as the answer, as this is what I did before reading the message.

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