Plasmashell keeps crashing [KUBUNTU]

I get

every few minutes on Kubuntu (KDE), and the panels disappear.

It restarts itself automatically, so it's not a real problem, just an annoyance, but it is a big annoyance.

I've tried sudo apt install --reinstall plasmashell plasma-desktop, but that made no difference.

When I try a backtrace from the error message, it says it's unable to produce a useful backtrace.

Solution 1:

Try installing the latest version of Plasma as a backport:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Solution 2:

First, if you have any non-standard plasma widgets, I would try to remove those.

Then, I would kill plasmashell process and then run it from the command line to see the full debug output.

to get a useful backtrace you need to install the *-dev related packages.

about widgets: potentially removing your whole panel, or widgets on your background and recreating a new panel if you want. is an option.

finally, you could inspecting your local plasma related config files.

$ find .config/ | grep plasma
.config/plasma-localerc
.config/plasmavaultrc
.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
.config/plasmanotifyrc
.config/plasmarc
.config/plasmawindowedrc
.config/plasmawindowed-appletsrc
.config/plasmashellrc
.config/plasma-nm

you could back them up and move them away between restarts. I would start by .config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

hope this helps