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yuriy.shatrov

Member

Registered: 2021-03-02

Posts: 2

Plasma widgets disappeared and not working after update

Hi folks,

After the latest update of plasma-workspace (and other plasma packages altogether) to 5.21.2-1 all "widgets" disappeared from the desktop and the panel. By widgets I mean stuff like disk usage, sticky notes, other non-essential but handy stuff. The whole desktop is black and inactive and doesn't react to clicks. Instead of the disk usage widget on the taskbar there is an empty space but on hover it reports "Disk usage".

When I click "add widgets" on the taskbar it shows an overlay over the whole desktop but... it's empty (in effect it just dims the screen with a half-opaque background). Clicking anywhere closes this overlay, but obviously no widgets can be added this way.

Any ideas what can be done about it? I'd be happy to file a bug report to Plasma but before that I just would like to make sure it's not me being dumb. Or maybe me being dumb.

Thanks.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,237

Re: Plasma widgets disappeared and not working after update

Sounds like the compositor is disabled, this can happen on major version bumps like these due to cache generation taking too long and KWin surmising desktop effects are broken, go into

kcmshell5 kwincompositing

click the likely appeared warning away and swap between the OGL implementations to reenable that. Maybe restart plasma with

plasmashell --replace

if that didn't help, maybe post a journalctl -b from a faulty session and to check whether there are a some conflicts.

yuriy.shatrov

Member

Registered: 2021-03-02

Posts: 2

Re: Plasma widgets disappeared and not working after update

Thank you for a quick response!

Indeed, that helped - after

plasmashell --replace

the desktop is clickable again and I can add widgets. On another story, the disk usage widget is broken even now - doesn't display anything...

Just curious now - the compositor was posing as enabled (and all those effects like shadows, blur, translucency - seemed to work fine), and even restarting the system (earlier) didn't bring the widgets back, maybe the trick was switching between OGL 2/3 and Xrender (though, OT, OGL 3 introduces visual interference like random color pixels and flashes )

Thank you once more!